- From Faith Current: “The Sacred Ordinary: St. Peter’s Church Hall” - May 1, 2023
- A brief (?) hiatus - April 22, 2023
- Something Happened - March 6, 2023
“Me and Yoko and a backing group…”
In the thread regarding Ruth’s excellent review, longtime Dullpal @Sir Huddleston Fuddleston wrote this:
“I guess what I’m saying is, whatever the problem, it’s Yoko’s fault. A failed ‘concept artist’ took the most successful popular musician in history, by a long way, and made him think his work was shit. By comparison, it’s nothing to make him hand the keys to Klein.”
To some degree, I agree with this. John’s self-appraisal post-Yoko is so woefully off that you want to check him for a skull fracture. “Mr. Lennon, did you get hit on the head with a coconut?” But agreeing with @Sir HF placed me upon the horns of a familiar dilemma. On the chance that either you feel it yourself, or will be interested in the issue, I wanted to take a post and unpack it a little bit.
When I read stuff like this, I want to reply, “Fuckin’ A! THIS is the kind of thing we should have a panel on at Beatlefest! I will personally pay for Ann Shulgin to come and tell us whether LSD can make a person that nuts.” But if I do set that kind of tone, the level of discussion descends rapidly. Yoko is simply too divisive; she hooks into people’s personal stuff. For me, she hooks into my dislike of bullies (see also my take on Allen Klein). For others, she is a feminist icon who has had to be “a bitch” to get anywhere in a world stacked against her.
Worst of all, Yoko herself has always tried to blur the line between herself as a person, and herself as an artist. In Yoko’s opinion (and John’s), to dislike Yoko’s work is to be a racist or sexist or a square, and to like it is to sign off on John’s proclamations of her as a world-changing genius. Any discussion about Yoko immediately becomes distorted and intemperate, and that’s largely why she’s still a cipher.
The Act You’ve Known For All These Years
Nearly fifty years after she came on the scene, first as John Lennon’s girlfriend and later his wife, Yoko Ono is probably the most problematic figure in the Beatles’ story. It seems to be impossible to care about the group, and not have a really strong opinion about Yoko. Even figures at the center of the story don’t elicit such strong opinions — have you ever heard a Beatles fan say he/she hates Brian Epstein or George Martin or Patti Harrison? “That fucking George Martin with his dry English wit! What a prick!” Even in the temperate climes of Hey Dullblog, whenever Yoko is introduced into a Dullblog comment thread, steam begins to come out of people’s ears.
I did a ton of research on John Lennon’s later life for my novel Life After Death for Beginners and the reason I have not, and will not, actively promote the novel is this: John Lennon’s later life sucked. It was a really unpleasant place to be. Maybe that comes out in the manuscript, maybe it doesn’t, but I simply can’t face diving into all that again. Yuck.
It is pretty clear that the Ballad of John and Yoko was not the reality. Whether it was the outright warfare suggested by Goldman, the intermittently affectionate portrait sketched by Fred Seaman, or the peculiarly cool, almost businesslike arrangement suggested by John Green’s book, it was not your typical marriage. But it worked for them, I suppose, after a fashion, and as I’ve aged I’ve definitely come to the conclusion that a post-acid John Lennon was much too damaged to be judged like a normal person. Perhaps the very things that make me crazy about Yoko — her mania for control, her haughtiness, her aggression — are precisely what John needed in a partner, after being hollowed out by his Beatles experience. He often seemed like a snail without his shell. I’ve said more than once that I think Yoko saved John Lennon’s life in 1968…but I also think she pretty much destroyed any chance he had to become a bonafide adult. When I read about John and Yoko, I constantly had the thought, “You guys should really get divorced. Split the money however, and meet for hot hotel sex twice a year. Both of you would be much happier.”
My Yoko Problem is two-fold. The first is, once you depart from the Ballad, it’s impossible not to feel a bit angry; if the Ballad isn’t true, it’s an utterly cynical (and largely unnecessary) attempt to manipulate the public. While John has some sound reasons for doing this — he was made cynical by his Beatle experience, and needed the protection of a false image so that his real one could flourish unmolested — Yoko really doesn’t. Yoko was never mobbed by fans or prevented from living her life; she never saw how stars can either get away with murder, or lose everything for being human. For her, JohnandYoko must be a means to an end, a game, a trick she’s playing on Beatles fans, the people who pay her bills. Much has been made of Yoko’s aristocratic heritage, but she seems to lack noblesse oblige. As I’ve written many times before, it was John’s moments of humanity that made everyone love him so, and it cost him nothing. The world desperately wants to love Yoko — but she seems, as ever, only interested in people as assistants.
John’s own Yoko problem: Was the bust punishment for dumping Cynthia?
The second part of my Yoko Problem is this: as we’ve discussed in several recent threads, patriarchal double-standards are real, and the sexual politics of the Sixties were abysmal. Anti-Japanese sentiment was real in 1968 Britain; the Second World War was only twenty-five years in the past. The idea of a Beatle, one of our boys, dumping a nice English girl for a Japanese weirdo did offend many people for purely racist reasons. When you add this to Yoko’s other systemic hindrances of misogyny and anti-intellectualism, it is impossible not to marvel at what it must’ve taken for her to rise the way she has. Mere meme or lived reality, it was salutary to have a Japanese person become the adored wife of the Chief Beatle; meme or reality, it was salutary for John and Yoko to reverse the standard roles and have him be the househusband.
It is difficult to tease out all the various strands at work here: Yoko Ono is, in my opinion, a complex person with a profoundly unlikable personal image (she may be lovely as a person), whom John Lennon clearly loved. Or at the very least depended on, maybe to the point of her keeping him alive. She is a successful artist, interesting in her own right, who has overcome systemic racism and sexism to achieve iconic status; female artists in the generations since have frequently thought of her as a trailblazing figure. On the other hand, it’s unlikely that she would’ve achieved anywhere near the cultural significance she has, had she not married well. She is unlikable because she does unlikable things. And her relationship to John’s cultural legacy can veer strangely into frenemy status.
Yoko Ono was, without a doubt, one of the stressors that led to the breakup of the Beatles, and to claim otherwise is to ignore a mountain of first-person evidence. Paul can give her a pass, that’s his right (and she’s his business partner), but we should go where the evidence leads. At the time, she seems to have considered them all as threats to her relationship with John, especially Paul. She introduced John to heroin, an idea that must rank as one of the world’s worst ever. On the other hand, in recent years she seems to have intermittently recognized that the world’s love for her husband’s band is more important than her own multi-decade pissing contest with Paul McCartney.
For better or worse, she was the woman John picked. If she was a bad fit with the group we love, that’s ultimately on him — so much so that I believe he picked her precisely because she would break up the group. The question is, why, and that’s at the heart of what we’ve been talking about this year. How does one square the John Lennon of 1940-1967, who surely met and dismissed many people like Yoko, with the Lennon of May 1968 and after, who seemed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Yoko Ono, Inc.? In the end, a Beatle fan’s Yoko Problem is really a John Problem, and therein lies the real rub, and why it will never go away. It can’t.
What do you think? If you want to let ‘er rip, this is probably the comment thread in which to do it.
POSTSCRIPT: Within thirty seconds of hitting “post,” I received a Facebook comment: “what a load of shit”.
Me being me, I immediately responded, “[x person], please go comment. The post is all about how Yoko engenders such passion, pro and con. If you think she’s gotten a raw deal, say why. People will be respectful.” The poster refused, saying she’d read enough anti-Yoko garbage, and that we were being removed from her feed.
Related posts:
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Marvelous mystery tour
The hits just keep on coming…
Just how blind was John Lennon without his glasses?
Imagine Beatles chocolates
New York Beatlefans: Stop reading this and go to The Fest!
Blank on Blank on John and Yoko on Love
The unexpected from Ono and McCartney
Tony Sheridan, 1940-2013
John’s Vocals on Don’t Let Me Down
"All Together Now"
Most pirated group? The Beatles, of course
Hi! Great blog, I’ve just recently found it and I really enjoy this intellectual and un-biased discussion here. I’ve noticed that in many Beatle forums fans can’t (or don’t want to) look things deeper but believe in things they want to believe, maybe taking it little too personally. I’m so glad that here folk is willing to analyze every “fact” and possibly re-consider their opinions. And I think that in Yoko’s case people take it the most personally of all Beatle surrounding subjects, exactly because of racism, feminism, aristocracy and other issues you mentioned. Those issues touch many people and it’s difficult to look at them neutrally. Personally I think that Yoko has consciously chosen how to portray herself and how to act, she`s not an innocent, fragile creature who cannot defend herself so she should be able to take criticism, but that of course doesn’t justify any racist or sexist insults shot to her. I believe she had a part in break-up because she came to the situation from outside without knowing too much about the group dynamics but still thought she knew what was best for John (leave the group, move to avant-garde) or maybe she just acted very selfishly. Anyway, there wasn’t single guilty party in the break-up (I think the biggest reason was just stress which led to other things) but John and Yoko’s relationship was part of it. And about her relationship with Paul, I think Paul has more reasons to be mad at her than vice versa (not that Paul is a saint either) but I respect both of them for (at least seemingly) burying their grudge. It’s very mature and it wouldn’t bring Beatles or John back if they continued their “pissing contest”. (By the way, I’m from Finland, English isn’t my native language so I apologize for every possible typo or grammar mistake.)
Welcome @Hanna, I think you are our first Finnish commenter. I once had a lovely lunch with the Finnish translator of my silly books, so I, just like Monty Python, have a soft spot for Finland.
Michael, thanks for taking the time to think about what I had to say. I’ve tried to get to the bottom of why I think Yoko’s existence itself did a disservice to humanity, and the reason is this: she took what did not belong to her. I’m not saying that she was not an acceptable partner for him; if she floated his boat, more power to her, and may they be happy together. But that’s not all there is to being with John Lennon — like it or not, creative geniuses are not like you or me. Quick, think of how many non-creative types you can recall from history, who weren’t madmen: not many. What we remember from the past, what we cherish, is the art. In retrospect, what matters about the Beatles is their art; that is what deserves to survive, and what *will* survive, the centuries.
To that end, an artist also belongs to history, to all of us. It may be a psychopathic thing to say, but the best thing for history would have been to preserve the Lennon-McCartney for as long as possible. Because that product is what we care about. Again, I’m not saying it should come at the cost of the artists’ health or happiness, though to be honest many of us would trade both to be eternally remembered. Salieri was right — it didn’t matter that he had fame and fortune in his time, what drove him insane was that he knew that Mozart’s music would be what survived. Show of hands — who felt shattered when watching Amadeus? Who else saw himself or herself in Salieri? I know I did. Alexander the Great took a poet with him on his conquests, because he knew that he would truly only survive in art.
I’m so annoyed with feminists who deride those who deride Yoko for not being a housefrau in the background. All those feminists can (as it were) suck it — Yoko wasn’t less important because she was a woman; she was less important because McCartney was a demonstrated great artist and she wasn’t. The only person who believed any of her bullshit “concept art” (which is an oxymoron — all real art is modern, and all postmodern art is not art, it is commentary) was her. Her name would not last unless it was liked to his, professionally as well as personally.
So: it was a disservice to humanity, not that Yoko married Lennon, but that she presumed to be his equal in the historical record. It’s her appalling lack of humility that, well, appalls me. First of all, it’s not true what she said, when she said when she met John at the Indra that she did not know him. Years before she went around collecting musical scores for a project of John Cage. She approached Paul, who directed her to John, who gave her the MSS of I-forget-which-song, which appeared in Cage’s book. So she sure knew who John was, and what his legacy would mean. Only a preening narcissist would say to herself “meh. I’m as good as he is. If he leaves McCartney and collaborates with me, that’ll be great.” In the JohnandYoko version of history, she became glued to him at his request. Ok, maybe, but which one of us, sitting in Abbey Road, would dare to pass judgement, as she often did, on the music? I’d be saying “please, guys, you know what you’re doing, just keep doing it.” Which one of us would be brave enough or stupid enough to imagine that he or she should second-guess the Beatles in the studio? Again, only somebody who says “eh, it’s only popular music. I’m a *real* artist, because I declare myself to be, because I declare my spectacles to be “art.”
Which is why we’re now stuck with these albums, half of which at least try to be music, while the other half is self-indulgent crap?
That’s the gist of it — I hate Yoko because she has no shame. It’s obnoxious for anybody to assume that the public would want to hear what we have to say. I doodle me some jazz piano, but I sure would know not to cozy up to Miles Davis (with the heroin, again like Yoko) and then say “yo, Miles, I’m *better* than Bill Evans — Bill Evans! — *I* should play with you.” Miles, to his everlasting credit, would have had enough self-respect to say “get the fuck out of here, motherfucker.”
TL/DR; As Miles would say, know your place (motherfucker). You can get on the album when you can blow the horn, not before. Leave the music to the musicians. Don’t inflict yourself on humanity unnecessarily.
@Sir, you write an intense blog comment. 🙂
Where I, and perhaps others, cut Yoko a ton of slack is this: in that day and age, women who stayed quiet — who didn’t push themselves forward — didn’t get the opportunities. One of the reasons that Yoko is so meaningful to other women (artists and not) is precisely how she demands an equal place at the table, even from John/Paul/George/Ringo. And that, in the end, has been a very good thing.
I do wish there’d been a way to have our cake and eat it too — have the Beatles survive, and even thrive, in the post-Yoko years — but as I said, that’s a John problem, not a Yoko problem. John Lennon was an adult; if he wanted to keep working with Paul and the others, he would’ve done so. I think he hid behind Yoko a lot, which isn’t fair to her.
I came across your comment years after you posted as a result of finally seeing the Get Back documentary and trolling the Internet for opinions. I just want to say that I think you nailed the point precisely and expressed it beautifully.
Is there anyone here who hasn’t had a close friend become infatuated with a romantic partner and the friendship is kicked to the curb as a result? It still hurts, years later. Well, imagine if that happened and your friendship happened to incorporate the fact that you were one-half of the creative partnership that created the BEATLES. Yeah … I can see that being a sore point.
I have no doubt that part of the public reaction to/resentment of Yoko, regarding both her art and personality, was influenced by her gender. At the same time, I have serious reservations with anyone who regards Yoko as some sort of feminist icon. She may promote feminism in interviews, and John may/may not have become a newborn feminist following their relationship (whether John actually practiced the feminist ideals he preached would be a post in and of itself) but there’s little proof, that I have seen, that Yoko treated other females with the respect that she demanded she receive.
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She seemed to use feminism as a cause when it suited her purpose, but failed to practice it in her own life. She either implicitly or explicitly approved of John’s abysmal divorce-era treatment of Cynthia: she pressured her female employee, May Pang, into an affair with her husband, which is sexual harassment; she never publicly defended Linda when either John or a reporter mocked Linda’s looks, and, according to May Pang, by “Mind Games,” was (evidently with a complete lack of irony) banning girlfriends and wives from the studio because they were too distracting. According to May, Yoko helped sabotage May’s career, making it difficult for her to get another job in the music business. There are different levels of feminism, of course, and her refusal to allow what was undoubtedly a racist and sexist society to totally suppress her is admirable. But her actions indicate that much of her feminism was at least as rooted in self-interest as genuine belief in sexual equality: she used the propaganda of feminism when it suited her goals, but failed to practice it when it inconvenienced her.
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There are numerous other issues regarding Yoko: — Her polarizing divisiveness is something I find fascinating — but I’ll repost something I tacked on to the end of the Douglas thread and then shut up.
I’d argue that any assessment of Yoko’s character *has* to include her constant claims to victimization. Her and John’s breakup-era narrative depends on portraying themselves as the victims: of the Eastman’s, Paul, commercialism, squares, the establishment, racists, misogynists, etc. Even after the narratives shifts and facts indicate otherwise, John and Yoko are still claiming victimhood: of Klein’s manipulations, of a constricting press, of proscribed gender roles, commercialism. But they take their victimization to the extreme, in that no one else is allowed to have been victimized, and everyone else’s suffering is inferior the theirs.
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I’ve never seen an admittance by Yoko that perhaps their treatment of Julian was less than stellar; or that John was displaying massive hypocrisy, lambasting Paul privately and publicly as a chauvinist for his treatment of Yoko while writing letters attacking Linda’s “petty little perversion of a mind,” publicly mocking her looks, and predicting that Paul and Linda’s marriage would only last two years. Yoko even identifies John as the victim of “How Do You Sleep,” criticizing fans for “attacking” John for writing it when they simply asked for an end to the public feuding. That victimization continues throughout the decades, as does that utter refusal to acknowledge something as basic as, “Maybe my being in the studio, all the time, wasn’t the best thing.” Yoko is even the victim of John, when she argues that she only stayed in the studio, all the time, because he demanded it. Both she and John seem to wallow in this perception, believing that their suffering made them superior artists/people. If you support the suffering artist trope, perhaps this makes their story more palatable. For those who don’t, it adds more than a tinge of hypocrisy their behavior.
Great comment, @Ruth.
“(whether John actually practiced the feminist ideals he preached would be a post in and of itself)”
Sounds like a Call for Submissions if you ask me!
I also find her polarizing divisiveness fascinating — hence the post, which I knew would be stirring up the bees. But Yoko’s genius for inspiring adoration and loathing is really remarkable, and one can’t address this topic without running into it again and again and again. What’s it about? I’m hoping we can make some sense of that.
I’m sorry that the Facebook commentator wasn’t willing to share her perspective here, because I would really appreciate having the chance to think about it. It can be hard for me to get past my own filter, and one of the things I enjoy about our comment threads is hearing things from a different point of view.
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My own struggle is with JohnandYoko–specifically, with what I see as the distance between the ideals they advocated in their work and what we know of some of their actions toward specific people. And I have a hard time distancing behavior from art in their case, because they insisted that the two be considered together and because they promoted honesty/integrity/no bullshit as their defining quality as a couple.
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I can’t square feminist ideals with their treatment of Cynthia Lennon or May Pang, and I can’t square peacemaking ideals with their vilification of Paul (and, to a lesser degree, the other Beatles). I can’t hear “Imagine” without hearing “How Do You Sleep?” in the background, and to me the latter severely undercuts the former. For peace to be a real possibility I believe we have to begin with the circumstances of our daily lives and the people close to us. It’s comparatively easy to talk about peace and love for the world; it’s much harder to practice compassion and forgiveness toward the people we live or work with (and I am certainly speaking from experience here). Similarly, it’s much easier to blame others for bad situations than to accept our own responsibility for helping create or worsen them. I would feel a lot more enthusiastic about John and Yoko if, at least by 1980, they were saying things like “Looking back, we probably should have treated some people differently.” (If I missed them saying such things, please somebody tell me.)
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I don’t think John and Yoko are/were terrible people. Their failings (which most of us share to some degree) don’t prevent me from appreciating a good bit of what they accomplished. I just can’t embrace the Ballad narrative wholeheartedly or hear some of the work without inner reservations.
“one of the things I enjoy about our comment threads is hearing things from a different point of view”
Me too! Speaking personally, it’s why I stay interested in the blog.
John and Yoko in 1980 weren’t saying “mea culpa,” they were actually doubling down on a lot of the earlier stuff, and that speaks of real mental health issues. Nothing that a good competent therapist for each and marriage counseling for both couldn’t have handled. But to have them trot out that old dog-and-pony show, when we now know that divorce had been seriously considered in 1979, and that neither seems to have been very happy after about 1971 or so, and that Yoko basically began living with Sam immediately after John’s death… well, then painting a picture of marital bliss shades from reasonable privacy to actually selling the public a bill of goods. Which stars do — but I find Beatles fans who still believe in the Ballad of John and Yoko to be exactly the same as Liberace fans who believed that “Lee just hasn’t found the right woman.”
Great conversation, folks! As I’m re-reading Tune In (this time the expanded edition), it strikes me that one of the things that must have been a magnetic attraction for John was precisely that Yoko assumed herself and demanded to be taken as an equal. Lewisohn frequently mention’s that John didn’t care about age, nor at least in the case of Lindy Ness about gender. Yoko’s self-esteem and intellect, her ability to make contact with John’s penchant for the unusual, the off-beat, the grotesque, must have been a powerful attraction.
Now, I say all of this from the perspective of someone who despised her at the time of the Beatles’ breakup, and never quite gained any appreciation of her work until hearing “Feeling the Space” sometime in the mid-seventies. In the end, we can hate her for the fact that through her presence, and that of others – Klein, etc – the Beatles came to and end but realistically, the intimacies of one’s relationship with a significant other can only ultimately be understood by the two people in question.
Again, great discussion!
MY ISSUES WITH SISTER YOKO:
First: The facebook poster sounds like he/she is from the “JohnandYoko peace and love meme. That’s their usual reaction to any criticism.
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1. Yoko is not a feminist. Feminists embrace their sexuality. They don’t use it to control people or manipulate men. They don’t wear clothing that screams sexual power. (I’m not talking about dressing like a nun, but geez–does she EVER wear clothes where her boobs AREN’T hanging out?). Any woman who claims to be a feminist and does that is deluded or a liar.
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2. She’s disingenuous. She blatantly lied about pursuing John, knowing about the enormous popularity of the beatles (“the moptops or something”–really?”), and she treated John’s family shamefully.
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3. She made John’s world smaller, not larger. That’s not what lovers should do. Or even good friends. And she did it to further her own agenda.
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4. She denies her own role in the Beatles’ breakup. This “John made me come to the studio” is crap. She wasn’t a wind-up doll or a child; she could have stayed the hell home. She wanted to be there and have a presence.
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5. She insisted she was an artist of equal stature to John, although she had never been in a recording studio, made a record, or sung anywhere except probably in the shower.
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6. to me, the emperor has no clothes. And Yoko–you are buck naked.
“3. She made John’s world smaller, not larger. That’s not what lovers should do. Or even good friends. And she did it to further her own agenda.”
This, this, 1000 times this. I think the sanest way for an outsider to judge a relationship is by the effects it has on the people in it. Being with each other seems to make John and Yoko worse versions of themselves. John gets more unsure, less productive, more paranoid, more self-righteous, and less funny after he’s with Yoko. (And he gets markedly better in the 1974-75 period.) Maybe he would’ve developed worse psychological health as he got older regardless of who he was with; but here’s the kicker for me: Yoko actively discouraged John from seeking any kind of therapy or counseling after Janov, and considered Janov to be a threat, just as she had Paul. It’s clear that Yoko’s own flaws exacerbated John’s, and vice-versa. People can be attracted because they reinforce each others’ flaws, and I think this is the case with John and Yoko.
That’s why it always pains me when people hold J and Y up as a model couple (and people do!). I think to myself, “Is THAT what you think a healthy friendship looks like? Is that how you’re trying to live? I am really very sorry.” I genuinely worry for the person.
“in that day and age, women who stayed quiet — who didn’t push themselves forward — didn’t get the opportunities.”
That applies to anyone, male or female, in any age. But being a Beatle Wife was a pretty good opportunity in itself. Yoko had a perfect public platform to promote her art, but she insisted on interfering in John’s. Jane Asher and Linda didn’t use their relationships to promote their acting/journalism careers. Even Heather Mills kept out of the recording studio!
“One of the reasons that Yoko is so meaningful to other women (artists and not) is precisely how she demands an equal place at the table, even from John/Paul/George/Ringo.”
Demanding is not the same as deserving.
@Dan, I think I probably agree with you more than not on these issues, but I personally keep a couple of things in mind at the same time:
1) The whole “JohnandYoko” thing is very much of the age. There’s a kind of identity-loss experiment going on which fit with John and Yoko’s time and place. If Bill Gates and his wife suddenly started signing documents “BillandMelinda” and using the bathroom together, it would be a bit more notable.
2) Demanding isn’t the same as deserving, but for the vast majority of the last 2,000 years, those who determined who was deserving have been white men. So while I don’t think Yoko’s stuff merits anywhere near the publicity it’s gotten — I don’t believe she’s a particularly important or interesting artist, and (not said often enough), basically stopped growing as an artist around ’68 — I also think it’s harmless, with the significant benefit of widening out the playing field, as it were. There are people who will argue that Yoko is Important or Yoko is a Genius, but even on her own terms she seems dated and gimmicky to me — in Andy Warhol’s words, “Corny.”
Mmmm.
OK, I’ll just come out and say: I actually quite LIKE Yoko. For awhile I used to say that my favorite Beatles were Paul and Yoko. Which I’m sure sounds odd to a lot of people, but feels normal to me. First of all, I have NEVER bought into the “Yoko broke up the Beatles” thing because… that’s just stupid. So when I entered Beatles fandom (at age 12/13), I didn’t carry that prejudice into it. John was my initially my favorite Beatle, which I think also helped me form a positive impression of Yoko (because he would never shut up about how awesome she was). I enjoy some of her music, especially “Fly” which I think includes “Mrs Lennon,” which is cool and morbid. She has an interesting personal history. In the 1980 Playboy Interview she sometimes says some interesting things. (I mean, some of her ideas are batty, but some are decent) I met her once (she signed a thing for me) and might’ve flirted with her (?!?)… I mean, the woman is not without charm. I’m VERY sympathetic to all the unearned bullshit people have heaped on her over the years (yes, including sexism and racism). And I just kinda sometimes think she was Punk As Fuck in the 70s.
What I don’t like is when she says disrespectful things about Paul. I don’t care about credit reversals and being outbid on the catalogue and all that shit… those are Paul’s issues. But the Salieri/Mozart comment was, IMO, extremely disrespectful. Even though it was inherently STUPID and the worst analogy ever, I’m sure there are people out there who bought that shit. And that makes me feel defensive/protective about Paul who should be able to laugh off something so idiotic but can’t (because of his own insecuritites). Paul and Yoko are a very odd combo, and I’m kinda always car wreck-fascinated by them. I sometimes think they secretly like each other, in a hate-fuck sorta way. Listening to the LIB tapes, there is some FASCINATING banter between Yoko and Paul. They strike me as being more alike than they are different. (But I digress…..)
Oddly enough, I don’t get worked up about her marriage to John and whether or not it was good for him, because… well, John is a consenting adult. He married her (and went back to her), so if Yoko wasn’t good for him that’s on John. I mean, I feel bad for him sometimes, but she had to live with him, too. GAH.
I will just ALWAYS want to push back when I hear people talk about how Bad Pussy Destroyed a Great Man.
Chelsea, I agree that blaming Yoko for breaking up the Beatles is crazy — it was John’s choice to start down the breakup trail and keep going down it, IMO. I think, in Michael’s words, that he sometimes “hid behind Yoko” to do it, but that’s still far more on him than on her.
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That “Salieri” comment says a lot about Yoko’s insecurities, I’d say. Why should she have continued to feel the need to put Paul down, especially after he helped broker her and John’s reconciliation? The thing that bugs me about her is that it feels like she’s continually lobbying for the position of #1 Person in John’s Life. The degree to which she’s built her public image around being his widow, even though she’s apparently had other serious relationships (with Sam Havadtoy, for example) seems sad to me.
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I rather wonder if Yoko fears that SHE’S the Salieri to John’s Mozart. The public perception of her is often that she’s a much lesser artist, especially musically. And in term of artistic collaboration, after the first few experimental albums (“Two Virgins,” etc.) I don’t see them creating work in tandem so much, even though they talked about it a lot. Even on “Let It Be” John and Paul did songs that drew lyrics from both of them (“I’ve Got a Feeling”) and that they sang together (“Two of Us”). On “Abbey Road” they’re still contributing musical ideas to each other’s songs. But on “Double Fantasy,” the only non-experimental album John and Yoko made in tandem, their songs feel quite separate (and that apparently reflects the way they were recorded, according to Jack Douglas). I wonder if it irked/irks her that she and John didn’t/couldn’t collaborate musically with the same ease and effectiveness that John and Paul had.
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Also: I agree that Paul and Yoko do seem rather alike. Which only makes sense, when we consider that they’re the two people John said he collaborated fully with.
OK… here’s what I see as the fundamental problem. John from his own self-centered POV, views Paul and Yoko as equals. Because he is viewing them relative to himself… he’s saying that they are of equal value to him as partners. And for that reason, he portrays them as artistic equals, which they absolutely are NOT. And I say that with all due resepct to Yoko, who is not without artistic talent. But to compare her to Paul McCartney is ludicrous. And this is what drives Paul insane, IMO. Paul earned his status with all the music he produced. Yoko didn’t. Yoko earned her status as a mildly interesting, marginally successful avant-garde artist. But she did not earn her way into the Beatles.
The things that’s annoying is how John, with his childish, binary mentality, is always simultaneously comparing Paul to Yoko and pitting them against each other. He says it over and over again, these are the two partners of his life. But I think John conflates his emotional attachment to both of these people, or the pleasure of collaborating with them with artistic value. And it’s not the same thing. I’m sure he loved Yoko every bit as much as he loved Paul, but his artistic output with her simply doesn’t compare to this work with Paul. Everything John and Paul did together was GOLD. Those partnerships are NOT creatively equal. Emotionally, sure, they are of equal value to John. But… what’s love got to do with it? 🙂
“I rather wonder if Yoko fears that SHE’S the Salieri to John’s Mozart.”
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@Nancy, this is genius! So astute.
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@ODIrony (awesome name, btw): “it strikes me that one of the things that must have been a magnetic attraction for John was precisely that Yoko assumed herself and demanded to be taken as an equal.”
YES, this. Here’s the thing. If John Lennon is all of a sudden like “Oh My God, you’re an artistic genius and I love you! Come to the studio with me and my band, I’d love to hear what you think” then can we really get mad at Yoko for opening her mouth a few times? The important thing to remember is that she really DIDN’T know all of John and Paul’s crazy, co-dependent psychology when she stepped into it. How could she? Of course she knew who the Beatles were, but I totally believe she didn’t know about all the Stuart Sutcliffe drama, or John’s insane jealousy, etc. She really just knew that John brought her in and probably sold her some bullshit about how it would be just fine with the guys (and if not, don’t worry, they’ll come around). And honestly? If John is presenting her and treating her as an equal… isn’t it incumbent on her to live up to that? What was she supposed to do? Keep her mouth shut and be seen and not heard?
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand where Paul (and the others) were coming from at the time. And I definitely feel for him, but that’s because I know John and Paul’s backstory. But did Paul ever man up and say to John “Hey, Yoko’s terrific and I’m happy for you two, but I would prefer that in the studio it’s just us” ? I don’t think he did. So that’s on Paul, not Yoko.
“I’m sure he loved Yoko every bit as much as he loved Paul”
I’m not sure about this at all, and get less sure the older I get and the more I learn about people. I think John and Yoko had a very brief period of incredible intensity — basically May ’68 to September ’69 — where Yoko pushed John to do a bunch of very public “tricks” to prove his devotion (the Two Virgins cover, the Bag One lithographs). This put him in the position of either having to commit to the One Great Love story, or to eventually say to the public, “You know that woman who I drew myself eating out? She dumped me.” For someone as proud (and as wounded) as John Lennon, that was intolerable. So for the rest of his life, he talked about how much he loved her, how special and remarkable and world-changing she was, while she… sat there. The Leibowitz picture.
But I do think there was real passion there, of a sort, for a time. This was cooled by heroin addiction, John’s incredible neediness (which increased after his “divorce” from the Beatles), and Yoko’s simply being a pretty cool customer. John Lennon craved closeness to the point of disappearance; Yoko seems to crave the opposite — that everybody else be “assistants.” No boundaries versus impenetrable boundaries. Janov increased tensions between John and Yoko because it made John even more vulnerable; and he began giving Janov authority in his life that Yoko wanted for herself. By 1971, it’s clear that the bargain is, “I will let you cling to me if you always do everything I say.” And when John rebelled against that, as he inevitably had to because stasis is not natural, she kicked him to the curb in late ’72 early ’73. That, to me, is the end of the relationship. What happened from 1975-80 is something different.
“But did Paul ever man up and say to John ‘Hey, Yoko’s terrific and I’m happy for you two, but I would prefer that in the studio it’s just us’ ? I don’t think he did. So that’s on Paul, not Yoko.”
Well…sort of. Paul wanted the group to continue, and knew that if he said that, John would leave it. If you want the Beatles to keep going, as I think Paul clearly did in ’68 and ’69, you can understand the wait-it-out strategy. As well as Paul’s own conflict-aversion, which I agree is on him.
@Michael: OK. I don’t really disagree with your take on John and Yoko’s relationship. I just… try not to think about it, because it’s depressing.
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“Well…sort of. Paul wanted the group to continue, and knew that if he said that, John would leave it. ”
Right, but I guess my point is… that says more about John and Paul’s dysfunctions than it does about Yoko. Was it worth it for him (Paul)? To make those last three Beatle albums? Probably. It destroyed his life for awhile, obliterated his self-esteem and allowed John to forever scapegoat him, but I guess he’d probably do it all over again. It just seems like… I dunno. Why did all that mind-fuckery need to occur in the first place? It all comes back to John. Yoko is a tool in the break-up (I think most of us agree on that). John doesn’t have the balls to formally, properly end things with Paul so he tries to force Paul to do it (and eventually this actually works!). I HATE John for that. And I can’t help but bristle when Yoko gets blamed. That’s getting mad at the mistress but not the cheater.
“That’s getting mad at the mistress but not the cheater.”
Yep. Utter bullshit.
Things I get mad at Yoko for: being overbearing, disrespectful, controlling, unkind. Jerky. Things that, because I don’t know her and she’s not my friend, don’t really matter.
Things I get mad at John for: systematically trying to break up the group from the moment he and Paul get back from New York. Something that really did/does matter, because The Beatles weren’t The Moody Blues.
I think it’s important to push back, gently, on The Ballad, because some people really believe it. I had one couple tell me it was the closest thing they had to a religion. So if it’s that big in someone’s head, I think it’s worth saying, “Hold your horses. That’s a fantasy.” People have gotten killed over the concept of Virgin Birth; the world doesn’t need more myths, because when people hold reality up to myths, great suffering occurs. Lennon suffered a great deal, because he wasn’t grown-up enough to leave Yoko; Yoko suffered too, until John died. One thing that I think we can’t argue that Goldman got right was that Yoko after John seems much more comfortable in her own skin. The Ballad of John and Yoko hurt those two most of all.
Michael, you wrote that “I think it’s important to push back, gently, on The Ballad, because some people really believe it. I had one couple tell me it was the closest thing they had to a religion.”
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In what context, and did you get any sense they were joking? (Please say yes.) Ultimately, THAT is what bugs me about JohnandYoko, and about much of what Yoko has done since John’s death: promoting the Ballad as capital-T Truth. That gets in the way of my being able to appreciate Yoko’s work, and some of John’s solo work, far more than any of the breakup stuff. And Paul gets called the “PR guy!” It just boggles my mind.
@Nancy, they were absolutely NOT joking. It was an awkward moment, because I’m sure my face revealed some alarm.
I hope I haven’t lost all credibility by saying I like Yoko. 🙂
Not with me, @Chelsea. It’s why I wrote the post and am trying to nurture the discussion. I genuinely think a lot of thoughtful, well-read Beatles fans struggle with it.
Yoko had to have something going on to get John Lennon to fall in love, and stay in love. Her art and public persona is significant. Plus, it is undeniable that she has become an icon of empowerment and moxie to others. She’s reputed to be nice in person. And then there’s all this …other stuff. It’s a genuine conundrum.
“John and Yoko had a very brief period of incredible intensity — basically May ’68 to September ’69 — where Yoko pushed John to do a bunch of very public “tricks” to prove his devotion (the Two Virgins cover, the Bag One lithographs).”
I completely agree. And what does this sound like? There’s LSD (in earnest, from Sept. ’66 – February ’68), the Maharishi (August ’67 to April/May ’68), Janov (1970), Abbie Hoffman et al (Sept. 1971 – Nov. 1972), Harry Nilsson et al (late 1973 – January 1975), plus some things we sort-of know about from the Dakota lost years, like evangelicalism. Not to mention Klein, Magic Alex, etc., etc. In other words, Yoko was another one of John’s Next Big Things, for which he was constantly searching—especially after the Beatles stopped touring and he had much more time to himself, and had that much more time to behold the howling void and psychological trauma he carried. In every single one of those cases, John made some very dramatic, very public pronouncement(s). The difference is, Yoko was his lover, not a guru or a psychologist or an activist whose ideas he parroted in interviews and a new batch of songs. He very publicly left his wife for Yoko and decided to split up The Beatles for Yoko. Thus, as you say, when the Yoko Next Big Thing had run its natural course—as did all of John’s quick fixes—he was stuck in a way he could not undo with a simple “ah, he/they/it were a fraud, not the answer. I know now.” And unlike Janov, or the Maharishi, or even Klein, Yoko acted quickly and decisively to bring John under her thumb in a very comprehensive way, by undermining his sense of self-worth as a member of the Beatles, by introducing him to heroin, by forcing him to play very publicly by her rules and according to her ethos. John’s Dakota years are what happens when a very great, very scared artist is denied everything that inspires him and feeds the better part of his genius.
Michael, I realize this thread is 6 years old, but I just want to let you know we’re of a VERY similar mind regarding the relationship between John & Yoko. I think it can be very difficult for fans of John’s to realize how emotionally & mentally unstable he really was in the 1970s. It’s hard to imagine our hero essentially handing over his identity so he could cling to Yoko and regress into an almost child-like state, but that’s essentially what he did. Not out of love, but fear & insecurity. Very sad.
@Tim, my experience has been that an ability to perceive J&Y’s relationship in this particular way has to do with one’s relationship to a certain kind of life experience. For me, my experience with addicts and addiction has really colored my view of John, particularly during the solo years when age and ease really let his addiction show in a way it didn’t during the Beatle years.
Being in close quarters with an addict pushes one into one of three directions:
1) “YOU GUYS THIS IS INSANE WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING”
2) “I don’t see anything, what’s the problem? We must be QUIET about this.”
3) “I love the addict, so the addict can do no wrong. In fact, I must protect the addict, so how dare you/back off/etc etc.”
So if you have the life experience that makes you see all this in The Ballad of John and Yoko, your relationship to that experience makes you adopt a strategy towards it, probably the same one you use(d) in your life with the real addict. Just read the comments on HD and you’ll see each strategy in full.
John and Yoko were/are celebrities with their own lives and troubles, people none (or very few) of HD readers have any personal experience with. So it’s all guessing. But because it’s all guessing, and I get such a strong intuition from it based on my own life, I like to use it as a cautionary tale, to help others who might be dealing with similar characters in their own lives. And as I’ve said innumerable times, John’s work is so titanic and beautiful that it can, should, and will endure quite apart from any personal flaws or misbehavior on his part. And his own personal commitment to honesty, waver though it did, gives me a sense that far from dishonoring the guy, I’m demonstrating that I got the message he was trying to convey from “Help!” onwards.
I think John and Yoko were both incredibly messed up, which is something that is never really examined in an honest way.
The fact that she was committed to a mental health institution is almost never referred to, except as a postscript, in any Beatles biography. And yet this is an absolutely crucial piece of information. Does anyone with a mental health illness severe enough to be committed ever really recover? Not in my experience, but this is apparently one of those subjects that is off limits when it comes to talking about John and Yoko.
And then there’s John, who was expelled from his Reception class at INFANT SCHOOL for poor behaviour. I have never in my whole life heard of any child of that age being expelled from school. I know that private schools might quietly suggest that a challenging 5 year old might be ‘better placed in a different environment’, because it’s up to them who they take. But a state school in Liverpool in the 1940s? When they could use any form of discipline to keep the kids in line and did? The fact that they kicked him out speaks volumes about how seriously disturbed he must have been.
So even without the fame and the fortune and the drugs and the Satanism and the hangers-on, this wasn’t a normal couple. I think she destroyed him, but I also think that if it wasn’t her it would have been someone else.
Elizabeth, you ask “Does anyone with a mental health illness severe enough to be committed ever really recover?” In my experience the question is an emphatic “yes,” and I think the question itself really depends on how the illness is diagnosed and what the treatment is. Depression and anxiety, for example, are often quite successfully treated now — and both may require “commitment” in the sense of some inpatient treatment. So I’m REALLY hesitant to believe that Yoko Ono’s experience in this regard proves anything about her long-term mental health.
One thing we can say for sure is that both Yoko Ono and John Lennon suffered trauma as children, and that the resources to understand and treat that kind of trauma effectively weren’t really around at the time they needed them. Heck, they’re hardly available to a lot of people who need them NOW, even with everything we’ve learned about childhood trauma in the past few decades.
@Elizabeth I don’t think that peoples mental health should be weaponised against them and I for one am glad that as a society we are getting to a place where there is a much more understanding and compassionate view of mental health issues.
Also John being expelled is news to me. I’ve read about how he was disruptive and about him doing things like stealing from the donation tray at church and (what I actually think shows a pretty enterprising brain and intelligence at a very young age) starting gambling rings on school sports. I know Mimi pulled him out of his first kindergarten to one closer to where she lives when he went to live with her. But I can’t recall reading that he was expelled.
And even if he had been I think the only thing that says about John is the effect of a disruptive home, of which none of was John’s fault.
Given the fact his father was out at sea and his mother was by all accounts flighty, structure and discipline are probably not something John had much experience with in his early life. (Also didn’t Julia use to leave him alone in the house to go out at night?) Then if you add in the emotional tug of war between his parents and relatives over him, culminating in the pick which parent moment- behavioural issues seems to be expected.
At the end of the day, none of us know what John and Yoko’s relationship was like on the inside. We also don’t really know what John and Yoko were like as people – be they good or bad. Speculation, reading and conjecture is fun and natural with famous people, but I’m hesitant when speculation and conjecture and personal opinions and biases get turned into cold hard facts and truth.
Where in my comment did I say it was John’s fault, Leigh Ann? I said he was clearly seriously disturbed, which he was.
There are no Kindergarten classes in the UK. John was expelled from his first primary school at age 4 or 5 for disruptive behaviour and bullying. He would have been in what we call Reception, which is the year before your Kindergarten, I believe.
Obviously he had suffered trauma for his behaviour to be so extreme that he would be expelled not just from primary school (which would be unusual in itself) but from the baby class. (which would be unheard of). That was my point entirely.
And don’t forget, this was (1) a place where there was a lot of poverty with kids living in chaotic circumstances and (2) the end of the war. John would not have been the only traumatised child, far from it.
I bet he was the only traumatised child to get expelled from the infants though. I’ve never heard of that, and I’ve worked with traumatised kids.
I’m sure Mimi brought some stability into his life because he obviously settled down when he was living with her. But that sort of damage can’t just be undone. It has a permanent effect, and that was my point.
Yeah, I don’t agree that people are condemned to suffer from mental illness for life. Plenty recover from suicide attempts, for instance, and that is something that certainly can lead to institutionalization. That said, I never heard that Yoko had a history of being in a mental hospital (which I guess speaks to Elizabeth’s point that it’s never referred to) or that John was expelled from school. @LeighAnn- About Julia leaving little John alone at home while she went out at night, yeah I definitely read that in his biography. Mimi told of how John, who couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6, had been staying with his mum and during the visit he would walk over to Mimi’s and knock on her door, looking forlorn. How heartbreaking is that.
Just to add to this, one of the sources for the information is Nigel Whalley, who attended Mosspits Lane Infants at the same time as John:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/teenage-teds-without-care-world-3500665.amp
John was apparently expelled for bullying a little girl called Polly Hipshaw.
His behaviour must have been very extreme to get expelled at age 5. I can’t even imagine it.
I guess I dont like the use of the word “disturbed” or using terms like “extreme behaviour” to describe Yokos mental health struggles or John’s childhood trauma. I think that is a negative connotation that I am glad for the most part society has moved on from when discussing mental health and trauma.
Also I find it strange that John being expelled has not been brought up in any biography that I recall reading or even by John himself- who I think wouldn’t have blinked at fessing up to that. So I’m not sure how much stock I put in Nigel anecdote seeing as he himself was only a 4 or 5 year old at the alleged time.
Well, unfortunately, Leigh Ann, childhood trauma does manifest as extreme behaviour. That’s a factual statement and I’m not sure why you find it offensive. It’s listed as a symptom of abuse on every piece of safeguarding guidance that I’ve ever read.
I’m not really surprised that no one ever mentioned John’s expulsion from school. It must have been very shameful for his family, and I imagine, a very painful thing to talk about – especially for him. I don’t think he ever spoke publicly about the reasons he was removed from his mother’s care. This would obviously have been one of them.
John did talk about living with his Aunt and being removed from his mothers care and wrote a song about it. He also talked openly about his abuse of drugs and alcohol, his violent pass, even about his relationship with Brian being a love affair that was never consummated- so I highly doubt he would have flinched at talking about being expelled as a child. If nothing John was frank, candid and genuine about himself whether people loved him for that of not.
Also Mark David Chapman who had psychosis is someone I would call disturbed or extreme. Not John or Yoko who had issues with abusing drugs and possible PSTD and Anxiety that millions of people deal with on a daily basis to varying degrees. But your opinion may differ.
Right, LeighAnn? I think getting expelled from school would be, for John, a badge of honor. He had nothing but contempt for the establishment. Except when he got sentimental and asked Mimi to send him his old school tie. Such a man of contradictions, our John.
John spoke publicly about the fact that he lived with Mimi, LeighAnn. He didn’t talk about the fact that social services were involved, or that he had been sleeping in the same bed as his mother and her various lovers, and he definitely didn’t mention that he was expelled from infant school. These details are obviously painful enough that Julia Baird has spent the last 40 years trying to bury them, or shift the blame onto Mimi.
I don’t really understand your point about Chapman. Are you saying that we should only label psychotic behaviour as extreme? We can call John’s behaviour at age 5 ‘dysregulated’ if you prefer, but it means the same thing. Extreme behaviour in a child that age is a cry for help, and it would be negligent to pretend that wasn’t the case. Even Mimi recognised it as such in 1945.
I’m also a bit confused about your reference to PTSD and Anxiety. Did Yoko and/or John receive a diagnosis of PTSD or Anxiety that we know of? I know Yoko spent time in a mental hospital, but I don’t think her diagnosis was made public.
John was a baby when he was expelled from school, Michelle. He wasn’t some arrogant teenager sticking two fingers up at system; he was a traumatised little boy from a chaotic home who had possibly (probably) been sexually abused.
Of course it wasn’t a badge of honour for him to have been expelled at age 5. It was a tragedy that he should be so utterly damaged at that age for that to happen.
Everyone, I’m going to call a halt to comments on John’s expulsion. Thanks.
Hi, I wanted to say that I’ve been really enjoying your blog, your style of writing and your views on the group–especially the very nuanced, fact-based, and empathetic ways you describe developing perspectives on the Beatles.
But I’ve seen this idea that John used Yoko as premeditation to break up the Beatles, that he didn’t really love her, and I feel like that rings at odds with, well, how humans do things. Why (and how) would he stick around her for years on end, appear as a loving couple, do all these things that were deeply important to him, while saying he loved her, if he didn’t?
Furthermore I’m curious in both the post here (where his later life is briefly painted as miserable) and in your comment about the 1975-80 period of their lives why this time seems to have been so bad. Reading Sheff’s book, John’s life as a househusband seems grueling and thankless at times, but he seems to enjoy it, get serious benefit out of it and support his wife all the while. Yoko and him definitely had a lot of weird, stressful, rough periods in the early 70s, but why does this period of relative settlement and relief get interpreted negatively, and why is this expression of their relationship used against them (in particular Yoko)? Seriously, I did not expect so much anger and vitriol at Yoko Ono from longtime fans. Wouldn’t you want your favorite rock star to be happy?
Well, I’m no fan of Yoko the artist or Yoko the human being and certainly not of Yoko the would-be rock n roller, and I do believe that even her own words have established that she didn’t realize how important Lennon was until he was dead — but neither do I buy into the notion that John was some sort of unwitting dupe, a half-wit Mozart to her scheming Salieri. He consciously chose to join himself to her hip and whether at her instigation or his, forced her on the band, not something she could have pulled off on her own under any circumstances no matter how tough she was. And he left the band because he wanted to — wanted to, I believe, as early as 1966 while sitting around in Spain filming How I Won The War — not because she made him.
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Yoko was the lever perhaps but John was the one on the business end of it.
Could not agree more, @Mythical. And that’s why any Beatle fan with a Yoko Problem, really has a John Problem.
Of course, John had a problem, too — he, unlike Paul, couldn’t see that his greatest potential as an artist would be as part of a group. Lots of artists don’t really know what makes them great, or even what makes themselves tick. John was, as my wife would say, “high on his own supply.”
Hello, I apologize for coming to this so late. Having watched the Get Back documentary, I was disheartened to see John’s passivity and immaturity. He did not appear to be a psychologically stable person. I also think, from the nasty comments he made about Paul after the breakup, that he was very jealous of Paul’s drive and songwriting talent. Of course, he could not admit to his jealousy. In Yoko, he found someone who was arrogant enough to dismiss Paul’s talent. In time, he would adopt her dismissiveness to free himself from the responsibility of being a Beatle.
It is important to keep in mind how unique Yoko’s background is. Her upbringing was extremely privileged. Her father’s family descended from a samurai warrior-scholar clan, and her father, Eisuke, was a classical pianist before he became a banker with the Yokohama Specie Bank (Wikipedia). As a child, Yoko studied classical piano for ten years, and she attended the Gakushuin, a Tokyo school for children of the nobility. As a young woman, she attended two colleges, Gakushuin University and Sarah Lawrence College, neither from which she would graduate. One of the subjects she studied at Sarah Lawrence was music composition. Her first husband, with whom she eloped, was the experimental Japanese composer Toschi Ichiyanagi; their marriage lasted six years, from 1956 to 1962. She met the composer John Cage through Toschi. Then in late 1962 she married an American, Anthony Cox, who was a jazz musician and film producer (Wikipedia).
During the 1960s and 70s, many found Yoko off-putting. Likely, they couldn’t imagine coming from Japanese nobility and regarding yourself as better than everyone else, including the Beatles. Yoko was unimpressed by the Beatles’ success, and she likely didn’t think much of their songs–after all, she was classically trained and the Beatles weren’t. What did they know about music? John was struck by her attitude; all the women he was with while married to Cynthia were with him because he was a Beatle. And here was Yoko, who didn’t care at all about the Beatles, and who was at best indifferent and possibly scornful of his and Paul’s achievements.
I think John’s relationship with Yoko was destructive. It shows that he did not value his songwriting partnership with McCartney, nor did he have the foresight to imagine what the Beatles’ legacy would become. As for Yoko, she’s the type of person who wants to be an artist very badly–or at least thought of as an artist.
I must have seen a different documentary to the one you watched. John didn’t appear passive or immature to me, and certainly didn’t seem any more psychologically unstable than Paul, who was all over the place and seemed manic depressive or with a case of ADHD. Which actually gave me a better appreciation for him, as opposed to the one-dimensional persona he often conveys in public. John acted rather sensible throughout. I don’t think he was jealous of Paul’s songwriting ability. He had plenty of his own; he was perhaps going through a dry spell after the double album that came only several months prior.
@Mythical Monkey said: “but neither do I buy into the notion that John was some sort of unwitting dupe, a half-wit Mozart to her scheming Salieri. He consciously chose to join himself to her hip and whether at her instigation or his, forced her on the band, not something she could have pulled off on her own under any circumstances no matter how tough she was.”
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John wasn’t an unwitting dupe but he was a person with overwhelming psychological issues who was easily manipulated by persons he viewed as his saviour.
“who was easily manipulated by persons he viewed as his saviour.”
…and even MORE SO once he
1) didn’t have Brian Epstein shielding him from the heaviest crazies (like for example The Process Church);
2) was messed up on acid and worse (STP? synthetic DMT?) constantly; and
3) probably meditated too intensely without proper instruction.
The John of May ’68 is not the same guy as he was May ’67 or May ’64. Thinking that he is, is one of the major traps Beatles fans willingly fall into when digging into this issue. The one thing you can’t say to a John and Yoko fan, is that “fucking drugs wrecked John Lennon.”
(BTW, click that link about DMT, it’s kinda neat.)
“The things that’s annoying is how John, with his childish, binary mentality, is always simultaneously comparing Paul to Yoko and pitting them against each other.”
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I know I’m diverging from your overall point, (which I wholeheartedly agree with) Chelsea, and I apologize, but turn it over and look at this from Yoko’s point of view. We know John cast Paul up to her in public — “I wish I was back with Paul!” — and in private: “Paul is worth 25 million. How come we’re not worth that much? Go into business and make me a fortune so that we’re worth as much as Paul.” John may have gotten off the boat named Paul and gotten on the boat called Yoko, but he chained the “Paul” boat to his ankle and kept dragging it behind him and, when it suited him, used it as a stick to beat her with.
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Given how much John rants about Paul publicly during the breakup era, and how much Paul-mentioning he displayed publicly for the rest of his life, how sick do you think Yoko got of hearing John reminisce/complain/denounce/obsess over Paul, and being compared to him both artistically and as a person? Its like a new marriage where one spouse can’t stop obsessing over/comparing his new wife to his ex-wife. That would be bound to provoke resentment on Yoko’s part — both of John and of Paul.
Great point, Ruth. I wonder how much Yoko, after the Beatles breakup, thought “wow, what have I gotten myself into?” I suspect it was one thing to be in “you and me against the world” mode while the Klein debacle/lawsuit was ongoing, and quite another to be married after the breakup was history.
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And, I know I’ve said this in a comment on another post before, but I find John’s describing himself as getting off the Paul “boat” and getting on the Yoko one pretty disturbing. What kind of relationship is it if one partner sees himself or herself getting on the “boat” of another person? That analogy, to me, speaks of a scary level of dependency: “You set the course and I’ll be a passenger, OK?”
Oh yes, absolutely, @Ruth! You’re not diverging from my point at all, you’re making it for me. 🙂 That was the other half of my argument and why I absolutely understand Yoko’s POV too. Who can function under the weight of that legacy? How can she not resent Paul? Their competition over John remains TO THIS DAY. Because Paul sure as hell is never letting go.
Like I said in another thread, if I completely understand why Yoko wouldn’t even want/allow John and Paul in a room alone together.
Chelsea, do you see Yoko and Paul as equally “never letting go”? I’d like to hear more of your take on that.
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It’s interesting to me that Yoko felt threatened by John and Paul working together again while Linda evidently did not.
“It’s interesting to me that Yoko felt threatened by John and Paul working together again while Linda evidently did not.”
I find that interesting as well, Nancy. I think much of that could be attributed to Linda, who certainly appears psychologically healthier overall than John, Yoko and (given his time in the Beatles) Paul. I don’t think anyone would dispute that Paul and Linda’s relationship overall was leaps and bounds healthier than either John and Yoko’s or John and Paul’s. I’d speculate that Linda felt less-threatened by John than Yoko did by Paul because 1) Linda didn’t regard herself as a musical artist, the way Yoko did, and therefore didn’t regard John as a rival for Paul’s creative attention, the way Yoko evidently viewed Paul 2) Linda, as I mentioned, seems to have been psychologically healthier 3) Unlike John, we have no evidence that Paul spent the ten years after the breakup constantly comparing her, his new wife/life to his previous songwriting partner/previous Beatles life. Really, Linda’s tolerance — even encouragement — of some sort of Lennon/McCartney reunion is remarkable, given how despicably John treated her, Paul, and her family during the breakup period.
One of the points everyone keeps making is how Yoko’s actions indicate that she identified Paul, and particularly his creative/personal relationship with John, as a threat to her personal/creative relationship with John. A few authors have mentioned this as well, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an in-depth discussion or analysis of “Why?” Why is Paul such a threat to Yoko? In the “Let it Be” tapes, its Paul whose urging the others not to force John into an either/or decision, and its Paul who provides the notes for “Two Virgins,” and accompanies John on “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and its Paul who helps reunite John and Yoko during The Lost Weekend. During much of the breakup period, Paul appears to be adopting a strategy of somewhat grudging accommodation to the new Yoko-infused Status Quo: George is more vocally anti-Yoko than Paul is. Paul clearly chafed at Yoko’s presence, but he’s not the one who turns it into an either/or choice, John and Yoko do that. At what point, and why, did Yoko determine that Paul was an obstacle that needed to be removed in order for her to have the relationship with John that she wanted? Doggett mentions the flip side in You Never GIve Me Your Money when he talks about John’s reunification with Yoko, rather than Paul, in 1974 — “It appears Lennon had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he could not have both” — but no one discusses it from Yoko’s perspective.
— “It appears Lennon had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he could not have both”
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@Ruth, I think the simplest answer is that Yoko provided an ultimatum. That has always seemed obvious to me, without having explicitly read it. I guess it’s the kind of thing people can assume but not prove.
As to why Paul was so threatening to Yoko, I also think the simplest answer is also the one people don’t like to talk about: that John was at one point crazy-in-love with Paul and that he remained obsessed with him (perhaps intermittently obsessed would be more accurate?) until he died. That is the blunt truth as I see it. What was one of the first things Yoko said about Paul after hooking up with John? “If he was a woman, he’d be a threat.” I think it’s clear what she means by that. Well, the only reason to stipulate “If he was a woman” is because she initially assumes John couldn’t feel for a man what he could feel for a woman. But I think she eventually realized that assumption was off the mark.
Maybe there are other explanations (i’d love to hear some!) but that is honestly the one that makes the most sense to me, over and over again.
Paul is a threat to Yoko because of his lifelong importance to John, emotionally and creatively. Doggett’s comment about John believing he couldn’t have both applies to Yoko too.
@Ruth: As far as Linda goes, I agree with all your reasoning. I also always got the feeling that Paul was totally open about John with Linda, whereas John was absolutely not open about Paul with Yoko. Of course this is just an impression, and I could be wrong. But Paul seems to have a much better handle on his feelings for John (post break up) than vice versa. And I think it’s because Linda helped him work through all those feelings openly instead of making them a weird, dirty secret. Linda’s like, “I totally get it. He’s your best friend, of course you love him,” etc and normalized Paul’s feelings. That’s what “Maybe I’m Amazed” is about, right? Paul’s in the middle of something that he doesn’t really understand, and Linda is the only woman who could ever help him understand. 🙂
So why would Linda feel threatened? She wants her husband to be happy and repair this massively important friendship (and/or partnership, if that was a possibility).
@Ruth said: “Given how much John rants about Paul publicly during the breakup era, and how much Paul-mentioning he displayed publicly for the rest of his life, how sick do you think Yoko got of hearing John reminisce/complain/denounce/obsess over Paul, and being compared to him both artistically and as a person? Its like a new marriage where one spouse can’t stop obsessing over/comparing his new wife to his ex-wife. That would be bound to provoke resentment on Yoko’s part — both of John and of Paul.”
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[big head nod here]. Yes. It was almost as though John was doth protesting too much–something even Paul alluded to (‘he’s slagging me off to clear the decks with Yoko’.) John thought if he criticized Paul at every turn, Yoko would rest easy. Unfortunately for him, Yoko was too smart for that. The more John slagged Paul off, the more threatened Yoko felt.
It seems to me that Paul, over time, has taken complete ownership over his relationship with John. In other words, Yoko has her relationship with John, she has John&Yoko, but Paul has Lennon/McCartney and Yoko needs to stay the fuck out of that. My feeling is that Paul does not believe Yoko gets to inherit John’s entire legacy/memory. If we go by John’s own account, Paul has ample reason to feel this way, because John repeatedly (and publicly) divided his life into Paul (part 1) and Yoko (part 2). In the hot haze of the Beatles-break up flame wars John sometimes tried to rewrite history in regards to how miserable he was with Paul, but unfortunately for John we can watch the videos. It’s obvious that they were very happy together for a long time (not perfect, but at the very least extremely productive), sometimes deliriously so. And I think that at some point Paul made peace with the break-up and just decided to cherish those 12 years or so that they had. But he’s (Paul) never letting go of those 12 years before Yoko showed up.
As for Yoko… I tend to think she wants John’s entire legacy for herself. I mean, I can understand not wanting to share it. But I don’t think she has much of a choice, because people will always love the Beatles, and always love Lennon/McCartney.
That’s my sense too, Chelsea (about Paul’s holding on to his sense of his early relationship with John). “Early Days” on “New” is explicitly about that:
“They can’t take it from me, if they tried
I lived through those early days
So many times I had to change the pain to laughter
Just to keep from getting crazy
Dressed in black from head to toe
Two guitars across our backs
We would walk the city roads
Seeking someone who would listen to the music
That we were writing down at home.
[Chorus:]
But they can’t take it from me, if they tried
I lived through does early days
So many times I had to change the pain to laughter
Just to keep from getting crazy
Hair slicked back with vaseline
Like the pictures on the wall of the local record shop
Hearing noises we were destined to remember
We willed the thrill to never stop
May sweet memories of friends from the past
Always comes to you, when you look for them
And your inspiration long may it last
May it come to you time and time again
Now everybody seems to have their own opinion
Of who did this and who did that
But as for me I don’t see how they can remember
When they weren’t where it was at
[Chorus:]
They can’t take it from me, if they tried
I lived through those early days
So many times I had to change the pain to laughter
Just to keep from getting crazy
I lived through those early days
I lived through those early days
These lyrics make me sad. It’s like there’s been a conspiracy for the past 35 years to strip away Paul’s influence and role in John’s life to that of a uninvolved hausfrau.
@Karen, if you want to se the sweetest, saddest video of all time, head on over to You Tube. Bring kleenex.
Link, @Chelsea?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvBVIA_ZaNg
sorry chelsea, I didn’t like the video. I don’t think it jives at all with the song’s intent. What’s with having two black kids? The song is about he and John for crying out loud.
Gee, Ruth, two black kids with a close bond… outsiders joined by something they had in common… not just music, but something about them that made them stand out to each other… don’t tell JHP, you’ll have a heart attack! 😛
@ Chelsea said: “As for Yoko… I tend to think she wants John’s entire legacy for herself.”
This. She has spent the past 35 years refashioning John’s legacy to the point that he’s barely recognizable.
She can refashion all she wants; that’s just for her comfort during her lifetime, regardless of what she thinks. The legacy — and artist — is beyond her, or anyone’s, reach. For one thing, there’s a LOT of source material out there on Lennon; once you release “The Lost Lennon Tapes,” all that is out and can’t be put back in the vault. For another, she can pump stuff into the media, but it’s becoming less and less effective. “John was a hitter!” — knew that already. “John was bisexual!” — knew that, too.
After her death, I expect there will be a bunch of “revelations” in the printed archives that she has controlled for 35 years, but smart folks will take that with a grain of salt; do we really doubt that she is tossing anything that’s not flattering to herself?
But the work is there. And Lennon’s work from 1962-68 is what he will be remembered for.
@Michael said: “After her death, I expect there will be a bunch of “revelations” in the printed archives that she has controlled for 35 years, but smart folks will take that with a grain of salt; do we really doubt that she is tossing anything that’s not flattering to herself?
But the work is there. And Lennon’s work from 1962-68 is what he will be remembered for.”
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I hope so. I don’t think Sean is nearly as motivated as his mother to perpetuate a revisionist portrayal of John and that once Yoko is gone John’s entire history can be celebrated.
This:
“Ono’s weirdest piece of video trickery comes on the recently released DVD “Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon.” On one film, for the classic song “#9 Dream,” Ono has edited herself into the original video. There you will find her mouthing the backup vocals that were sung on the original hit recording by Lennon’s girlfriend at that time, May Pang.
Pang, of course, was not thrilled to hear this had happened. “She is trying to erase everyone who had anything to do with John with her alone,” says Pang, who is a popular figure in the New York music scene. “I am definitely upset at her misleading everyone into thinking she is on ‘#9 Dream.’ She had nothing to do with this particular album and it was John’s only No.1 album and No. 1 single during his lifetime. Boy, do I understand how Paul feels.”
I don’t know how Ono fans reconcile this bit of treachery with their admiration of her.
@Karen, I honestly think a certain type of Lennon fan has decided that whatever she does, she knows best. There’s a submissiveness, celebrity-worship, and a profound guilt involved.
…and a freaky kind of dumbing down. It’s like your facebook commentor: “what a load of shit” is what you say when you don’t have data to support your position, but you cling to it anyway.
I think it’s worse than that, @Karen — I think it’s a relic of the Culture Wars. John’s on Our Side, so any examination of his life and marriage — which he and his wife made into fair game, over and over and over — is seen as a slam against the legacy of the counterculture. Anti-feminist, anti-artist, anti-peace. But that silly. “Just gimme some truth/all I want is the truth.”
I just want to be clear that I’m not this person. 🙂 I feel very detached from Yoko, so while I am often horrified by her I am also sometimes amused and even impressed by her. I don’t feel as objective about John and Paul, who I feel like I “care” about- as much as one can care about random celebrities that you don’t know (one of whom is dead).
Yes, agreed, @Chelsea. John and Paul are like favorite Uncles. Yoko is like the Aunt who my Uncle married when I was 30 or something. “I wonder what he sees in her? I mean, she’s OK I guess.” There’s a general “glad you exist” but no heart-connection for me there. So when she does something nutty, like call Paul Salieri or box Julian out of some of his father’s belongings, I think, “C’mon, lady. Do your art and live your life and maybe see a therapist so you can stop acting out?” But not a lot of vitriol. My vitriol is for fans who swallow the Ballad — for reasons earlier in the thread.
“There you will find her mouthing the backup vocals that were sung on the original hit recording by Lennon’s girlfriend at that time, May Pang.”
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Gross.
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What’s with having two black kids? The song is about he and John for crying out loud.
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I like the video. It’s an eternal story, not specific to John & Paul. The story repeats every generation, every century, with different players of different backgrounds and nationalities. What I’m glad they didn’t do was make the video two young John&Paul lookalikes in early Liverpool. What would be the point of something so literal? We already have “Nowhere Boy” for that.
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Yoko was fortunate that she fit a certain post-adolescent fantasy/fetish/ideal that John had been carrying around with him: An art school wife. Dress in black, Asian (he admitted this was part of his fantasy), artsy, intellectual. He met Cynthia in art school, but she was more the conventional wife (he remade her in his childhood blonde Bardot fantasy). His ideal was a freak; a mirror image of himself; someone who …understands. Cyn was from art school, but she was not a freak like John & Yoko.
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Yoko stalked him because she saw him filling a need; John resisted but ultimately allowed it because he saw her filling a need: A wife/lover who could also be a best pal. Men of John’s generation (and the attitude continues) believed you could have your buddies who shared your interests, your creative partners… and your wife, who loving and nurturing but not… someone who could share interests.
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Yoko was probably flattered and baffled by how much he projected onto her. How he didn’t seem to care about her as a person, but as a symbol.
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I remember Chris Rock doing a standup bit about the myth of the Perfect SoulMate. His fantasy: she loves Seinfeld AND Wu -Tang Clan! A comedy nerd who appreciates his taste in hip hop. He finally concludes such a thing is so rare as to be impossible. You can’t wait for someone who is a mirror image of yourself. You’ll stay alone.
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John wanted all people blended into one soulmate: Someone he could sit up with all night playing with tape recorders, someone he could jam with, someone he could piss off the straights with, someone he could eat out and then discuss philosophy with. Cyn wasn’t that person; couldn’t be. But in reality, neither was Yoko.
“I like the video. It’s an eternal story, not specific to John & Paul. The story repeats every generation, every century, with different players of different backgrounds and nationalities. What I’m glad they didn’t do was make the video two young John&Paul lookalikes in early Liverpool. What would be the point of something so literal? We already have “Nowhere Boy” for that.”
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To each his or her own of course. I think the point of making it so literal is that Paul is singing about his literal experience–one that has been denied him for the past 35 years. That’s the whole point of the song. Nothing ambiguous about it.
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Interesting point about Yoko filling a boyhood fantasy for John, post Bardot. I tend to think he fell in love with the fantasy more the the reality.
“he fell in love with the fantasy more the the reality.”
It happens, right? I think people with strong imaginations, artists, are particularly susceptible. And also particularly susceptible to falling out of love when reality crashes in.
@Sam, you beat me to something with this. As I was falling asleep last night I was thinking about the thread, and realized there was something I’d meant to put in the original post, but had forgotten: John’s fantasy — from Skywriting By Word of Mouth — of a mystical dream woman from the East. It’s real Sax Rohmer stuff, racist but in a positive way. And you hit on the operative word: adolescent. John and Yoko’s relationship was fundamentally adolescent.
You can see this in how Lennon was dressing in 1980; how obsessed they both are about keeping their weight/shape as it was at 17; how they endlessly talk about Their Relationship in interviews and self-dramatize; how, as Ruth has mentioned, they duck responsibility for anything. John’s room is an adolescent’s room, a hideaway filled with all his favorite stuff, where he can go and lock the door and do drugs and look at porn.
All of which is fine. Horses for courses. Except when people really believe in it, holding it up as a kind of modern version of Courtly Love — when it was really closer to a counterculture version of Citizen Kane with D/S undertones. A tycoon at his zenith throws his wife over for a struggling artist, puts her in the spotlight via his money and connections (damaging everyone in the process), then after it’s clear that the public does not share his adoration, retreats to a hermetically sealed fantasy world underwritten by his wealth.
Contrast this to Lennon’s actual adolescence, in which he was utterly focused on the outside world — he was doing The Daily Howl to prepare to be a writer/artist; he was hanging with Stu, and then with Paul; he was leading a band. Yoko is, without question, a retreat for John, a diminution of him not an expansion, and that is I guess why I’ve never understood the worship of John and Yoko as a couple. You can see John — supposedly the reason any Beatles fan is interested in the first place — becoming less and less present, less and less a person any sane woman would want to be with. Some women’s Courtly Love fetish goes quite deep?
@Michael said: “A tycoon at his zenith throws his wife over for a struggling artist, puts her in the spotlight via his money and connections (damaging everyone in the process), then after it’s clear that the public does not share his adoration, retreats to a hermetically sealed fantasy world underwritten by his wealth.”
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I want this embroidered on a pillow. Your assessment of the “Ballad” is spot on, Michael.
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“Just like John, and Paul, Yoko carries around a very wounded little person inside her, and unlike someone whose external circumstances force them to change, her great wealth and power have made it possible for her to stay unhealed, and act out in ways that haven’t been kind. “
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At the risk of sounding uncharitable, maybe Yoko just is self-centred and egotistical. There’s nothing in her personal narrative (or what we know about it) that shows us a different kind of person. I think the difficult times she’s experienced in her life only served to set those traits in concrete.
@Michael said: “Nancy, they were absolutely NOT joking. It was an awkward moment, because I’m sure my face revealed some alarm.”
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Truly an OMG moment. The sound of Michael’s jaw hitting the ground could be heard for miles. 🙂
Let’s not forget, Yoko also froze Pete Shotton out of John’s life. Pete was certainly not artistic competition, he was just John’s oldest mate.
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It’s pretty clear that it was all about control. She controlled who he associated with, she controlled his money (and was very good with it), she controlled where he travelled. She even gave him a child and said “Here, you raise him” in order to tie him down further. Every aspect of those final 5 years screams control.
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It may be that it’s no more complicated than that. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t even about promoting her own career. It was simply about controlling him.
And his half sisters, Julia Baird and Jackie. Julia Baird kept trying to contact him in New York by phone in the ’70s and was often turned away. (I really loved Julia Baird’s book and there is a horrifying portrait of Mimi in there, not the semi-comic caricature we’ve been sold, but a really nasty piece of work.)
I’m curious what Mark Lewisohn will have to say in his third volume. And will he have to work around Yoko, or will she talk to him?
Oh, me too. The third volume will reveal the brief he’s been working under all these years. Is all this just embroidery, or will he go where the evidence points, no matter what?
Reality doesn’t care what we think is possible. For example: earlier in the thread we had a commenter asking why in the world Yoko would consider Paul a threat? There is an answer that, accurate or not, is by far the most logical, most obvious, and simplest. But “going there” requires us to admit that a public person may be able to hide a really fundamental part of themselves under the most intense scrutiny — which begs the question: in the end, how reliable are the tools of reportage and research? Few people are comfortable with existential questions regarding their professions; yet after one reaches a certain level of mastery, they become inevitable (cf. Robert Benchley and the value of comedy, @Sam).
Volume Three will tell us almost as much about Mark Lewisohn as it will the Beatles.
My guess is that Lewisohn’s schedule will solve his Yoko problem to some degree. But if Yoko is alive when Lewisohn begins to research 1967-70, she will never, repeat never, submit to him — because that is how she’s see it. But whether she cooperates or not, the whole conventional narrative will fall apart at that point, and will be replaced by a more nuanced, ultimately more interesting (but less romantic) picture.
“For example: earlier in the thread we had a commenter asking why in the world Yoko would consider Paul a threat? There is an answer that, accurate or not, is by far the most logical, most obvious, and simplest.”
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I was the one who asked that question, both because I’m very interested in what everyone else thinks, and because I personally think there’s been far too little “why?” regarding the hard questions in Beatles historiography. Far too many authors prefer to repeat the accepted wisdom, because asking “why” on some topics leads them down risky and unpopular avenues. But If you want a clearer picture, you can’t leave “why” out of the equation, even if its leads you down paths that are unpopular and ultimately speculative. So long as you differentiate between authorial speculation, authorial interpretation of evidence, and hard evidence, theorize away!
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Then see if your theory fits in with other related issues. The”simplest, most logical, and obvious reason” explaining why Yoko regarded Paul as the preeminent threat to her relationship with John also helps explain what Nancy and I were discussing: why Linda didn’t regard John as an equivalent threat to her relationship with Paul.
@Ruth, I’m with you on this. My “simplest, most logical” reason that Yoko treated Paul as her main rival for John’s affections was… he was the main rival for John’s affections. And Linda didn’t feel the same threat because Paul liked women better than he did men. Right or wrong, the theory that emerged through the “Were John and Paul Lovers?” thread explains the actions of all four people quite efficiently, fits with everything we know, and is utterly predictive of what happened next. The only thing we don’t have is physical confirmation; a letter from one of them spelling all this out — but we wouldn’t. (Or maybe this tape has something on it?)
How many books have been written about Lennon and McCartney, and on that period specifically, and not one of them has seriously suggested that John might be a bisexual man in love with his songwriting partner and closest adult companion? Now, we have writers timidly peeking out and saying, “Gee, it’s almost as if John was in love with Paul.” Has the evidence changed? Not much. Have we as a society become more educated and tolerant? Yes. There were plenty of lesbians before the Kinsey Report on the Human Female, but a lot of people thought otherwise. The conclusions we come to are bounded by the prejudices of our era, and this obvious fact becomes dangerous when people practicing arts (like history or medicine) claim they are practicing sciences.
History is not, in the end or even the beginning, based on “hard evidence.” A letter saying “I love Paul” with hearts all over it in John’s handwriting, signed by Lennon in the presence of a witness, is not interpretation-free hard evidence like a barometric reading or a counting of coins in a trove. It is a data point of a sort, but it’s subject to so much interpretation that I think calling such stuff hard evidence is problematic to say the least. From 1964-2000 or so, the only reasonable interpretation of that mythical letter would’ve been “I love Paul (as a friend, in a non-sexual way)” and any author that suggested another reading was ridiculed and defamed. Even Goldman didn’t go there. Now, given other data points, and the changing sexual mores of the West, a sexual/romantic interpretation of that letter would be somewhat more accepted.
But — and this is what I’m endlessly banging on about, sorry — that’s us, not the letter, and certainly not the writer of the letter. Most “hard evidence” reflects solely what the biases of the researcher allows it to reflect. Keeping this in mind is paramount, but there is a fetish in the historical community to treat its craft as a branch of science, rather than literature, and this emerged in the late 1800s-early 1900s, when science was granted a special cultural authority over “softer” stuff. It has not, IMHO, been a good development for history, even though it might have been for historians.
There has been little “why” in Beatles historiography because historians realize that one’s answer to “why” is a direct window into themselves. “Why” in a topic like this, is risky; to suggest the possibility of a romantic relationship between John and Paul makes people wonder about your own sexual mores — whether you are part of the proper tribe. And academia is sensitive to these kinds of issues, more than ever before. There is great risk in writing history; when you are dealing with people, their thoughts and motivations, it is ALL authorial speculation, and in this way I think perhaps the ancients’ conception of it was more honest, or at least more workable. History is much more like police work than it is chemistry, and like cops, historians are in some sense to be given great sympathy. They are people driven by a craving for certainty, who are destined to find only likelihood. And often, not very much of that.
“A letter saying “I love Paul” with hearts all over it in John’s handwriting, signed by Lennon in the presence of a witness, is not interpretation-free hard evidence like a barometric reading or a counting of coins in a trove.”
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I wouldn’t categorize that hypothetical letter as “hard evidence” either, Michael. When I mentioned distinguishing between authorial speculation, interpretation, and hard evidence, what I should have clarified was the essential aspect of documentation. There is lots of hard evidence in Beatles historiography — contracts, birth certificates, sales figures — but when the author mentions the information contained in that evidence but doesn’t tell you where they got that information — when they don’t tell you where they got that hard evidence by citing a source — its difficult to separate those actual, indisputable facts from other, less credible information and from authorial speculation. I entered Beatles historiography as a blank slate a few years ago, and would read a biography which would make claims/interpretations/convey hard facts and lesser “facts” but they never tell me where they got that information. This made it impossible for me, in my ignorance of the topic, to figure out what was hard fact/disputable evidence/interpretation/speculation. Which, as a historian, was about as enjoyable for me as chewing glass.
But wait — contracts are often disputed; birth certificates forged; sales figures fudged. (Witness Brian’s buying a bunch of boxes of “Love Me Do”, long rumored, now accepted fact?)
So even “hard evidence” requires a kind of interpretation on the part of the historian, who is often painfully naive. You wouldn’t characterize that hypothetical love letter as hard evidence, but you would characterize the Beatles reaching #17 on the charts as a true reflection of audience demand — which it turns out it was not. That chart position was “hard evidence” created by fraud one step below. It is like planting a gun with a fingerprint at a crime scene. The gun is there; it bears the fingerprint. It is hard evidence of the kind seldom questioned because — well, where would it end?
It is that faith in “hard evidence” that makes journalists and historians painfully easy to manipulate. Just know what they take seriously, and manipulate that. Don’t lie, but work one level lower, creating facts that support your narrative. This is why the history of intelligence, for example, is laughable.
I’m not trying to argue you anywhere in particular, @Ruth, only to highlight these issues, which I think are seldom discussed.
I have nothing constructive to add to this discussion, but really wanted to let you know @Ruth and @Michael, that I am seriously enjoying it. From my POV as a consumer (i.e. not being a journalist) I don’t think I’ve ever heard such an excellent discussion on journalism… you’ve given me so much to think about. This blog is the Bee’s Knees.
@Ruth’s the pro, @Chelsea. I’m just a concerned citizen. (Who’s read a TON about the 60s, and sees how that history got manipulated. There’s a playbook, and it works. Historians and journalists and anybody else performing “the watchdog function” for our society need to be a lot growlier.)
You guys are bringing up some very REAL stuff for me here. Particularly the historical counter-narrative I need to provide to my children, the oldest of whom is already being taught history from a White Supremacist Viewpoint in 1st grade public school. It’s a constant struggle for me, gauging how much info is too much at what stage of development… UGH. All I can say is, it’s one thing to consume a bullshit view of history, but it’s quite another to be expected to regurgitate it, especially when it’s actively harmful to humanity. Thank you for providing the discourse in a context that is relatively “safe” for me to deal with emotionally right now. 🙂
Just saw this. Made me laugh, with respect to your comment.
That’s great.
My instinct is that the J/P/Y/L friendship could’ve worked, if John and Yoko hadn’t been so emotionally damaged. There was goodwill there, and then all the sudden it was nothing but disdain. (BTW, I don’t believe the “you and your Jap tart” story — it sounds like how an American thinks British people talk to each other. What do you think?)
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A tycoon at his zenith throws his wife over for a struggling artist, puts her in the spotlight via his money and connections (damaging everyone in the process), then after it’s clear that the public does not share his adoration, retreats to a hermetically sealed fantasy world underwritten by his wealth.
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Citizen Dr. Winston O’Boogie.
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John’s boyhood fetish was the blonde bombshell type. Once he got famous, he could satisfy it to his heart’s (and other organs’) content. No doubt there were thousands of Bardot types available. But once he was sated, what else was there to do? The post-adolescent fantasy: The artsy intellectual. There were journalists and actresses to fit that bill and go gaga over (He must have been babbling when he dropped the Jesus quote on Maureen Cleave).
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Yoko was someone to hide behind. “You go talk to the lawyers, I’ll be upstairs.” She’s an artist [check] she’s “oriental” [check] she’s damaged from a traumatic childhood[check] and Bonus! she’s “good” with money! She can buy cows and bully the suits while I play with my drum machine.
“John and Yoko’s relationship was fundamentally adolescent.”
Blech. I’m squicked by how correct this sounds.
You all have made fine points, but can I play Devil’s Advocate for a minute? While I absolutely agree that Yoko was/is controlling (and definitely agree that John liked to be controlled), I’m not sure she was 100% cold and power-mad all the time. I think it’s more likely that she enjoyed being the dominant partner AND that she loved John as well. John and Yoko seemed genuinely into each other for at least the first 2-3 years. But she’s not Hitler or a cartoon.
@Michael- boy, I would love to read that manuscript.
@Chelsea, my sense with Yoko has always been that she does what she does because she is still terrified, on a basic level, of being destitute again. This explains her behavior’s excessiveness, while still giving her the space to be loved and loving — not a stereotype, nor a cartoon villain, but simply (!) a really bright, really driven woman scarred by war as a child and doing the best she can as an adult.
Two clicks on Google: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/people/AJ201312050082
Just like John, and Paul, Yoko carries around a very wounded little person inside her, and unlike someone whose external circumstances force them to change, her great wealth and power have made it possible for her to stay unhealed, and act out in ways that haven’t been kind. I genuinely pray that she’s been able find some peace — not “peace,” but genuine personal contentment — a sense of serenity, happiness and wholeness as this world turns. You know, we talk a lot about all these people on Dullblog, but please when you’re reading my posts or comments, know that there’s such love and compassion for all of them. ALL of them.
Skywriting‘s published, @Chelsea. Easily found on Amazon for a buck or two.
@Michael: Sorry, I was referring to YOUR manuscript. Which I now see is also available on Amazon. 🙂
Chelsea, I also believe that Yoko genuinely cared for John, and that she’s no cartoon villain. As much I dislike the ongoing promulgation of the Ballad of J&Y, I have a good deal of sympathy for Yoko as a person.
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For one thing, I think she, and Linda to a lesser extent, found themselves in pretty impossible positions once they married John and Paul. After the loss of Brian, and then the loss of the Lennon/McCartney partnership and the structure of the group, John and Paul were both deeply needy. When the band broke up they pretty much lost the whole extended circle of people (George Martin, Geoff Emerick, Mal Evans, etc. etc.) who had supported them both practically and emotionally. And both John and Paul took all those needs, which had been spread out over a number of people, and put them on ONE woman each.
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Now that might sound romantic at first — “you’re all I need!” — but I bet it got scary pretty fast. “Meet ALL my needs!” Yoko got a much harder deal, because John was both more emotionally damaged and more pharmaceutically adventurous than Paul. I think she deserves props for helping to keep him alive and for giving him some direction/activities in the late 60s and early 70s that gave him some kind of balance.
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And I don’t think Linda’s gotten enough credit for pulling Paul back from the brink during that late 60s/early 70s period. From what I’ve read he was depressed and drinking very heavily during their initial time in Scotland, and Paul has said it was Linda who held things together. When I imagine living in a rustic, fairly isolated cottage with a young child, a newborn, and a depressed, drunken husband, man do I give Linda props for hanging in there and helping to spur Paul on to work. (I also think “Ram” doesn’t get enough recognition as a work of spousal collaboration, but I’ve banged on about that album enough on this site that I’ll stop there.)
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In my opinion BOTH Yoko and Linda deserve more compassion, and more respect, than they tend to get from many Beatles fans.
“And I don’t think Linda’s gotten enough credit for pulling Paul back from the brink during that late 60s/early 70s period. From what I’ve read he was depressed and drinking very heavily during their initial time in Scotland, and Paul has said it was Linda who held things together.”
I think some of this lack of appreciation for Linda’s strength in this time period could be attributed to how neither Paul nor Linda even talked about Paul’s depression until the 1984 Playboy interview, by which time the shallow, Teflon image of “Macca” was well established. And even when Paul did mention it in 1984, it seems to have passed over a lot of people’s heads: when Doyle’s book came out, there were a lot of “revelations” about how depressed Paul was during this time period, and about how Linda saved him.
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But the other part is simply that a lot of Beatles writers and fans don’t or can’t look at it from Linda’s perspective. The amount of strength she demonstrates here is admirable and remarkable.
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Her situation is terrible: The fans hate her, because she had the audacity to marry the “Cute” Beatle; the mainstream British press hates her because she’s not Jane Asher; the rock and roll press hates her family because of the Klein/Eastman conflict. Her NY friends are angry that she’s not talking to them.
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Meanwhile, she’s trying to cope with a fragile seven year old and a newborn baby. Having a newborn baby is one of the most stressful things you will ever have to cope with in your entire life, period, even under the most idyllic of circumstances. Even if Mary was the most well-behaved baby in the history of the world, Linda is still having to change diapers 5/6 times a day and feeding every two and a half-three hours, so she’s averaging about six hours of sleep a night. Later, when Mary is crawling, Linda can’t take her eyes off of her for one second, because otherwise Mary might put something in her mouth and choke on it, or toddle herself right off the end of the bloody edge of the Mull of Kintyre. Linda is doing all the cooking, cleaning, and parenting, because Paul is drinking, “feeling worthless,” not getting out of bed, and having a nervous breakdown. Linda somehow manages to deal with all this stuff and still coax Paul out of his depression and back to work. She must have had an enormous amount of patience, compassion, and a spine of steel.
@Ruth, this is marvelous, building on @Nancy’s own marvelous comment.
I also think that Paul’s depression has been understated because it went directly against the Lennon Remembers narrative. Far from being a narcissistic egomaniac, Paul was heartbroken over what John was doing to The Beatles; out of the four of them, he seems to have been the one who recognized what we all knew/know. To watch the post-India period from that viewpoint is to suffer with Paul, be angry with George and Ringo for being so weak and profligate, and be furious with John and Yoko. What Beatle fan wants that? Much easier to do what Paul seems to want us to do, which is brush it off, minimize it in that stiff-upper-lip-way.
Linda was heroic.
“The fans hate her, because she had the audacity to marry the “Cute” Beatle; the mainstream British press hates her because she’s not Jane Asher; the rock and roll press hates her family because of the Klein/Eastman conflict. Her NY friends are angry that she’s not talking to them.”
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Very good point, Ruth. When I add that to all the incessant child-care tasks you describe, I respect Linda even more for surviving that Scotland period and coming out with her marriage and family intact.
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Also, I wish I could upvote this 1000 times: “Having a newborn baby is one of the most stressful things you will ever have to cope with in your entire life, period, even under the most idyllic of circumstances.” PREACH!
@Ruth: “Having a newborn baby is one of the most stressful things you will ever have to cope with in your entire life, period, even under the most idyllic of circumstances.”
Word x 100000!
@Nancy said “In my opinion BOTH Yoko and Linda deserve more compassion, and more respect, than they tend to get from many Beatles fans.”
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I’ll respect Yoko when: she admits she was disingenuous in her narrative about how she met John and what she knew of the Beatles; when she admits she mistreated his Liverpool family, including Julian; when she admits she was a willing participant in the Beatles’ deconstruction; when she admits she narrowed John’s world, to his detriment; when she admits she’s been unfair to Paul and the other Beatles in business dealings—which means I’ll never respect her, because she will never do any of these things.
Karen, when I say “more respect and compassion than they tend to get from many Beatles fans,” I don’t mean giving either Yoko or Linda a pass on all their behavior or adopting either as a role model — I literally mean “more respect and compassion” than the kind of name calling and super-harsh blaming that is sometimes directed at them.
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All the behaviors of Yoko that you list bother me as well, some of them (like her treatment of Julian) a great deal. But I do tend to agree with Michael G. that those behaviors have their roots in childhood damage, and that they must be causing her to suffer in addition to the harm they cause/have caused others. I don’t think that to understand all is to forgive all, but I think someone as seemingly locked in to defending a strict storyline as Yoko is has got to be in some real pain. That, to me, is where the compassion can come in.
someone as seemingly locked in to defending a strict storyline as Yoko is has got to be in some real pain
100% agree with this. Only if you think money can buy you happiness has Yoko “gotten away with” anything. Whatever she’s done, she’s suffered for sure.
Which is not to defend/excuse her missteps and misdeeds, only to take solace in the essentially balanced nature of this place we’re all in — you cause someone suffering, you get your own suffering. For me, the times when I’ve caused the most suffering have been when I’ve been focused on the misdeeds of somebody else — and that makes sense, right? I’m not paying attention to the effects of my actions, because I’m distracted.
@Nancy said: “I don’t think that to understand all is to forgive all, but I think someone as seemingly locked in to defending a strict storyline as Yoko is has got to be in some real pain. That, to me, is where the compassion can come in.”
I think where we part company is that I don’t see her behaviour, as we’ve seen it unfold over the past 40 years, as driven by trauma. I see it driven by personality. At any rate, she’s been a one-woman wrecking ball in the personal lives of many, many people and I applaud you for having found compassion for her, in spite of this.
I was so disappointed by Robert Caro’s latest volume of the life of LBJ, after the incredible first volumes. I really hope Lewisohn stays the course.
On the subject of ‘why couldn’t they sit down and sort out their problems in 1968/9?’, I think it’s very easy to underestimate the emotional stuntedness of that postwar generation of northern Englishmen. And the Beatles were worse than most, anything to do with serious feelings to them was just “soft”. According to Paul, he and John never discussed their mothers’ deaths in all their time together. Expecting them to sit down and ‘work through their issues’ is a bit optimistic.
In fact the only people more buttoned-up than the postwar English were… the postwar Japanese.
@Dan, can you give me the short version of why Caro’s trilogy disappointed you?
Very astute re: buttoned-upness.
@ Dan said: “According to Paul, he and John never discussed their mothers’ deaths in all their time together. “
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Not so, actually. I don’t have the quotes handy, but Paul has said countless times that he and John shared their feelings about their mothers’ deaths, beginning at Key West and over the years. It would just “hit In” according to Paul, and we would “cry together about it.” (I’m paraphrasing of course.)
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(Sorry, Hitler was a bad example. He had a girlfriend, too)
@Michael and @Sam: You’ve both touched on something I’ve been reticent to even mention: What will Mark Lewisohn uncover and reveal to the world? My reticence has been due to a fear that if Yoko thought he just might go ‘there’ she’d move heaven and earth to prevent him having access to the people and documents that would allow him to authoritatively expose the truth.
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That said, I suspect the second and third volumes of his Bio will be earth-shattering on many levels. One thing he’s already laid the groundwork for is how totally incompetent the Beatles were absent Brian Epstein. Another is the growing picture of John’s brokenness from a personal/psychological standpoint, his use of anything he could find to self-medicate himself against the pain his life had cast on him, his need for a companion, someone to affirm him personally. (It is this latter point that I believe we’ll see Paul crucially play, and perhaps discover that his early departure from Rishikesh was at some level seen by John as a betray.)
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As the historic evidence is to some publicly available already regarding Yoko’s pursuit of John before their Indica Gallery ‘meeting,’ I believe Lewisohn will tell what he finds and let the cards fall where they may. I think this will also affirm the above discussed ‘adolescent’ nature of JohnandYoko, What Lewisohn is already establishing in Tune In is the way to Brian totally mothered the Beatles, preventing them from having to deal with anything they didn’t want to deal with. After his death, Mal Evans, Neil, and the several others who “looked after” them more or less stepped in to fill the gaps to the extent they were able. Had any of them been capable of truly handling the finances, it’s likely that much of the turmoil of Apple might have been avoided.
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But the one thing Brian’s death inevitably led to was four men approaching 30 who hadn’t grown into adulthood in any real sense. If not fully psychologically, at least emotionally, the Beatles were still experiencing/perceiving life as when they were teenagers. It is in that context that I think we’ll eventually walk away with a much more nuanced understanding of John’s relationship with Yoko. In the end, I think we’ll find no true villains and ultimately no heroes.
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Sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble on so. 🙂
Ramble away, God knows I do. 🙂
“she’d move heaven and earth to prevent him having access to the people and documents that would allow him to authoritatively expose the truth.”
Thing is, I don’t think there’s any “there” there. The world has pretty much decided what it thinks about John, and also Yoko. But I think it’s an instinct, a craving, a modus operandi on Yoko’s part — which is why the Estate has been buying up the rights to photos, documents, et cetera for many years now.
I too wonder about Lewisohn. For some reason I think he’ll miss the boat on that one. He’s good at technical research (what happened when and who recorded what) but I don’t think he’s particuarly skilled in the Beatles’ emotional landscape. Time will tell I guess.
Hi Karen…
Maybe that’s Lewisohn’s strength here – for this particular project he’s undertaken any way? Heaven knows we’ve had enough authors and books about The Beatles veering towards the emotional and the opinionated even. What I think Lewisohn should do is offer up the facts as close and accurately as he possibly can so that in decades (and centuries?) to come, historians and future generations will have something as accurate as can be to read and not data that is muddied by emotion and opinion. I think that’s perhaps what Lewisohn is looking to achieve – i.e. a reliable historical record. A book with its facts based on hard, cross-referenced, double and triple-checked research.
Fascinating stuff and some great insights. Wonderfully expressed. too – both in the original post and in the comments, A sterling example of what makes Hey Dullblog so essential and enjoyable. Long may it continue.
Personally, I don’t have anything to add about Yoko that hasn’t already been said here. Sometimes I think she’s ok, sometimes I think she’s bloody awful, But most of the time I try not to think about her – and her relationship with John – because (as someone said above) I find it quite depressing.
Most recently I was struck by how much I like to not think about it while reading Philip Norman’s Lennon biography. I felt a real aching sadness, a yearning for things to go differently, when it came close to them being reunited after the lost weekend: “John! Don’t go back to her! Don’t be an idiot! Stay with May! Hang out with Paul and Harry! Carry on being a dickhead rock star in LA for a while! You’ll be ok!”
Of all the bad decisions John ever made, I think that was probably the worst.
That said, I do like her music. A lot. The first two LPs in particular and the collaborative Yes, I’m A Witch – especially on Jason Pierce’s reworked Walking On Thin Ice which shows that she could occasionally be a great singer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5osXTpyktA
@Paul I like her music too and the lyrics. I like Waiting for the D Train and Between My Head and the Sky. I really like her band.
https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=7yLKsympUmM
https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=00BEwG_5Swc
But I don’t like her. I also think she is a “preening narcissist” , an opportunist, shallow, childish, manipulative, but I really like her bass sound and Sean is a great guitar player IMO.
@Karen
Yes, sorry, you’re right about them discussing their mothers deaths that night in Key West etc. I was thinking of their early days.
@Michael – Caro’s 4th book, about LBJ’s time as VP (Passage of Power), I found very superficial compared to the depth of the first three. For example, the Billy Sol Estes scandal was huge at the time and nearly got Johnson indicted, but Caro doesn’t even mention it.
I think, regarding Yoko, Lewisohn will always go where the evidence leads, but there are varying options available to him.
Methodologically, Lewisohn has demonstrated already in “Tune In” what he does when he has two separate, equally credible sources (such as John and Paul’s disagreements over whether Paul initially approved of Brian as manager): he provides both and allows the reader to decide. This is a balanced but also somewhat safe choice. The Brian-Paul relationship doesn’t exert a great deal of partisanship in Beatles readers: Yoko, as we know, does.
We know beyond a doubt that Yoko pursued John: I think its safe to say that, on that issue, Lewisohn will reiterate the facts rather than repeating Yoko’s version of events. Will he ask “Why?” and draw interpretations and conclusions from that question? That’s where I’m skeptical. He’ll tell us, without attempting to excuse it, that Yoko introduced John to heroin almost immediately in their relationship. Will he ask “Why?” I don’t know; I’m inclined to believe he won’t. He *can* — so long as he differentiates between his speculation and evidence, he can theorize all he likes — but I’m inclined to think he won’t. Lewisohn’s strength is in research, facts and evidence, and methodology. However, even if he doesn’t — and this is crucial — his research will lay the groundwork for other authors to ask “Why?” and speculate and interpret in ways that hopefully reveal greater truth and are willing to reject the accepted wisdom.
Lewisohn’s other option is somewhat messier. There’s evidence supporting both sides on various Yoko issues, so he can use historical methods and determine which source is more credible and therefore which version is more credible, and present that version. But if he does that, he’s going to have to explain how and why he chose the version of events that he did. I have not yet seen Lewisohn do that on a particularly divisive topic, in part because we haven’t really delved into Beatles historiography’s really divisive topics yet, given where he left off in “Tune In.” (Its worth noting that, in “The Beatles Day by Day,” Lewisohn never acknowledges the existence of any of Goldman’s claims regarding John’s later years). Unless a piece of evidence is demonstrably superior in credibility to another, I am guessing that Lewisohn will simply provide both and let the reader choose.
“He’ll tell us, without attempting to excuse it, that Yoko introduced John to heroin almost immediately in their relationship. Will he ask ‘Why?’ I don’t know; I’m inclined to believe he won’t.”
Then he’s not doing his job, @Ruth. Lewisohn’s set is meant to be the definitive history of the band and the phenomenon; “why” is included in that brief. Anybody who cares to know, already knows that Yoko introduced John to heroin almost immediately in their relationship. Stating that fact, then offloading interpretation onto the reader, is ridiculous. We look to historians to be experts on the topic they are discussing; they, not us, have spent the time collecting and arranging the data, reading the sources, interviewing, etc. An historian that offloads interpretation of anything sticky is… well, it’s like a cable news network airing Trump without calling his ideas “racist xenophobia.” It’s a misapplication of the idea of objectivity, intellectually corrupt, and a betrayal of the authority they ask us to grant them.
Yoko’s introducing John to heroin does not happen in a vacuum; it has a mountain of data preceding it, and everything that was happening simultaneously, and afterwards. Waiting for someone like Yoko Ono to “come clean” (heh) about why she did it is foolish — and believing whatever she would tell you about it is even more so. “We did it because we were artists” — come on, seriously?
Lewisohn’s a person, he lives with people, and he more than any of us should have a sense of what all the participants are/were like. He must say why, or he’s writing a different book than the one he claims to be writing. Would I want to incur the wrath of any of these people by saying something they didn’t like? No. But that’s why I haven’t dedicated my life to unearthing the history of the Beatles (although now that I think on it…) But I tell ya now: if Lewisohn’s books don’t ruffle some serious feathers, they’re just Anthology tarted up in subfusc.
“Then he’s not doing his job, @Ruth. Lewisohn’s set is meant to be the definitive history of the band and the phenomenon; “why” is included in that brief.”
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I agree. So does Gaddis, in “The Landscape of History.” “It’s not enough simply to chronicle what a person did. Biographers must also try to determine why he or she did it.” And perhaps I’m wrong: my speculation that Lewisohn won’t ask that “Why” it comes to the starkly partisan issues such as Yoko and heroin is just speculation, mainly because, IIRC, we haven’t seen Lewisohn venture into that sort of issue before. (However, he preemptively declared his position on the great Lennon vs. McCartney debate by declaring them equals in “Tune In’s” Introduction, so he doesn’t refuse to wade into some contentious waters — although that’s not a “Why” question).
@Ruth, your comment is really interesting to me. You’re absolutely right that “Yoko and heroin” is “starkly partisan”, but as I read that I wondered why. There’s no disagreement that Yoko introduced John to heroin; there’s no disagreement that John was an emotionally fragile person with a long history of drug abuse. Where is the “pro” side coming from? That John would’ve taken it anyway? That really nothing Yoko does can be criticized because: widow?
It’s simply beyond debate that nobody but Yoko introduced John to smack, and that it was a terrible idea to do so — at least irresponsible and unloving, at worst starkly manipulative and Machiavellian. I guess this gets to the heart of the post for me: Yoko doesn’t deserve unfair criticism — but neither should she get a pass. She seems to have an absolute genius for fomenting and nourishing partisanship which obscures her authentic self almost entirely.
@ Michael said: “It’s simply beyond debate that nobody but Yoko introduced John to smack, and that it was a terrible idea to do so — at least irresponsible and unloving, at worst starkly manipulative and Machiavellian. I guess this gets to the heart of the post for me: Yoko doesn’t deserve unfair criticism — but neither should she get a pass. She seems to have an absolute genius for fomenting and nourishing partisanship which obscures her authentic self almost entirely.”
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All of this.
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I’m currently reading Doug Sulpy’s book about the Let it Be sessions, and there’s a passage where Yoko asks John for heroin (in a disguised fashion, of course.) John tells her that he’s given her all of his but she says she needs more. Sulpy caught the exchange and noted it. I also remember Yoko herself saying that she got back onto heroin in 1980, but proudly stated that John was clean. It must have been a herculean task for John to quit heroin while married to a full-fledged heroin addict, among other things.
Elvis Costello did a fine cover of Walking On Thin Ice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMdAvrLECs4
John was listening to a lot of Elvis Costello & Nick Lowe in 1979-80. When Lennon made his 1980 comeback, I remember thinking (like a fool) that the ’80s would be John’s decade.
I – like many of us(?) – wonder what John would have served up musically during the 1980s, and he was – by his own accounts – a fan of the ‘New Wave’ scene of the time and of the British-based Ska / Two Tone acts such as Madness, e.t.c. Unfortunately, there’s a side to me that thinks he would have fallen short of emulating or surpassing these contemporary sounds during the decade that was before him but that he sadly never came to see. His attempts to pick up the Ska / Two Tone, Reggae and B52s-type sound on his albums ‘Double Fantasy’ (but especially ‘Milk and Honey’) were – IMO – sadly lacking.
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I genuinely pray that she’s been able find some peace — not “peace,” but genuine personal contentment — a sense of serenity, happiness and wholeness as this world turns. You know, we talk a lot about all these people on Dullblog, but please when you’re reading my posts or comments, know that there’s such love and compassion for all of them. ALL of them.
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Your heart (like Cab Calloway’s Minnie’s heart) is as big as a whale. That’s what makes you a fine comedy writer.
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I tend to demonize these people (“Yoko’s isolating John from friends and family is textbook spousal abuse!”) but at the end of the day they were all just insecure people following the voices in their heads. At least John left us the music. Thanks to Parlophone for those wonderful recordings.
Thank you @Sam. Unfortunately, I am also a Moocher. I mooch off of all you great readers/commenters. 🙂
Hi everyone, just thought I’d drop an unrelated comment into here:
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Mark Lewisohn, asked once again about what time period “All These Years” will go up to, last night said that he has absolutely no interest in going up til “now” – he said he’s not interested in what any of them did in recent years. But he said he is absolutely dying to tell the story of the years 1971-1975; he said as far as he’s concerned, it’s simply never been told, and there’s such a rich story there.
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But, he said, volume 2 is so huge already, it’s likely that to stay in any kind of feasible range he will have to stop volume three in 1970.
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And then he said: “which leaves me with the question of whether to turn three volumes into four”. That’s the first time I’ve heard him saying this, and there was excitement in the room when he said it. Personally, I think they should’ve made that decision when volume one came in at 1800 pages. I would love to see him be able to be true to his word – to tell the story til it ends. But, as he said in a previous interview, he finished volume one on a bank loan because the advance he got was for all three volumes, and he’s already well over his deadline even for volume 3. So I don’t know how generous his publisher is being, and whether there’s enough money to be made to justify them paying him to do another book. If Kickstarter hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own hand-washing when things go wrong by then, maybe we can all finance Mark’s pension by gathering the money ourselves.
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But if I had a 4 volume set of extended editions, at 1800 pages each, I think my life would be complete 🙂
Kickstarter’s exactly what I thought, @Evilpants! He could raise a cool million, I think, and not have to give 85% of his sales to a publisher.
I mean, my God — if Lewisohn’s taking out a bank loan against advances, I’ll help him run the Kickstarter myself! This man’s a treasure, he should not be under financial pressure, and it’s only the arcane insanity of the book publishing business that he would ever be.
The ‘reply’ button on this blog is like the Cheshire Cat; sometimes its there, and sometimes its not.
“So even “hard evidence” requires a kind of interpretation on the part of the historian.”
Interpretation and/or authentication. That’s part of the job.
I know, I know — I’m going to change the theme over the holidays.
“Authentication” is the sticking point. We can’t reasonably expect journalists/historians to assume that every #17 hit is a fraud. But it would be nice if the system enabled journalists/historians to be truly adversarial when it really matters.
“There’s no disagreement that Yoko introduced John to heroin; there’s no disagreement that John was an emotionally fragile person with a long history of drug abuse. Where is the “pro” side coming from? That John would’ve taken it anyway? That really nothing Yoko does can be criticized because: widow?”
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I don’t know what the pro-Yoko fan says regarding the heroin issue, because this is the only Beatles-related forum I pay attention to.
The pro “Ballad of John and Yoko” writers, such as Norman and Coleman, ignored it when they could, downplayed it when they couldn’t, and certainly never, *never* asked *why* Yoko introduced John to it. I don’t recall if the first edition of Shout! even mentions John and Yoko using heroin at all, (I don’t think so) but I know it doesn’t mention that Yoko introduced John to it. Coleman’s first edition of his John biography drops it in a sentence — something to the affect of “And then John and Yoko sought treatment for their heroin addiction” — and then ignores the entire topic. It doesn’t receive much more expanded coverage in his later editions, either. Again, that Yoko introduced John to it is ignored and not mentioned. In the 2008 John bio by Norman, Yoko argues that it was part of their cohesiveness: that John chose to take heroin because she was already using it; he didn’t want to be left out of what she was experiencing — and that they never, of course, injected it. Any psychological consequences it might have had on John, Yoko, and the delicate mechanism of the Beatles is summarily ignored. The damage it might have done to Yoko’s relationship with Kyoko, or John’s with Julian, is ignored. (Which, I have to say, is such a glaring omission by these authors its infuriating. I had a daughter approximately Kyoko’s age when I first read Norman’s bio of John, and he’s describing John and Yoko in the recording studio all day, lounging around in bed, and doing heroin, and I’m thinking “Where the hell is Yoko finding time to do this when she has a six year old, when I can’t find ten minutes to take a shower!” — the answer being, of course, that Kyoko gets booted to the curb).
That’s the scope of the pro-ballad writers on the subject: Ignore, deflect, minimize and never, never ask “Why.”
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Paul doesn’t address the “Why” in MYFN, but he does state that it was John’s heroin use that made him so suddenly difficult to talk to during the breakup period, and Peter Brown argues that it was John’s heroin use, more than any other single factor, that broke up the band. The anti-ballad writers such as Spitz don’t ask why: They outright state that Yoko introduced John to heroin in order to control him. So does Tony Bramwell.
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I have to add: while I personally believe that Yoko’s introducing John to heroin was deliberate in order to gain more control over him is reinforced by what we know of her, part of me reflexively wants to reject it. There’s a long, well established historiographical tradition of blaming the faults and actions of males on manipulative, sexualized women; its a pattern that goes back to the historic depictions of Antony and Cleopatra. In the case of John and Yoko, it appears to be a valid interpretation; part of me simply cringes at reinforcing that well-worn and sexist trope.
@Ruth, I love your comments so much.
That trope is doubly odious given that, for most of the last 3,000 years, controlling/influencing a powerful man really was the most efficient and quickest way for an ambitious woman to gain power for herself. In some societies (ancient Rome for example) it was the only way to amass power, if you were female. And given that intelligence, ability, ambition and drive are distributed evenly, that meant there was a LOT of pressure on women to employ this strategy, despite the massive social price they paid for doing so, even when they were successful. (See: the portrayal of Livia by Tacitus, Dio, etc.)
But that doesn’t make it OK for Livia to poison people (if she did). And Yoko Ono wasn’t living in Ancient Rome. Yes, the 60s and 70s were woefully backward in their sexual politics, even the counterculture — but if indeed Yoko does fit that Lady Macbeth stereotype, to a certain degree it’s on her. As Yoko’s defenders endlessly point out, she was a fully fledged professional artist with a career when she met John Lennon. She didn’t need to seduce a Beatle to put food on the table; and yet she pursued him relentlessly, and once close to him, seemed to do everything she could to bind him to her. Yoko pointedly did not do what Jane Asher did, for example — date a Beatle, but retain her autonomy. Alternatives were possible, that’s worth noting, and people have noted it in this thread — Linda McCartney’s uxorious behavior in the ’69/’70 period, for example. Linda seems to be foundational in Paul’s sense of self-worth and autonomy; Yoko seems to gnaw at John’s.
At this late date, people interested in the issue have to acknowledge that Yoko’s “bad vibes” aren’t all “bad press,” and to me untangling that issue in as fair a way as possible is the joy of this thread. It’s a knotty issue, surrounded by endless unfair bullshit and hard-to-see prejudices. But I think to treat it as 99% of Beatle authors have, which is to sidestep it entirely, probably out of fear, is irresponsible. John did what he did, and we judge; Yoko did what she did, and we judge. Too often, Yoko gets a pass because: racism/sexism (or now, wacky arty old lady), and that’s simply not fair to all the people who suffered as much or more under an unfair system which continues today, but did not introduce their boyfriend to smack. Manipulation for personal gain is part of Yoko’s personality, and it’s also what makes her good at business. To look past that is to miss something on the order of JFK’s sexual profligacy.
TL;DR — we are not simply our virtues, and a fairer society isn’t hastened by doling out free passes. If anything, that’s another form of men wielding power, playing the “treats for sex” game.
@Michael said: “As Yoko’s defenders endlessly point out, she was a fully fledged professional artist with a career when she met John Lennon. She didn’t need to seduce a Beatle to put food on the table.”
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And we know this is patently false. They were living hand to mouth, essentially.
@Ruth said: ” I have to add: while I personally believe that Yoko’s introducing John to heroin was deliberate in order to gain more control over him is reinforced by what we know of her, part of me reflexively wants to reject it. There’s a long, well established historiographical tradition of blaming the faults and actions of males on manipulative, sexualized women; its a pattern that goes back to the historic depictions of Antony and Cleopatra. In the case of John and Yoko, it appears to be a valid interpretation; part of me simply cringes at reinforcing that well-worn and sexist trope.”
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It’s only sexist if it isn’t true.
Photos from 1980:
http://mashable.com/2015/12/08/john-lennon-grief/#jKTsQkGFmkqp
The photos are really interesting Hologram Sam and still relevant to what’s going on today. Thank you for sharing.
Long time lurker, first time commenter… I probably should have done a formal introduction before jumping in to this, of all topics!
I personally don’t know much about Yoko’s history, so I want to ask those who know more. I’ve always assumed that much of Yoko’s bad behavior regarding drugs was a result of her, herself, being an addict. Just as we can look at some of John’s bad behavior during this time period and trace it to the heroin, can’t the same be true of Yoko? Not that she isn’t responsible for having taken the drug, but it makes it harder to see her introducing John to it as purely manipulative if she was addicted at the time, and had ceded much of her judgment to the drug.
HI huzzlewhat 🙂
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I think addiction can only account for behaviour which is atypical. The usual behavioural trajectory for drug addiction is a marked change in behaviour or mood, which steadily worsens. This is certainly the situation in John’s case.
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There is no such trajectory in Yoko’s narrative. While her behaviour was likely exacerbating by drug use, the foundational behaviours were already there.
@Karen, have you heard of the idea that addicts’ emotional maturity is frozen at the time in which they first became addicts?
This is a different point, but that’s what I get from the Two Junkies period — John and Yoko are just mind-blowingly immature. Which is not, generally, how Lennon appears before May ’68.
Absolutely @ Michael,particularly when the addiction occurs during adolescence.
Addiction, in and of itself, is the continued pursuit of reward-seeking behaviour, so in general terms addicts of any age tend to regress as a consequence.
So can you unpack Lennon’s seeming regression after 1968, from an addictive-behavior standpoint?
@ Michael asked: “So can you unpack Lennon’s seeming regression after 1968, from an addictive-behavior standpoint?”
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Hmm. That’s an interesting challenge. I’ll give it a shot but bear in mind my field of psychology isn’t in addiction. 🙂
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It all starts with dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that motivates us to seek pleasure (food, sex, etc) and plays an important role in the brain’s executive functions, such as judgement, memory, and learning, which are essential for the perpetuation of the species. While the brain can effectively regulate naturally occurring dopamine rewards from food and sex, it cannot regulate the massive dopamine hit caused by addictive drugs. In that instance, the brain tries to handle the onslaught by shutting down dopamine receptors, like a damn during a flood.
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When dopamine receptors go on strike a number of things happen for the addict. First, they need higher and higher doses to get that high, until eventually there is no high at all. Second, they lose their interest and capacity for pleasure. Third, their ability to reason, execute decisions, and learn from experience becomes impaired.
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The “frozen” phenomena is actually the brain shutting down important functions in its attempt to regulate dopamine. The addict, for all intents and purposes, becomes a child again, particularly in terms of the incapacitation of the brain’s executive functions.
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I have no doubt that John’s heroin addiction during the late 60’s contributed to his strange and uncharacteristic behaviour during that period. And his drinking during his “lost weekend” explains it again. But what explanation is there for his regressive behaviour post 1975, if he wasn’t using drugs? I tend to think it’s a conflation of years of drug use, and his untreated mental health issues.
Oh @Karen, I think he was using drugs massively during the Dakota years. A guy who’s used drugs massively since 1962 doesn’t just stop in 1975 because of brown rice and the love of a good woman.
This explains John’s anhedonia very succinctly, don’t you think?
@Micheal–I had always thought that John’s drug use petered out by the mid to late 70’s. Hmm. It does explain his Howard Hughes-like existence, for sure.
Well, that’s what he said — something like “pot and the occasional mushroom to visit the Cosmos” — which could be true, I mean we all want it to be true. But he doesn’t act like that. He acts like a guy with a serious drug problem. And the fact that we know that Yoko was using again in the late 70s suggests that, too. Recovered addicts don’t hang around users…because they don’t want to become users again. The associations are just too intense.
You and I have talked a lot about Lennon being a manic-depressive/bipolar, who medicated via drug use. That really rings true to me. And if that’s how it worked for him, the impetus to use was there in 1978 just as it was in 1968. Maybe even more so.
“You and I have talked a lot about Lennon being a manic-depressive/bipolar, who medicated via drug use. That really rings true to me. And if that’s how it worked for him, the impetus to use was there in 1978 just as it was in 1968. Maybe even more so.”
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Yoko always claimed that John was “clean” when he was killed. I wonder if she was referring to heroin only (or lying completely.)
He was supposedly coked up during the filming of that in-studio Double Fantasy video- I’m too busy to find it now. I actually think that the coke use and cigarette smoking were starting to destroy his voice. See Dylan, Bob for the final results of that experiment.
@Kevin, I’d read that his coke use was so significant that he was scheduled for septum surgery in early 1981.
Which makes total sense. Cocaine was, in the words of someone who was in the comedy business at that time, “so accepted, it wasn’t even considered bad for you.”
Yikes. Michael, you have all the goods! (But yeah, Womack writes that John got Fred Seaman to score coke for him in Bermuda, in a depressing episode. Both banal and depressing, I guess.)
Oh oh, it’s Yoko.
http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/yoko-ono-i-had-nothing-do-with-breaking-up-the-beatles/
John Lennon is a great example of people can change and are not fixed to be a certain way as a man or a woman.Yoko changed John into a much better person as a pro-feminist man and the feminist changes *are* for the better, and many pro-feminist men have recognized this too! They say it has freed them and allowed them to develop and express more of all of the shared common *human* traits,emotions,behaviors,abilities and reduce and prevent male violence against women and children etc. Definitions of “masculine” and “feminine” differ across time periods, and in different societies.
John Lennon is a great example of how feminism changing limited artificial gender definitions and roles,changed him for the much better. John as a child and teenager had a lot of traumas that permanently psychologically damaged him,but because of his and Yoko’s beautiful loving relationship,and as he said she was a feminist before he met her,(and he said that because she was a feminist before he met her,they were going to have to have a 50/50 equal relationship which he never had before) he went in to primal scream therapy and Yoko went with him and he dealt with all of his pain and anger for the very first time at age 29.
When John was a young guy,he was often drunk getting into fist fights with men,hitting women,and womanizing including cheating on his girlfriends and then his first wife Cynthia.Of course Paul,George and Ringo did the same with all of the groupies all 4 of them had while touring from 1963-1966. I hadn’t watched these Mike Douglas shows in years until December 2010 when it was the 30th anniversary of John’s tragic crazy murder.
Out of the 5 Mike Douglas shows that John and Yoko co-hosted for a week that was taped in January 1972 and aired in February,a young criminal lawyer Rena Uviller(she went on to become a Supreme Court Judge) who worked with juveniles was on, and she,Mike Douglas,John and Yoko were discussing the then very recent women’s liberation movement. George Carlin was on too.
Rena said,she agrees with Yoko,that the idea of Women’s lib is to liberate all of us,and she said ,I mean we could talk hours on the way men really suffer under the sex role definitions.Yoko agreed with what she said too. Rena said that men don’t really realize they have only to gain from Women’s Lib,and that she thinks that maybe with a little more propaganda we can convince them.
John then said,yeah there is a lot to gain from it,just the fact that you can relax and not have to play that male role,he said we can do that,and he said that I can be weak,( but notice how then in a male dominated gender divided,gender stereotyped,sexist society,and even unfortunately still now in a lot of ways,the “female” role was defined as the weak one,and the male role as the strong one) I don’t have to protect her all the time and play you know that super hero,I don’t have to play that,she allows me to be weak sometimes and for me to cry,and for her to be the strong one,and for me to be the weak one. John then said,and it really is a great relief,after 28 years of trying to be tough,you know trying to show them,I don’t give a da*n and I’m this and I’m that,to be able to relax.and just be able to say,OK I’m no tough guy forget it.
Rena then said,I think in some funny way,I think girls even as children,have a greater latitude because a little girl can be sort of frilly and feminine or she can be a tomboy and it’s acceptable,but a little boy if he’s not tossing that football,there’s a lot of pressure on him.John said,there’s a lot of pressure,not to show emotion,and he said that there was a lot of pressure on me not to be an artist,to be a chemist and he said he discussed this on another Mike Douglas episode.
Rena said that unfortunately some of the leaders in the Women’s Liberation movement fall victim to being spokesmen,for Women’s Lib, and yet at least in public personality they seem to really have a certain amount of contempt for the hair curled housewife and there is a kind of sneering contempt,and she said I think it’s a measure of their own lack of liberation.And Yoko said it’s snobbery,and Rena said yeah,they really don’t like other women,but I’m sympathetic,and Mike Douglas then said a sexist woman-hating statement,saying,well women don’t like other women period.Rena said,no see that’s very unliberated and Yoko said, in response to what Mike Douglas said,that’s not true,that’s not true.And John said,you see they are brought up to compete with men.
Yoko said that even though in Japan they say they don’t have much of a woman problem and women already had some liberation,there is still a long way to go that she really agrees with Rena that so many female liberation movement people basically hate women,and we have to first start to understand women and love them whether they are housewives or not,and she said that snobbery is very bad and we have to somehow find out a way to co-existing with men,and she asked Rena don’t you think so and she said most definitely. George Carlin said,that actually many successful women are acting out male roles just like a lot of blacks think they escaped are acting out white roles.John also said that he thinks that women have to try twice as hard as to make it as men,and he said you know they have to be on their toes much more than a man.
On another Mike Douglas episode from the same week,former actress and acclaimed film maker Barbara Loden was on and Yoko had requested her as a guest.John asked her ,Did you have any problems working with the men,you know like giving them instructions and things like that and Barbara said,I did, but I think it was because I was afraid that they would not accept what I said,and I wasn’t quite that authoritative in my own self.John said it’s certainly a brave thing to do,and Yoko said it is.
Mike Douglas asked Yoko if John’s attitude had changed much towards her since The Female Liberation Movement,and at first Yoko says John’s attitude from the beginning was the same,and that they met on that level.John then says,twice, I was a male chauvinist and Yoko says,yes he was a male chauvinist but,and then John says,Can I say how you taught me,and Yoko says yes.John says,How I did it in my head was,would I ask Paul or George,or would I treat them the way I would treat a woman? John then said,it’s a very simple thing maybe it’s fetch that or do that ,and I started thinking if I said that to them,they’d say come on get it yourself,and if you put your wife or your girl friend in the position of your best friend,and say now would I say that to him,then you know when you’re treading on some delicate feelings.
Mike Douglas said years later that after this week of John and Yoko co-hosting his show,many young people who had never watched his show before,(and his main audience was middle America and people older than their 20’s and even mostly their 30’s) told him they loved the show,and that it was great and his ratings went up high for those shows.Even if John didn’t always live up to his feminist ideals and beliefs in his personal life,(although he did with Yoko because of her and this why and how he emotionally evolved into a caring,nurturing,house husband and father to Yoko and Sean),just the fact that he spoke out as a man in support of the feminist movement on a popular TV show back in early 1972 when most of the sexist male dominated woman-hating society looked down at it and considered it crazy which in some ways it’s still unfortunately wrongly misunderstood(and it’s really the male dominated,sexist,woman-hating society that has always been so wrong and crazy!),and the fact that John was (and still is) greatly admired and influential to many young people male and female,he did *a lot* to legitimize it and show it was rational,reasonable,needed and right!
A few months later he was performing Woman Is The Ni**er Of The World on The Dick Cavett Show and then months after that live in Madison Square Garden.In his very last radio interview done by Dave Sholin etc from RKO Radio just hours before he was tragically shot and killed, John said I’m more feminist now than I was when I sang Woman Is The N**ger,I was intellectually feminist then but now I feel as though at least I’ve put not my own money,but my body where my mouth is and I’m living up to my own preachings as it were.
He also said what is this BS men are this way, women are that way,we’re all human.He had also said that he comes from the macho school of pretense of course *all* men really are they are just too conditioned all of their lives to realize and admit it.And he said that men are trained to be like they are in the army,and that it’s more like that in England but he knows it’s this way over here too,he said that they are taught as boys and men don’t react,don’t feel,don’t cry,and he said he thinks that’s what screwed us all up and that he thinks it’s time for a change.
Barbara Graystark of Newsweek interviewed John September 1980 and part of what she said to John is,You’ve come a long way from the man who wrote at 23,”Women should be obscene rather than heard.” And she asks John how did this happen? And John said that he was a working-class macho guy who was used to being served and Yoko didn’t buy that. John then said that from the day he met Yoko,she demanded equal time,equal space,equal rights. He said that he said to Yoko then,don’t expect him to change in any way and don’t impinge on his space. John said that Yoko said to him then she can’t be here because there’s no space where you are everything revolves around him and that she can’t breath in that atmosphere. John then says in this interview that he’s thankful to her for the ( meaning feminist) education.
http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1980.0929.beatles.html
Mike Douglas also said to John and Yoko,You’re both so different,you had such different childhoods. John said,it’s incredible isn’t it? Yoko said,Yes! Mike asked,What do you think has attracted you to each other? Yoko said,We’re very similar.John then said,She came from a Japanese upper-middle class family.Her parents were bankers and all that jazz,very straight.He said they were trying to get her off with an ambassador when she was 18.You know,now is the time you marry the ambassador and we get all settled. I come from a an upper-working class family in Liverpool,the other end of the world. John then said,we met but our minds are so similar,our ideas are so similar.It was incredible that we could be so alike from different environments,and I don’t know what it is,but we’re very similar in our heads.And we look alike too!
Mike also asked John about his painful childhood,and how his father left him when he was 5,and John said how he only came back into his life when he was successful and famous(20 years later!),and John said he knew that I was living all those years in the same house with my auntie,but he never visited him.He said when he came back into his life all those years later,he looked after his father for the same amount of time he looked after him,about 4 years.
He also talked about how his beloved mother Julia,who encouraged his music by teaching him to play the banjo,got hit and killed by a car driven by an off duty drunk cop when John was only 17 and just getting to have a relationship with her after she had given him away to be raised by her older sister Mimi when he was 5.
And John also said,And in spite of all that,I still don’t have a hate-the-pigs attitude or hate-cops attitude.He then said, I think everybody’s human you know,but it was very hard for me at that time,and I really had a chip on my shoulder,and it still comes out now and then,because it’s a strange life to lead .He then said,But in general ah,I’ve got my own family now …I got Yoko and she made up for all that pain.
John’s psychologist Dr. Arthur Janov told Mojo Magazine in 2000( parts of this interview is on a great UK John Lennon fan site,You Are The Plastic Ono Band) that John had as much pain as he had ever seen in his life,and he was a psychologist for at least 18 years when John and Yoko saw him in 1970! He said John was a very dedicated patient. He also said that John left therapy too early though and that they opened him up,but didn’t get a chance to put him back together again and Dr. Janov told John he need to finish the therapy,he said because of the immigration services and he thought Nixon was after him,he said we have to get out of the country.John asked if he could send a therapist to Mexico with him,and Dr. Janov told him we can’t do that because they had too many patients to take care of,and he said they cut the therapy off just as it started really,and we were just getting going.
Also this great article by long time anti-sexist,anti-men’s violence,anti-pornography former all star high school football player and author of the great,important 2006 book,The Macho Paradox:How Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, Jackson Katz.John Lennon on Fatherhood,Feminism,and Phony Tough Guy Posturing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/john-lennon-on-fatherhood_b_800333.html
Also Cynthia Lennon is quoted in the great John Lennon biography Lennon,by award winning music journalist and former editor of The Melody Maker Magazine and good friend of John’s for 18 years,Ray Coleman as saying somethings like she knew as soon as she saw John and Yoko together she knew that she lost him,and that it was a meeting of the minds and that she knew that they were right for each other.She also said that she told John before he started his relationship with Yoko that she sees and incredible similarity between him and Yoko and said to him that there is something about her that is just like you.She told him that he may say that she’s this crazy avant garde artist and that he’s not interested in her,but that she can see more into John’s future with Yoko then he can.
In this January 1971 interview with Red Mole John says that Yoko was well into liberation before he met her and that she had to fight her way through a man’s world and he said the art world is completely dominated by men and said so Yoko was full of revolutionary zeal when they met. Then John said there was never any question about it that they had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship and he said he was quick to learn and he said that Yoko did an article in Nova more than two years back in which she said Woman is the Ni**er of the world.A year later he co-wrote with Yoko the song Woman Is The N*gger of The World,and bravely performed it live on The Dick Cavett show and at Madison Square Garden in 1972 and the song was banned off a lot of radio stations.
John also says in this same interview that it’s very subtle how you’re taught male superiority.
http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1971.0121.beatles.html
Paul has said through the years as he did in this April/May 1982 Music Express interview that he really thinks that John getting together with Yoko was the best thing to ever happen to him for his personal happiness.
http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1982.0400.beatles.html
He also admitted on the David Frost show in 2012 that Yoko didn’t break up The Beatles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_9L0zzeA-M
@Randie, when it comes to Yoko’s effect on the Beatles, the surest guide is stuff they said at the time (see the Twickenham tapes, for example). It’s pretty clear that while Paul respected John’s choice and wanted him to be happy, Yoko’s presence in the studio (invited by John) and her speaking for him in meetings after May 1968 (once again, John’s decision), was a huge stressor and contributed to the souring of the Beatles creative process. As John surely knew it would. So the interesting question is, did John sour the Beatles on purpose?
Yoko simultaneously benefits enormously from her association with the Beatles — you and I wouldn’t be talking about her here otherwise — and laments that people see her as Lennon’s widow, that her career was ruined by it, etc. I think we can, and should, acknowledge both of these things: that she has benefitted, and also suffered. She wasn’t a passive participant.
IMHO, you should take Paul’s subsequent pronouncements on this topic with quite a large grain of salt. In 1982, the world was still full of grief over Lennon’s death, and there was no possible way that Paul, viewed as a lightweight and worse after the “Drag, innit?” comment, was going to speak in anything but honeyed tones about John and/or his chosen mate. And 2012? Paul and Yoko are business partners. Once again, there’s a huge disincentive for Paul to say anything but positive things about Yoko (or John, for that matter).
So I’m dubious — which is not to blame Yoko for the breakup (that’s on John, IMHO). It’s to identify her as one of several factors, as they did in the Anthology Director’s Cut. We have to take the sources you give here, and in your other comments, and add them to the whole picture.
I’m a whole year late to this discussion, but I just wanted to say that these are the best (and most respectful) discussions of Yoko that I have seen on any Beatles board. The last Beatles site that I was on (which will remain un-named), I was told that I was anti-feminist and possibly subconciously racist because I didn’t believe in the whole JohnandYoko myth.
Regarding Lewisohn. I am a little worried about how he will approach Yoko–he thanks her at the beginning of Tune In for giving him access to some sort of archive (possibly John’s childhood letters, but who knows). I don’t think that he will change his writing about her due to that favor, but it is a possibility. And I doubt very much that he is going to conjecture much regarding Yoko’s motivations re the heroin. His answer would probably be “how could I possibly know for sure?” Just judging from his interviews and the first book, I don’t see him doing a lot of conjecture regarding psychological motivations.
Not a Yoko fan here at all, mostly due to her appalling treatment of others, her isolation of John in the later years and her mythologizing of the JohnandYoko relationship after John’s death. (Not that John didn’t do most of the mythologizing when he was alive). And yes, if she wasn’t a musician, she should have kept quiet in the studio. If George had brought in Patti and insinuated to the others that she was more or less a 5th Beatle now, there would have been hell to pay.
I think that John was a damaged person who always had to have something (the band) or someone (Julia, Paul, Stu, Brian) to hang on to in his life. I don’t think that Yoko was a good influence, judging from the recollections of those around the Dakota those last 5 years.
If she had gone through with the (possible) divorce in 1979/1980 though, I don’t think that John would have magically become a happier person, reaching out to old friends and reconnecting with his family. However, SHE might have been happier. As much as I dislike her, living with John, who was often depressed and bored in those last five years, probably wasn’t a picnic. I feel bad that John, who had always been sort of a social person, cut himself off from so many of his friends in the last years of his life. I don’t have any problem with him deciding to take a time-out in the 1970s. He’d lived several lifetimes in the 1960s (seriously, I just exhausted reading about their schedules). I’m surprised that they all didn’t end up with PTSD after the last tour….It sounds as though Mimi was about the only person that he kept in regular contact with.
Hi @Michael Gerber, great post and discussion as always! Another straggler here, a few years after the original post, but I must say it’s excellent. Everyone handled this red-hot subject with care and grace. I am very much of the opinion that we mustn’t dehumanize anyone in the Beatles story, even someone who proves to be a divisive character in the drama.
Thank you, @Aimee. She is a flashpoint, but also a person.
I certainly don’t want to clutter up the Recent Posts section by commenting on every thread I catch up with, but this one is truly outstanding and pretty much a must read for any and all who are more than superficially interested in the history of the Beatles. A thinking man’s/woman’s approach to the topic of Yoko that strives to, above all else, be fair while still discussing the why and why nots from as close to a factual basis as one can.
I am learning as I step into a closer look at the Beatles, that there are a few still active minefields and a great number of areas that never seemed to be, until recently, explored with anything close to the basic standards of scholarship or even within a structure of curiosity and rigorous reporting.
Again, this was an outstanding discussion. I admit I was/am thirsty for such reasoned debate even if I cannot add much at this time.
Thanks to all for providing a refuge from the usual Fandom blah blah blah!
As someone with strong feelings about The Concept of Yoko (I’ve never met her, and have had no dealings with her, so she is only conceptual to me), both from my own background and also from my reading of the story, I really strive to see her clearly. Neither victim nor saint, neither Iago or Joan of Arc. I hope that this post moves that forward, and it sounds like for you it did, @Neal. Thanks for writing and sharing.
Hot take: John and Yoko should have pulled a hard pivot in 1972 and become children’s authors. They would have been well matched in a way they could never be musically. John’s drawings and wordplay coupled with Yoko’s Grapefruit-style, strangely charming humorlessness. All with subtle fight-the-man etc subversive undertones. I think they’d have been a sensation. And maybe a less high-profile medium would have taken some pressure off the relationship. If either of them could have been convinced to give up the high profile stuff, that is.
I think that was one of John’s ambitions. But for some reason he envisioned himself doing it when he was elderly. I’m not sure why he thought of it as an old man’s game.
It might have been awkward though, when parents who wanted to buy the books were directed to “other works” by this author: Erotic Lithographs.
All this talk of Yoko reminds me of a 19th century headstone a widow commissioned for her husband:
Rest In Peace Until We Meet Again
@Hologram Sam, do you know the work of Tomi Ungerer? He was a massively successful children’s author whose career was derailed for several decades after he drew a bunch of erotic cartoons for adults.
No, I’d never heard of him. But I think Lennon might have had the same problem as Ungerer.
If Lennon had survived and tried to be a children’s author in the 1980s-90s., the satanic panic parents would have been alarmed. He surely would have been boycotted after they saw “No Flies On Frank”, never mind the erotic lithographs!
Shel Silverstein managed to be both a highly popular children’s poet and a writer of some erotic verse (and a pal of Hugh Hefner’s).
True! I wonder how ol’ Shel managed that—he was indeed a rascal.
Silverstein was exactly who I was thinking of! He was a huge childhood favorite of mine (full disclosure The Giving Tree still makes me cry). And as a beloved ex beatle John was far better equipped than most to weather any pearl-clutching from the public and press — and anyway it’s not as if he and Yoko were gun shy about being professionally controversial. Frankly I think he (and Yoko! I honestly would love to see what she might have done!) could have expressed himself better in that medium than he was able to musically in the 70s. I imagine him writing and illustrating silly, witty, seemingly simple stories that then punch you in the gut with an “oh the humanity” moment 3/4 of the way thru, in the best children’s literature tradition.
Lennon could’ve, and probably would’ve, written a memorable children’s book. But as much as we might wish she were like this, Yoko’s never shown much interest in children, and children are actually really intolerant of attitude. They want your book to acknowledge them as equals-in-the-making, and Yoko’s work is fundamentally authoritarian towards the audience.
Would the Ballad crowd have bought the book? You bet. There were and are lots of parents craving borrowed hipness after they become parents (see: metal shirts for toddlers), and some kids would’ve loved the book because they read it when they were four, but the good parts would’ve been Lennon, which has already been marketed to children by the estate.
Yoko has been able to get a million plus for a children’s book since December 9th, and yet she’s never written one.
It’s precisely Silverstein’s willingness to speak in a non authoritarian manner that makes his work popular. Yoko is talented, but that’s not her talent.
Another thought about this: one of the challenges that Lennon and Ono had was that they apparently wanted their careers to be tightly conjoined. Hence the whole “Double Fantasy” package of releasing one album that alternated Lennon and Ono songs, rather than separate albums. I wonder how free either felt, especially post-1975, to go in a direction the other just wasn’t interested in.
Paul and Linda McCartney seem like a different situation, with photography and cooking being Linda’s “separate” interests and with her musical ambitions essentially being to play in Wings if Paul wanted her there. There just seems to be more . . . . space in that relationship, if you get what I mean, even though they were evidently very close and didn’t spend all that much time apart.
Sometimes I think Lennon and McCartney had the most difficulty individuating after the Beatles’ breakup, and that’s why both of them made music with their wives — as if they were trying to replicate having work and life be all one big thing, as it was when the band was together.
Yes, my sense is that Linda McCartney remained her own person, with her own interests, and so did Paul.
There was a political aspect to the “melding” that both couples did; it was a heterosexual reaction to the feminist movement which, at its best, expanded women’s horizons. But in the case of John and Yoko, it seems to have resulted in a reduction of John’s effectiveness in the world. Perhaps Linda also felt diminished, too, but with Lennon we are talking about a man in full flight from his life for a large portion of the marriage.
Bear with me for a minute here, since I want to do a Victorian literature comparison again!
To me, the Paul and Linda McCartney marriage is pretty explicable; the trade-offs involved seem common (e.g., Linda devotes a lot of time and energy to the kids and family, has less time to do her own work).
Whereas the John Lennon and Yoko Ono marriage seems to me more like a black box: what the heck went on in there I’m not sure, in the same way that I don’t think we can fully understand what Cathy is saying in Wuthering Heights when she tells Nelly “I am Heathcliff.”
Not “I love Heathcliff” or “I want to marry Heathcliff;” not a socially explicable relationship, but some kind of mystical one involving identity. In discussions of this novel, some people think this is romantic and others are spooked out by it. I’m firmly in the “spooked out” category, but then I’ve been in a pretty explicable marriage for 25+ years.
I’m with you, @Nancy, and I love that you bring this perspective to the blog. I think it really works!
I think the closest we will come to seeing what type of children’s book John could’ve done is the “Real Love: Drawings for Sean” book. This book is lovely, very sweet and charming. It’s wonderful that John did drawings for Sean however it breaks my heart too knowing that he couldn’t/wouldn’t show this type or any type of affection towards Julian.
@Michael Gerber, that may be true for the US, but in my memory Ungerers cartoons and books were very popular in Germany in the 70s and 80s, both those for kids and those for adults.
Which speaks very well for Germany! The blackballing of Ungerer was absurd; I ran into this panicky attitude in children’s publishing, and it was asinine and am destructive.
Paul McCartney just announced his children’s book Grandude’s Green Submarine will be out in September:
https://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/grandude-s-green-submarine-will-set-sail-2nd-september-2021
Something I’m curious about is whether Yoko and Paul arrived at a stalemate over John’s planned England trip/songwriting reunion/general state of the J/P relationship. IMO there are enough data points that there was contact and communication between the two — for example Jack Douglas saying he “knew Paul was up at the Dakota” and James McCartney saying John held him as a baby. And yet Paul has let the conventional wisdom — that their last face to face was in ’76 — prevail, and that a reunion was unlikely to have ever happened. Pressure from Yoko? Or was it just too goddamn painful to countenance in public at first, and now he’s stuck with it? Or other reasons?
I’ve seen it mentioned in several places on the internet that James McCartney confirmed that John held him as a baby but have never been able to see a reference to this anywhere, i.e. print or video interview, what’s your source for that? And if James did say this why have none of the Beatles authorities ever referenced it?
@Lizzy95 I can’t find a primary source either. But such a thing would be pretty easy to scrub from the Internet, if the topic was a no-no.
I got curious about this and looked it up. James McCartney’s words were,
People have (plausibly) suggested that his memories of the Dakota relate to visits made after John’s death.
The original source was apparently an article in The Sunday Times in 2012. It seems likely that it’s this one (“Macca Mark II”, 1 April 2012), but since it’s paywalled, I can’t confirm that. I didn’t have any luck finding an archived copy either.
I remember reading somewhere (was it in Seaman’s book?) that Paul called up the Hit Factory, during work on DF, with a view to dropping by. However, the calls were intercepted by Yoko who made sure that John was not informed. This also seems to have been the case generally at The Dakota, where John only received phone calls that had passed first through Ono first and had not been vetoed. So given Paul’s difficulty in even being able to reach John, I find Douglas’ assertion that he knew Paul was at the Dakota questionable.
On the other hand, Carl Perkins claimed Linda McCartney told him that Lennon’s last words in the hallway of the Dakota to Paul were ‘think about me every now and then, old friend.’
https://www.dannydutch.com/post/john-lennon-s-last-words-to-paul-were-think-of-me-every-now-and-then-old-friend
If this happened, when did it happen? In 1976, after John told Paul to stop dropping by? Or later on? And if it did happen, why does McCartney never mention it?
The problem I have is that nothing Paul has said or that we know of indicates that they did indeed depart on such an affectionate note. In some of Paul’s uncharacteristically unguarded early/mid 80s interviews, he is very despondent and admits to being unsure whether he and John were actually ever friends at all. Given that he has spent most the time since trying to convince the world (if not himself) that the opposite is true, you would think a story like this is something he’d come back to. Unless, of course, that convivial moment between he and John is just too painful a memory, like a dashed hope, a promise of a renewed relationship that was never to be.
Mick Jagger told a similar story.
A book called “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” came out in 1981 or 82, and it was full of interviews with Rock celebrities. Mick said he tried a few times to get together with John, but that apparently he must have been on “Yoko’s bad list” and so he could never get through.
Mick offers this recollection in passing, and almost amusedly. The rest of the book was devoted to the “John&Yoko love affair of the century” narrative, but I remember that one anecdote floating in the pages like rabbit poop in a punch bowl.
My instinct is that the tragic circumstances of John’s death, and the years of spinning that Yoko did to demean Paul’s relationship with her husband, has made this an unanswerable question. Did Paul and John plan to see each other in the future? That seems inevitable; even if they weren’t affectionate towards each other (and I think they probably were then, and would’ve grown more so as the years passed), as old work friends in a rather small industry, their paths would’ve crossed constantly. Would they have worked together? That rests on John’s relationship with Yoko, which is an even more contentious topic, but I think probably yes. I think at some point they would’ve wanted to kick everybody off the charts for a while, just as “Anthology” did. Did John and Paul care about each other? It seems obvious that they did, and of course they did, and anybody suggesting otherwise has the burden of proof on THEM.
A side note: commenters frequently come on Dullblog talking about people who have outlandish beliefs like “John was close to everybody but Paul” or “John hated Paul.” My advice is, quit reading comments sections with stupid people in them! I’m only half-kidding; just because The Beatles are a pop cultural topic and not, say, The Treaty of Westphalia, that doesn’t mean that judgment is suspended and every fan’s opinion is equally valid–in fact, much the opposite. The emotional attachment a fan has to his/her particular Beatle, or the kind of transference that young fans engage in, make their opinions particularly distorted, as well as vehement. Vehemence is a particular warning sign. Foolish opinions should be disregarded, and boards full of foolish opinions, avoided.
Or not, but nobody reasonable thinks “John hated Paul.”
@Matt, maybe Yoko wasn’t able to screen *all* of Johns calls, despite trying to. Or maybe she only did it at certain times but not others for whatever reason.
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Re Paul’s 80s despondency: that is true but Paul handles death and grief poorly. His “deep blue hermit period” after Mary’s death, as described by Mike; not telling his Wings band mates about Jim’s death til it came out in an interview, then skipping the funeral; what seems to have been a complicated bereavement after Linda’s death (including his agonizing appearance at his hall of fame induction the following year). And I remember reading somewhere that he spoke of John in the present tense for some time after his death (not sure if it was a reliable source tho.)
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And he’s prone to guilt. So IMO it would be 100% in character for him to be *extremely* insecure about the relationship, even if they were on closer terms at the end. (And with good reason; when you get the sometimes-angry-John treatment for 10 years it’s gonna shake your faith.) And maybe at the time it was actually more comforting (or…numbing, at least) to downplay the lost opportunity — “Oh, John would have probably changed his mind and not gone through with the reunion anyway”/”Oh it probably would have been a disappointment anyway”/Oh he’d have probably left me again anyway.”
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I agree that if true he would LOVE to tell us all about it *nowadays*, but he’d get pilloried for “rewriting history” and, also, Yoko. Which is where my main curiosity lies. Did they hash out this agreement explicitly? Or is it an unspoken stalemate? And if so, how and why (by which I mean, how and why did Paul concede? Pressure? Deference? Grief induced temporary insanity? What?)
Annie M- I agree. Paul doesn’t handle grief well at all. I can see him downplaying a reunion in order to keep the pain away. I think they were friends again before John passed, but Paul would’ve been in doubt because of how quickly John’s attitude could change.
I heard about him speaking in the present tense about John too. I believe the guy’s last name was Cox. He mentioned that Paul spoke about John in the present tense when he spoke with him.
There was an interview Paul did in Dec 2020 and he talked about how he still hasn’t come to terms with John’s death. It’s concerning to me, because it appears that his grief hasn’t lessened in these past 40 years. I know everyone grieves differently, but 40 years is a long time for the grief, denial, and pain to still be just as strong as when the murder happened.
Here’s the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKc4Eyl3rPA&ab_channel=GoodNewsBroadcast
His remarks about John begin at the 7:20 mark
I guess it’s because of the way John died. Not natural causes, not even a stupid accident. Instead he was gunned down! I’m not sure if any survivors ever really get over something like that.
Re: Yoko
I don’t want to reduce her to a stereotype, because everyone’s unique. But in my travels in artistic circles in the 1980s-2000s (before I grew weary) I met many creatives like Yoko. The art, video, music, literary scenes were full of them. People with no visible means of support. (No day jobs to get up early for.) The rest of us who worked during the day to fund our artistic ambitions at night – we always marveled at the ones with family money. Growing up in places like Scarsdale NY and Alpine NJ, they were fearless about being as avant garde as they wanted to be.
The musicians made noise (or extended silence). The writers did unreadable cut-ups of random text. The artists threw paint. They were preoccupied with trying to top each other in making their art as obscure, difficult and often ugly as they could. The rest of us wanted our work to be accessible. I think our ambition was born in financial insecurity.
So why did Yoko first chase Paul, and then John? “Wasn’t she happy being a big fish in her small avant garde pond?” Part of it, I think, was her own financial insecurity. She’d seen her wealthy family lose everything. What if it happened again? She couldn’t depend on them!
Also, the trust fund artists I encountered… they all had complicated relationships with their parents. One woman I knew, she did conceptual art and also recorded something I guess I’d call free jazz noise rock. Her rent was paid by her father, who owned several construction companies or dealerships (or maybe both). He didn’t understand or respect what she did. She resented him, and wished she could generate her own fortune. But there was no money in what she was doing.
Again, I don’t want to reduce Yoko to a type… but someone tired of depending on her family to fund her “give audience members scissors and let them cut pieces of my clothes off” performance events will often dream of an artistic partner like John, a guy who made bags of money in pop culture but was open to experimentation. “And no one’s going to drop a bomb on John and turn him into a refugee…”
Sam, your memories of “trust fund artists” remind me of a friend who got an MFA in theater and had a classmate whose final project was doing a performance — with no audience. That kind of épater le bourgeois, deliberately “difficult” posture is certainly common in some artistic circles.
I think this is very much right. I work with TONS of artists daily and the primary feeling I get from Yoko’s work is a kind of frustration and resentment. If you’re not being supported, you resent that. If you’re being supported, you resent the person supporting you, and are frustrated with the world for not recognizing you sufficiently so that you don’t need support. She’s a very smart, very hurt person, though who and how will likely remain a mystery.
I think Yoko felt (and feels) to be in competition with John, and the Lost Weekend period was a rough lesson for her as well, in that she did not become a figure of sufficient renown on her own. I don’t think one can understand the Dakota Years without really digging into what the Lost Weekend taught both John and Yoko.
Resentful, frustrated artists often make kinds of art that are not as much communication or sharing as a desire to control, a D/S relationship; they want to force the audience to speak the language of the artist and accept his/her conclusions unquestioningly. The tool they use is a specialized kind of shame. I find it…nonconsensual, which is why I steer clear of that kind of art and artists.
These attitudes are the opposite of great popular art, which is a fundamentally generous attempt to communicate with anyone.
@Hologram Sam- I understand what you’re saying and it should definitely be noted. It’s just concerning because from what I’ve seen, John’s inner circle of friends and family seemed to have processed his death. They miss him, but they don’t seem to grieve or be in denial about it. The way Paul mentions that he doesn’t think he has processed it and he’s still in denial makes me sad. I would think the intensity would lessen as time goes by. I actually thought it had until this interview. It seems as if it still dominates a large part of his life. Then you have Peter Cox, I believe, stating that Paul refers to John in the present tense. That makes me even more concerned.
I think being asked about Lennon’s death in interviews repeatedly over the years, and the public fascination surrounding the Lennon/McCartney partnership, have a lot to do with this kind of response by McCartney.
It would make sense that his grief (like those of Lennon’s other family members and friends) would be complicated. Losing someone suddenly to violence is always going to be difficult. But in McCartney’s case, he’s asked over and over how he feels about Lennon and what their relationship was like, even though they didn’t see each other often — which has to make things harder.
Having to reevaluate and readdress the relationship in public over the years I think exacerbated McCartney’s rumination on it. How do you assess a friendship — by the last encounter you had? By the whole span of years? Add to that the way Lennon was elevated to near sainthood by many following his murder while McCartney was often blamed for the demise of the Beatles, and it gets even weirder.
But all that said, I don’t think McCartney is in grief at the same level he was years ago. I suspect that while he is being asked about it it all comes back, but I doubt that he’s carrying that kind of feeling around every day all day. He seems to have a good relationship with his kids, to be happily remarried, and able to work and function well, so it’s clearly not incapacitating.
@Nancy Carr- Thanks for the explanation. I can definitely see how being constantly asked about his relationship to John can keep him in the grief stages. The interviewers tend to only want to ask him about the problems they had with each other. I remember reading in Doggett’s book that Paul was going to be in competition with his best friend’s legacy for the rest of his life.
@Matt, neither Carl Perkins nor anyone else but fans ever claimed that this was said in person at the Dakota, could very well have been during a phone call.
I think it is pretty obvious why Paul was so unsure about the depth about their relationship at first. There is a live interview with him and Linda with American TV from late November 1980, where he is asked about some pretty catty recent remarks by John. Unfortunately *this* represents the state of things when John died.
I am sure though, that John was in pr mode for DF and would not have said these things had he known them to be his last on the subject.
Here is the link to the interview with the McCartneys: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXGfeG8ztUQ
@Matt, regarding the last time John & Paul saw one another, Giuliani’s “Lennon in America” puts Linda & Paul in New York in late March or very early April 1978 where the two couples had dinner and saw the movie “Pretty Baby”. I guess it’s possible and that timeframe would allow for a photo of John with infant James. However, I don’t know how reliable Giuliani is. His source may or may not have been John’s diaries. It’s an interesting thought, though.
@Patti, Giuliani is generally not reliable, and in this case the date given is impossible. He says they watched Pretty Baby on March, 22nd. According to Wikipedia the movie premiered in the US on April, 05th.
Remember, @Jesse, that John and Paul couldn’t just go to the movies like you or I can. They would’ve likely rearranged a private screening, so it’s not impossible that the date is correct. (I don’t know if it’s correct, and I’ve also heard that GG’s research is a bit fast and loose.)
@Nancy, I very much agree with your comment re: Paul’s grief. Paul seems focused on John because that’s what the press and fans are focused on. I’m sure he’s sad; I’m sure he thinks of him as a friend and collaborator and part of the major events of his professional life; I’m sure he sees Lennon’s fate and thinks, “I’d better take steps so I don’t end up the same way.” But the idea that Paul is pining for John, or “unable to process his grief”–that’s a fan’s idea, a telenovella. The reality is, Paul McCartney has had an immensely productive and successful creative life after 1980, just like he’d had since 1970; plus he’s raised a family, and gone through all the life changes. Among people in his business, and of his era, he is perhaps *the most* functional and well-adjusted–from what we know, and we know a lot.
Is it possible that when Paul dies all manner of stuff will come out? Sure. Will it include a black-draped altar to John? Maybe. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I’d bet that Paul’s grief is somewhat like John’s was regarding Stu.
“I’d bet that Paul’s grief is somewhat like John’s was regarding Stu.”
I agree. It took about two weeks for John to get over Stu’s death. When Paul says he is in denial about John’s death – such as in the interview that Kir posted above – what he means is it’s as if he didn’t die. I think he’s amazed by his own lack of grief. When he tried explaining his “it’s a drag” comment, he didn’t say he was in shock (easy explanation). Instead he tried to whip himself up into feeling something: “What I really meant to say was, it’s a draaaaaaaaag. Like that.” Sometimes the first reaction is the most genuine, and the impression that people get from that reaction is correct, and not another way for the press to give Paul a hard time. I mean, when fans watch a video and have to squint hard looking for signs of grief like gum chewing and eyelashes struck together, it isn’t there.
I have always felt that people are way too hard on Paul for that comment.
First of all, whatever his relationship with John was at that moment, John was massively important in his life and career—probably the most important person. Suddenly, there’s a huge hole in Paul’s creative world, a magnet for guilt, regret, longing, grief. So John’s death is a massive emotional moment for Paul, whether he wants to show us that or not. His authentic personal feelings about the death of his primary creative partner? Numbness is actually a really understandable, genuine, honest response…and it’s really none of our business. A more proper response to that question, would’ve been “Fuck you. Get that fucking camera off me.”
Secondly, John was killed by a crazy fan outside his apartment. Paul’s first thought must’ve been “that could’ve been me.” So in addition to all the personal confusion, loss, and grief he must’ve been feeling, he must’ve been scared out of his mind for himself and his family.
Plus, and let’s be frank, he was probably high at the moment that question was asked. I would be, and I don’t even smoke pot. It would’ve been completely sensible and proper for him to have taken tranquilizers.
None of the things that I’ve said in this comment are remotely imaginative. They are simply thinking of what it must’ve been like for him as a person. And yet I’ve never heard anyone stick up for Paul in this way. Not as a Paul fan or a John fan, just in sympathy.
For me, this is a real example of fans treating these people like characters in a story, rather than real people, suffering real losses, having real good days and real bad days, making mistakes, etc. Anybody who is too critical of Paul for this one moment, which he has been pilloried for four decades— which has been followed by an endless public performance of grief over John— is simply not treating Paul like a real person.
We can’t simultaneously call Paul a “phony,” and criticize him for one moment where he doesn’t act the way we expect. Given that treatment, why should he be honest? We haven’t demonstrated that we fans remotely deserve it. Paul wasn’t, and isn’t, especially phony; he just gives the fans what they want. And John did that too. Because they, both of them, were entertainers.
Well said, Michael. I think it’s hard to recapture how genuinely shocking and frightening Lennon’s murder was, to his family and to the other Beatles. That kind of emotion can come out in strange ways — all the more if you’re being approached by multiple reporters. I think it’s straight-up unethical for a reporter to shove a microphone in anyone’s face right after they’ve lost someone close to them.
I find fans watching a video for proof of grief to be a really troubling dynamic. Really, sitting in judgment on someone’s entire relationship with another person — neither of whom the watcher knows — on the basis of a video clip? To me this is at odds with what I appreciate about the Beatles’ music: at its best, it acknowledges and embraces emotional complexity.
Echoing @Michael and @Nancy but also, I’ve always thought Paul does look extremely upset — for him — in that video. Just like I think he looks extremely angry in the post-arrest “Pot is less dangerous than rum, cigarettes, and glue” [paraphrased] video clip (where he is also chewing gum like he’s trying to murder it). He’s not a big facial emoter so it’s relatively subtle, but definitely there. But then I’m one of those people who scores off the charts in those “interpret these facial expressions” tests. Missed my calling as an interrogator, I suppose… 😉
It’s “Giuliano,” everybody. His books have come in for some criticism, but let’s not tar Geoffrey with that brush. 🙂
@ Annie M- I think the memory is probably too painful for him. Richard Skinner said the same thing about Paul and John planning to meet each other. There’s a lot we just don’t know about them. I remember reading that Paul has letters from John that he won’t share because they are too personal. He may share more about John and himself at a later time. I think he also knows that people are going to believe whatever they want to believe. He’s stated multiple times that he and John were best friends, but people still run with the narrative that they hated each other and that John was close to everyone, but Paul.
@Lizzy95- Someone stated that it was an interview he did for The Times
@Kir, do you have a source for that on John’s letters to Paul? I’d like to read about that more.
I’ll see if I can find it. I saw it in passing.
@Michael G- I’m still searching and it may take me a while to find it. I also wanted to add that I saw it in an excerpt from a book or article. I remember a certain part of it stating something along the lines of asking those close to John if they had anything of his that they wanted to give away for a project he was doing. It mentioned that he had asked Paul and that’s when the letters were mentioned. I should’ve saved it because I thought it was very interesting.
@ Michael G- I’m sorry for the three continuous posts. I found it, but I can’t find the actual article. It was from David Browne with the Rolling Stone. The person took a picture of just that section, so I can’t locate the title of the article. Here’s the quote, “Davies spent two years collecting material from relatives, old schoolmates and auction houses. Paul McCartney told Davies he had two letters from Lennon, but considered them too private to publish.”. Something else was written after that, but the camera didn’t capture that part. Do you think you could find the article?
Thanks for bringing up Richard Skinner, @Kir! I had forgotten about his claims.
The story told by Richard Skinner has as many holes as a Swiss cheese.
And I have never ever heard or read an interview where Paul mentioned having such letters. He just said to Hunter Davies in 1981 that he would not share certain details he knew about John as long as Cyn or Yoko were alive.
Very well stated @Hologram Sam. Either many of the “artists” to which you refer were not familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s brilliant 1917 send-up and/or never took the lesson to heart…much to their obvious disadvantage and often our annoyance.
Your comment of accessibility links very well with your view that John was a pop artist but open to experimentation–something that blended to deliver some of the most memorable and enjoyable art of the 20th century. I can never understand why any number of artists so look down on the popular who it can be used as a foundation for deeper levels of artistry.
As one in the audience, I know that we need to be poked and proded and stirred occasionally, but we also are often best served when well led. Artists should, imho, open paths and not create deliberate navel-gazing detours because they don’t want to do the work behind the creativity.
@Michael Gerber, Didn´t John watch Let It Be in a regular afternoon showing with Jann Wenner in LA in 1973/74?
And you can of course book a private viewing once a movie has been released
and the cinema has a copy, but two weeks in advance is not that easy, and
why would they have been so ultra keen to see that movie to try and get an
early viewing?
Still , it is not entirely impossible, but it is just another piece in the
puzzle which tells me this story is not true. Or maybe just the date is
wrong. But for some reason GG is very specific in saying that it took place between the Lennon’s anniversary and Good Friday, which was the 24th.
However, I do think it is quite possible that they did meet after James’
birth. He does not remember himself, but it seems he has been told that
John held him as a baby. And I find that quite believable because I can see
how proud daddy Paul would have made a point of presenting his long longed
for son to John.
But unless a photo turns up one day, I suppose we will never know for sure.
In December 2020 McCartney did an online thing where fans could ask him questions.
Someone did ask him about the last time he and Lennon met and specifically mentioned
James´ memory as well as the Pretty Baby rumour. Paul´s answer, paraphrased? “Can´t
really remember, so ‘Sometime in New York City’ it is.
But I am totally with you regarding your answer to Nancy! And I would like to add that his answer in that interview was also very much coloured by the fact that it was the 40th anniversary of John’s death, plus the total senselesness of the way he died.
Thanks for the reminder about that December online chat! Tho it gives me the opposite reaction. Paul doesn’t remember the last time he saw John in person? That seems very, very unlikely to me. (“Weed!” someone yells from the crowd. “Old age!” another adds.)Yeah yeah, people, I know, it’s possible. But from everything I know about Paul — including multiple testaments to his unusually keen memory — and about how the mind works after a sudden and devastating loss, I find it really hard to believe. If John had lived well past 1980 it wouldn’t be strange if Paul couldn’t answer the question “quick, when was your last 70s visit?” But he did die, and that cements memories. I don’t think you can lose someone important to you without immediately doing a LOT of thinking about and reliving of “the last time(s) I saw X.” That rumination is what makes the memory stick. So if he does remember, why would he say he doesn’t? Trying to encourage a certain narrative, while also maintaining plausible deniability should evidence of a later meeting surface? Makes sense to me.
Annie, I also think this could be pretty classic McCartney deflection: he’s not going to come out and say “I’m SO tired of being asked questions like this,” but he will say “I don’t remember.” I see it as one of his ways of dealing with being asked / expected to bare his emotions in public. In his live shows he deals with this by having specific songs dedicated to people he was close to (John, George, Linda) and telling the same anecdotes about them every time. I hear it as “thus far and no farther.”
Hi @Nancy, yes, that’s a definite possibility, and Paul is absolutely a “thus far, no farther” type person (in fact I remember a discussion here about conflicts in the John/Paul dynamic where I wanted to write something about how John’s attitude was “ALL THE CODEPENDENCE” whereas Paul’s was “Thus codependent, and no codependent-er”). But I keep coming back to the fact that, as far as recall, Paul has NEVER gone on record about when their last meeting was. More strangely, I don’t think he’s ever even been asked. Maybe I’m wrong about that — someone please correct me if so! (Anybody got a MYFN quote on the subject?) But if he’s never even been asked on the record, that HAS to be because he doesn’t allow that question, right? I mean it’s a super obvious question. There’s just no way for that to coincidentally be a glaring omission by dozens of interviewers over multiple decades. Is there?? I mean am I being crazy here??? What am I missing?
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He’s taken “When did you last speak on the phone?” and been fine answering in vaguely positive terms about them chatting kids and cats, so if he wanted to be similarly noncommittal about the DYNAMICS of their last meeting and thereby avoid baring his feelings, surely he could. But if I’m right, he is very invested in obscuring even the date. I can’t help but find that odd.
@Annie, I am sure he would be able to piece together when the last time was if he really thinks about it, but I suppose to him it really is not all that important to put a specific date to it. Beatles fans ponder these things, but he does not and he probably can’t quite fathom why that would be important to them, so he does not apply much thought to the answer.
And it probably is also to do with what Nancy mentioned – it is personal and there is only ever so much he is going to give the public.
Sorry, I’m not saying he knows the exact dd/mm/yyyy, but the question was essentially “had it been *nearly 5 years* since you’d seen your semi-estranged but always loved and spiritually connected best friend-partner-turned-rival, or like, 2 or less? And did he get a chance to hold your youngest child?”
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I find it *inconceivable* that Paul “doesn’t remember.” So yes I’m taking it for granted that, for some reason, Paul wants to keep that info private — possibly to the point of assiduously spiking the question for 40 years. I’m very curious as to why that might be. If “eh, he’s private” is a satisfying explanation for you that’s cool, but I’m nosy and think there’s something interesting going on here.
Oops, that “sorry” at the top of my last comment sounds passive aggressive, when I didn’t mean it to be. Just acknowledging I hadn’t been clear that I don’t mean an exact date, just the difference between 5 years and, like, 2.
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(@Nancy/Michael, I left a reply below to Laura and Erin about Yoko that seems to have gotten et. Would you mind checking the spam fired? Thx!!!)
@Annie, repost it. I went back a couple of pages in Spam and didn’t see anything. Sorry!
@Jesse
According to Wenner’s biography, John and Yoko saw ‘Let It Be’ with Wenner and his wife in late 1970. J and Y were in San Francisco to meet with Wenner about the projected RS interview (which would be conducted later on in New York.) Wenner said they went to a regular theatre showing where the movie was playing (he mentions that the ticket taker did a double take at seeing John and Yoko). He says John started crying when he saw Paul on screen singing ‘Let It Be,’ -and then Yoko started crying, and that they were both very raw from the Primal therapy.
This is really fascinating.
@Matt, thanks for pointing that out, should have checked ! 1970 makes much more sense as well…
@Jesse, IIRC from the Wenner bio Sticky Fingers that screening was in late 1970, and I don’t have the paper copy with me so I can’t check whether it was a regular screening or not; it would be comparatively cheap to rent that theater out for a midday screening, and John Lennon showing up at “Let It Be” would’ve surely made the papers. As to the one you’re speaking of, stars can sometimes sneak in, but John and Paul and Yoko and Linda would’ve probably caused a stir.
I’m not a star so I don’t know exactly how they do it, but that level of fame and money calls for different arrangements. I’ve seen a tiny glimpse with the big-deal TV showrunners I’ve met, but they aren’t recognizable nor a teen idol. I’m not close to anybody that famous to give you the skinny on how they’d actually see a movie or eat a hamburger.
@Jesse,
That was indeed Paul’s exact answer. Reddit AMA, December 2020. The question was:
Paul’s answer, frustratingly vague:
@Michael Gerber
You remarked: “…they want to force the audience to speak the language of the artist and accept his/her conclusions unquestioningly. ”
This x 100! I mean how sad is it for an artist to have already drawn a conclusion, or conclusions, and then demand that the audience fall in line? Even middle school art class teachers stress that the viewer/listener is encouraged, nay required, to draw his/her own impressions and takeaways.
This, of course, is all the more critical when we consider that the the best of art bonds with us emotionally so how in the blazes can one presume to wish to control the emotions of any one person? Hearing a Van Halen record playing at a frat party in 1980 or looking at a Matisse in 1985 or seeing a production at the Old Vic in 2004. All these mean quite different things emotionally at different times and that is the beauty of it. The artists present it for you to process in your own way.
The second point I often mull over is that since I do not have artistic skills or gifts to offer to an audience, I wonder how someone can call it art if I can do all these same things merely by stepping onto the stage.
In other words, I can scream without any practice. I can climb into a bag without any practice. I can ask an audience to cut strips of my clothing without any investiture into creativity. These things require not a jot of effort or imagination on my part.
This means that, for better or worse, it strikes me as a serious scam of some sort. To then try to put those banal acts on par with Strawberry Fields Forever, Revolver, and the other works in JL’s canon is, to say the least, a breathtaking overreach of the first order. Seemingly ever person, except one, on earth would never even dare to such an equivalence!
What intrigues me about this is how Yoko’s attitudes toward Beatles music has changed — ie, how and when its enduring impact and relevance clued her in to the fact that it was, in fact, way deeper and more special than she first gave “the mopheads or whatever” credit for. (I’m not quite cynical enough about her to think she was insincere in her initial belief it was pedestrian, or that she is being insincere now when she speaks of it with higher regard.) I suspect her opinion has really changed, and not just for $$$ reasons. And I’d love to know how that change came about. At a certain point, the “staying power” of art just can’t be written off. I hope she has accepted and made peace with that. What another testament to The Beatles’ greatness and goodness, if so.
I confess I didn’t realize Yoko had changed her take on Beatles music. Any idea when and how that came to be known? And is it more centered around John’s Beatles songs?
I recall reading about a Lennon museum exhibit she worked on, and if I recall correctly, the Beatles part of his output was represented by Run for Your Life. I don’t think it was terribly long ago – this century anyway.
This is really interesting. I too didn’t know Yoko had changed her mind, and would like to know more about that. Maybe nobody knows more (I wouldn’t be surprised), but it’s an interesting topic to think about. Annie, do you have any sources that show Yoko’s changed her mind about them? (I’ve read this whole thread, but perhaps some of the above-cited sources validate this. If so, please point them out!)
@Erin and @Laura, I don’t remember sources, sorry! I just know at some point in the past few years I ran across a couple interviews with complimentary quote from Yoko about the positivity and longevity of The Beatles music and remember thinking “Aw, that’s nice.” I know, I know, it’s very much in her interest to say nice things, but it was still encouraging to read. I think 1969-1975 Yoko thought her work with John would ultimately equal or surpass The Beatles legacy. She’s probably had some uncomfortable grappling to do as years and then decades passed and those expectations were rather spectacularly dashed. It’s a bitter pill for a proud and fierce personality; the quotes I read made me hopeful she’s made peace.
@Annie, thanks for the hoop jumping!
Annie, apologizes for the very-late response, but thank you for explaining the quotes. Yoko is nothing if not a complex person.
@Annie, can you elaborate about Yoko having changed her attitude about Beatles music? I wasn’t aware she had.
Looks like my response appeared above, belatedly! I’m sorry I don’t remember details, folks! Just that I thought “Aw, that’s nice, I wouldn’t have expected Yoko to be so positive” after reading it.
@Annie, at what point has Yoko’s attitude towards Beatles music — not John Lennon music, but Beatles music — changed?
Neal S: “In other words, I can scream without any practice. I can climb into a bag without any practice. I can ask an audience to cut strips of my clothing without any investiture into creativity. These things require not a jot of effort or imagination on my part.”
Now, I’m no huge Yoko fan, but I must say that I think some of the things she came up with do require imagination, even if what she did was not a lasting creation and the quality of her imaginings are definitely in the eyes of the beholder. I also think some of the things she did require real audacity and even bravery. For a woman to sit on a stage, vulnerable, and invite an audience to cut off pieces of her armor is pretty ballsy. You never know what people will do– you might have an audience that respects a boundary, but more likely, once you have one person daring enough to begin the process of stripping her, the rest of the “herd” becomes emboldened to go further and further until she’s left with nothing and the audience feels something, even if it’s only exhilaration mixed with shame. It’s not art in a lasting sense but it does say something about humanity. Or the people in the room. And it says the artist was willing to allow it to happen to her just to evoke that feeling.
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I really don’t know what was going on with the bags. But that’s a subjective opinion by me! 🙂
Well @Neal this is a fundamental fissure dividing contemporary art from everything that came before, and while I think there is much to recommend contemporary art, even the conceptual type endlessly pumped out by art schools, it does seem to have a “charlatan” aspect that I find discomfiting. Modern artists are too often like a Salvador Dali who couldn’t paint, and what makes Dali notable are his paintings, not the fact that he was a bizarre-looking self-promoter who owned an ocelot.
In general, I trust the wisdom of audiences, and work that is beloved by many people over a long period strikes me as fundamentally worthy. But that is just one view, and I am biased.
“Hearing a Van Halen record playing at a frat party in 1980 or looking at a Matisse in 1985 or seeing a production at the Old Vic in 2004. All these mean quite different things emotionally at different times and that is the beauty of it. The artists present it for you to process in your own way.”
Actually, the only way to process Van Halen is at a frat party in 1980.
@ Kristy
You make an excellent point Kristy and I very much appreciate the way you describe the vulnerability involved in the staging of the event with the sniping of pieces of clothing–that helps quite a bit with a basic understanding of what is going on and that of course, as with most art, is mission critical in giving a fair viewing.
Your comment also made me wonder if, like some of John’s work 1968 and onward with her, Yoko’s art was actually better before she came into proximity to him. Did they both diminish their talents by being together? I have heard elsewhere that a few of her works (something about the eternal clock was it?) pre-1968 were cleverly creative and deserving of a certain level of merit.
In other words, would we have seen better, or at least continued high-level creativity, from both of them had they not become as close as they did? Was screaming into a microphone or climbing into a bag the apotheosis of either of their artistic potential? Yet one could immediately argue “What about JL and the Plastic Ono Band?” I guess it is just one more of those “what ifs” in the Beatles universe.
Again, thanks for your insight into as this gave me something to definitely mull over whilst looking at the JohnandYoko saga.
“Cut Piece” is probably the only Yoko Ono event that feels like art to me, for the reasons that you mention @Kristy. It is very much like the work of Marina Abramovic; if you haven’t seen the documentary “The Artist is Present,” check it out. But Abramovic is constantly, almost death-defyingly vulnerable. Ono is not, save for “Cut Piece,” and I think that is why her art feels so shallow to me.
Some news pertinent to this thread:
“I’ll dispel the distortions, inventions and lies, and reveal, for the first time, her virtuosity, humour and joy, her resilience, compassion and wisdom, her triumphs and, ultimately, her genius”, @david_sheff’s @yokoono biography to @simonschusterUK: https://bit.ly/3fn2V45
Sounds like a hagiography…
“…her triumphs and, ultimately, her genius.”
I’m guessing this is an authorized biography, then.
GOOD NEWS.
There has always been a fat book contract out there waiting for sometime who could get access; Yoko Ono is quite revered by a certain type of New York scenester, and every book editor I’ve ever known was more or less a scenester.
Sheff has written extensively about addiction, so maybe he’ll “Gimme Some Truth” on that topic?
Eeeeeeyiiiikes, whitewash and a half.
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“Virtuosity”? Um? Of what could she possibly be considered a virtuoso??
@Jesse
I felt nauseous just reading that blurb. It barely disguises what a complete whitewash this is going to be. Sheff swallowed The Ballad of John and Yoko uncritically and unquestionably back in 1980 and afterward, so I can see why she agreed to cooperate with him. What really bothers me is the jejune level of discourse it will clearly be encouraging: Yoko is great, and if you disagree, it’s because you’re a misogynist and a racist.
Maybe she’s worried about the next Lewisohn book, and this is an attempt at damage control?
@Matt, I think “a jejune level of discourse” is the perfect way to put it. It’s not exactly a war crime, it’s just all so…”naive, simplistic and superficial.”
On the other hand, as Goldman showed us, even a very flawed book can be useful if it is the occasion for digging. I suspect Sheff’s relationship with his subject will will have to remain that of an unquestioning courtier, but perhaps his research will provide data for future scholars not interested in commerce.
At worst, it will be “Ono Remembers,” which I will be happy to read, if not pay for. (Library.)
@Matt
@Hologram Sam
I am glad I am not alone in being taken aback by that blurb re. Sheff’s upcoming work. Anything that gushes such fulsome praise immediately indicates that the author skipped the concept of being disinterested when undertaking a biography. A sympathetic view one can understand but, as you say Sam, this has a whiff of rank hagiography.
My guess is that an editor approached the Estate; Yoko, feeling her mortality and wanting to control the narrative, agreed on the condition that she approve the author and have “final cut” on the book; S&S presented her with a list of authors; and she picked the one she liked from 1980.
This is, above all else, an attempt to create a narrative she likes, to be considered “the truth” and put everybody else on the back foot for a couple of decades. Like John did with “Lennon Remembers.” He got in there first and told the story, and then everybody else had to refute him…even when he was obviously lying.
More info on the cancellation of Doggett’s book “Prisoner of Love”:
http://www.robertrosennyc.com/blog
@Hologram Sam wrote: “More info on the cancellation of Doggett’s book “Prisoner of Love”: http://www.robertrosennyc.com/blog”
Interesting. Very interesting… I wonder if it will ever see the light of day?
Michael Bleicher received his copy and will be reviewing it for us here.
That’s very exciting!
Can someone remind me what the book is supposed to cover about John’s life again? Is it another Goldman retread?
@Michelle – it’s about John’s ‘retirement’ years in the Dakota ’75-’80. I don’t think it’s fair to compare Doggett to Goldman – he wrote the most even-handed book about the Beatles I think I’ve ever read.
I’ll add my voice to the chorus expressing surprise and pleasure that we can look forward to hearing what the deal was about this book. I hope it had some new information that might actually have put a chink in Doggett’s Beatle-view of John. I didn’t hate You Never Give Me Your Money, but I think his Lennon-reverence did give him some blindness to the possible errors in his thesis about John’s state of mind (and Paul’s reactions) during the band’s disintegration. I think it affected John deeply and still had an effect in the Dakota years. I do think it interesting that this book got the final kibosh right as Paul’s, and subsequently Yoko’s, books are announced.
Unfortunately, I spoke too soon. Michael informs me that his order has been cancelled.
I have half a mind to try to contact Doggett for an interview.
I would LOVE THAT.
If he (or his publisher) was so threatened that the book was withdrawn, would the interview basically be him repeatedly saying “I can say no more, say no more.” ?
Don’t the threats from the Estate extend to any media appearances by the author? I mean, if they didn’t, then Doggett could simply say to us all the stuff in the book. He could verbally share excerpts with HeyDullblog! Isn’t he forbidden?
I don’t understand how far this gag order, or whatever it is, extends.
I don’t know, I’ve never been in that situation. But I would be very surprised if he could not speak about the topic. Publishing a work is one thing, but everyone can have an opinion about something.
Oh no! Canceled as in “never received it” or canceled as in “Youse better not be singing, Mister Canary?” You don’t have to answer that. I’m just sad because I was honestly curious about the book, even if it was yet another book about John. I’ve read Rosen and Seaman and wondered how much was going to be corroborated (and apparently Rosen was wondering the same thing) and how much might be different with another perspective. What I’d really like to know, though, is were the diaries truly private or were they performative and even, reportedly, annotated by Yoko? Especially given what we know about John’s paranoia that his real secrets would be taken advantage of.
@Kristy, John wanted Julian to have the diaries according to Seaman, so there was some kind of a performance going on in them. But if they were good for Yoko, they’d have been released, or at least written about, by now. Seems to be that whatever’s in them is an absolute shitshow. Drug use, depression, obsessive entries about food, that sort of thing. Not “loaf #445 turned out great! Watched the Bob Newhart Show with Yoko and then spent 30 minutes with the Berlitz Japan tapes.”
The book was canceled as in “the Estate is going to sue the publisher for so much money they won’t dream of going anywhere near this manuscript,” I think.
@Michael Bleicher
Not “loaf #445 turned out great! Watched the Bob Newhart Show with Yoko and then spent 30 minutes with the Berlitz Japan tapes.”
Hah! Well said indeed.
What is the over/under on the diaries ever, even if just partially, seeing the light of day. I was going to naively ask if the Estate would open them up after Yoko passes, but that would have to assume see did not leave specific directions to keep them sealed or for them to be destroyed.
If she and the Estate are still leaning on people so heavily all the way to the year 2021 there does not seem to be reason for much optimism. I mean seriously Yoko, we’re talking about nearly 50 years ago and you still have the attack dogs after a gent who wants to write a book? Gee…ok.
I continually stumble on the same point with this and some of the other Beatles/McCartney/Lennon/Starr issues. Paul, Ringo, and Yoko could snap their fingers and the finest historians, writers, and researchers would be on the evening flight to meet to discuss things. They could ensure a fair shake by having the records and interviews open to a number of the aforementioned experts. Why be so afraid of what someone might think? That seems incredibly shallow to me and, in Yoko’s case, her keeping such an iron grip on John’s legacy stultifyingly and dishonestly selfish.
@Neal – I hope you don’t mind me weighing in. My slightly cynical (and quite possibly entirely wrong!) take on this is that they’re not worried about what people will think, they’re more worrying about the Beatles Empire crumbling. I think the alternative story, of the less-than-idyllic Dakota years, is broadly true and therefore bad for the Lennon brand – it turns him from a househusband to a wreck, and turns his marriage to Yoko into a PR stunt. So much for Gimme Some Truth, etc. The Lennon brand relies on Yoko as John’s One True Love and therefore the keeper of his entire legacy.
We all know John was complex – so much light in his personality but a LOT of darkness too. Goldman was not useful in terms of empathy and interpretation but in my opinion, his research and the version of John’s life he presented in his book was edging towards accurate – a far more complex, deeply damaged human being. But consumption of the Beatles beyond places like this site isn’t complex at all, so if John’s complexity and the misery he often caused himself and others comes to light (and that is in my opinion a key part of telling the the Beatles’ story truthfully, right from the start) he just turns into a ‘bad guy’ – case closed, no room for nuance.
If Goldman’s Lennon sees too much daylight, the Beatles legacy – especially in current cancel culture – takes a massive hit. So, they can be truthful about John, and the Beatles story that revolves around him, but not too truthful. As a result, I really believe Paul and Yoko won’t invite people to grill them on the minutiae of the Beatles story/Lennon-McCartney partnership and breakdown because he and Yoko, and Ringo to a lesser extent, control the narrative on purpose. They’re not looking for an opportunity to bare all, they keep a tight rein on the story because the Beatles are a corporation now. Even outside their own business interests and financial stakes, thousands of people – some old friends and girlfriends and wives and acquaintances and band members – make a living, an entire livelihood, off the Beatles’ legacy staying in tact, wholesome and positive. That’s why we get Disney Beatles now – Peter Jackson’s Let It Be, it’s why we get the same 10 stories from Paul and nothing more, and I think it’s why Yoko (and potentially Paul directly or indirectly?) move to stop books like Doggett’s.
There’s plenty missing from this theory, and many other factors playing into it I’m sure, but that’s my take on it. For whatever it’s worth!
@Nikki, I think this is dead-on, and I think John was already experiencing it during his life, and it was one of the many things that made him depressed. I get the impression that part of John — the part that craved the love and acceptance of the entire world — wanted to be John Beatle, witty, charming, handsome, intelligent, confident, impish, naughty but basically good. Another part of him felt deep guilt about his private behavior and revulsion at a public who refused to know about that side of him even when he tried to tell them, “I’ve been a violent wreck!” In the end, John seems to have decided he would set himself up to be a martyr — John Christ, not John Beatle — possibly on the theory that becoming a rock star hadn’t really been enough, but maybe becoming a secular saint *would* do the trick, even if it wouldn’t happen until after he was gone.
The other thing — and this goes to Michelle’s point that John was a legend in his own time, unlike Linda, too — is that the Lennon image has changed between when John was alive and after he died. There was room in Beatle John for a fully adult Lennon at 40, 50 or 60 to say, “you know, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I was a mess. I was really violent, and my addictions were out of control, and no matter how much the public loved me, I made the lives of those around me really painful.” Maybe it would have affected the Beatles’ bottom line, but I don’t think so, not much, because Beatle John’s image was not premised on being anything other than the cleverest rock star – not Martin Luther King or Gandhi. John Ono Lennon’s legacy, however, was premised on him being peaceful, healthy, and happy in his last five years especially, but also in general since he met Yoko. Yoko’s tried to add a little shading to that portrait over the years — probably to pre-empt or front face even worse revelations that could come out if she held fast to the 1980s portrait — but it’s basically still that. And at this point, they’re in too deep to do a complete 180.
@Nikki- I agree with you. However, I do believe that Paul wouldn’t mind answering questions as long as they’re asked with good intentions. In my opinion, they are doing more damage than good with how they are handling the legacy. The tactics they used during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s won’t work in the climate that we are in now.
@Nikki Thank you. You brought out a point that I have completely overlooked and that is of the legions of stakeholders who have investiture in keeping the “corporation” flowing steadily along. I have never paused to think just how many gain their daily bread from anything related to the Beatles, the Estate, PM, JL, Yoko, etc.
This, of course, is not to ascribe ill intent to them as I know many work hard, for example, just in getting Paul out on tour or handling scheduling requests, but your thought has a subtle ring to it in that there is a huge amount of inertia in this enterprise and it is difficult, if not impossible, to make a course correction. I think of it being like a super-tanker plying the seas in that nothing happens suddenly or moves far from the centerline. That is assuming that someone even wants to make a course correction…something that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Again, thank you for teasing out this idea in your reply.
@Kir. Interesting thought in that more harm than good is being done these days by the way the legacy is being crafted/administered/fed. Another frustrating “condition set” confronting those interested in the story.
General question. I have been working through the backcatalog of posts and am trying to determine what the most pressing questions are still extant regarding anything to do with the Beatles, the four individuals, etc. Did there happen to be a post on this?
Most of us probably dislike lists, but from the perspective of a rigorous historical look what do you all wish you could know. Add to that, do you think those questions will ever be answered?
In other words, what unknowns are there? Is the list decreasing or, in fact, increasing?
„From the perspective of a rigorous historical look what do you all wish you could know. Add to that, do you think those questions will ever be answered? In other words, what unknowns are there?“
Well! Since you’re bringing it up…
(off top of head and in no particular order:)
What happened in Rishikesh and the months just after that turned the Beatles of „having a reasonably good time recording Hey Bulldog“ into the Beatles of „making their own and everybody else’s lives miserable recording Cry Baby Cry“?
What really happened when Brian „gave away“ the Beatles’ merchandising income to Stramsact/Seltaeb, and how much did the group really know about this cock-up?
Did Lennon/McCartney’s ultimate loss of control over Northern Songs in mid-September 1969 (rather than, for example, John being elated after playing live with the POB in Toronto) contribute significantly to John announcing his departure from the group on the 20th? If yes, was this ever discussed within the group and/or their inner circle?
Why was Paul (supposedly) absent from the recording session for She Said, She Said?
What were John/Paul/George and their immediate surroundings’ reactions to Ringo leaving in August 1968 (apart from recording a couple of songs without him)?
……
That’s just me though, there must be hundreds more of these…
Those are all good- here are a few more: Why did John think they’d be writing “The Family Way” music together? Did Paul write the “jap tart” note? Why didn’t Linda go to the rooftop concert? What happened with “Cold Turkey” – objections to subject matter or just bad timing? Did John ask Spector to go over the top with overdubs on “The Long and Winding Road”?
@Neal Schier–There are so many things that I want to know. A few of them include what factor(s) caused the fallout between Paul and John? What did John actually do during his final years at The Dakota, and why didn’t Paul object more to the credit switch. I know that last one has bothered him for years. I hope he has been able to make peace with it.
Correction”What did John actually do during his final years at The Dakota? Why didn’t Paul object more to the credit switch?”
On a lighter note, which is sort of off topic-on topic here is unseen footage that has been released of John rehearsing Give Peace a Chance in 1969 and making her laugh with his line flubs. I’m trying to think of a time when I’ve seen her laugh before.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RUHdhxwyjjU
Fascinating and perplexing subject, and so well considered and written. Much has been speculated about what caused John to change in May 1968. Within days of his return from New York City with Paul where they promoted Apple (and seemed to still be quite comfortable and compatible with each other in the interview videos from that occasion), John invited Yoko to his home. The next morning he told his friend Pete Shotton to find a home where he could live with Yoko. As for John being in love with Paul, could it be that once he saw Paul with Linda in New York City, his intuition told him that Linda was the one for Paul and that she was different from the others including Jane Asher? After reading Linda‘s biography online, it seems that she and Paul spent time together that week, and Linda rode to the airport sitting between John and Paul. John said he wasn’t impressed with Linda and was surprised that she was Paul’s type, but then said he didn’t really know what Paul’s type was anyway. John had seen Paul with innumerable women and Paul was engaged to Jane at the time. How could he not know what Paul’s type was? To me that comment means he had never seen Paul with anyone that Paul might actually love for life. And if Paul ended up with someone like that, John would feel abandoned. And when someone as messed up as John feels abandoned,, he could easily turn to someone who has been love bombing and stalking him for months. A year later, John married Yoko days after Linda and Paul’s wedding. Speaking of love bombing, Yoko appears to be a textbook narcissist. She coveted John’s fame and genius. After love bombing, a narcissist devalues their victim. They control and isolate and gaslight their victim. That explains her lack of empathy for Cynthia and Julian. It explains her grandiose delusions of her own imaginary talent. And I think it explains the creative demise of John’s brilliance. Now, we see her rewriting history because the greatest thing a narcissist fears is is being irrelevant
@Forsynthia, what’s “lovebombing”?
@Forsynthia – It’s certainly hard to see how John’s disintegration into madness wasn’t connected to that car journey with Linda. We know it rattled him because he was still going on about it years later in the interview where he said Linda wasn’t attractive – too ‘tweedy’ (LOL) and he didn’t understand what Paul saw in her.
But let’s look at what happened after the car journey. He flew home, got completely wasted, stayed awake for 48 hours, called a meeting, announced he was Jesus, and then finally told Pete Shotton to send for Yoko.
Maybe it was all a big coincidence, but it doesn’t seem likely.
@Elizabeth- We know it rattled him because he was still going on about it years later in the interview where he said Linda wasn’t attractive – too ‘tweedy’ (LOL) and he didn’t understand what Paul saw in her.
Sounds like John was speaking for half of Paul’s fanbase. I’ll never forget that rude bitch in the audience of the Oprah Winfrey Show who had the gall to say to Paul, when Linda was battling cancer no less (she wasn’t on the show with him), that he could have had any woman he wanted – why Linda?
Why was John rattled by a car journey with Linda? She sat between John and Paul – Yoko style?
Something happened to John while he was in India and now it’s because of a car ride with Linda? Well, there’s a leap of imagination.
@Lara – I think you might struggle to label John ‘sane’ before the car journey, though it’s pretty indisputable that he went completely off his trolley after it.
He seemed to be able to function when he was in New York, at least. The day after he came back, he was convinced he was Jesus.
I mean, something must have happened to send him over the edge.
I don’t doubt “something happened” to John in India, but if it was related to Paul, why were the two on good terms when they went to NY? It was directly after the NY trip John and Yoko became Johnandyoko.
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That said, John and Paul were on good terms when John and Yoko stayed at Paul’s house later still. Could that have something to do with Paul having broken up with Jane, yet Linda being nowhere to be found?
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The alleged arrival of the ”Jap tart note” was during that time, but the tale has only ever been told in a book published Jann Wenner’s company by someone who had an axe to grind with Paul and was a huge J&Y fan. If Paul sent the typed, unsigned note, why didn’t John or Yoko ever mention it, especially considering John admitted he sounded paranoid about Paul? And why in 1980, did Yoko say the other Fabs were never nasty to her?
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That brings up another small mystery. John is said to have felt betrayed by Paul having more shares of Northern Songs, but he never mentioned it during his public anti-Paul diatribes. Perhaps that anger only lasted until someone pointed out that Paul had only 1,000 more shares than he started with – a minuscule number rather than the power grab it’s portrayed as. (Klein, however, was happy to point to the episode without saying the vast majority of the discrepancy was due to John selling about 110,000 shares.)
Could have been a whole bunch of things though:
1) Brian dead
2) Apple anxiety
3) Marriage on the rocks + Yoko’s love bombs
4) Deeply-rooted dependence on Paul’s approval
5) Paul leaves Rishikesh early
6) Maharishi turns out to be not the Messiah
7) Paul hearts Linda
8) Loads ‘n’ loads of drugs -> 2 months of hardly any drugs + loads ‘n’ loads of meditation -> Loads ‘n’ loads of drugs
9) […]
Add your own!
@Velvet:
“8) Loads ‘n’ loads of drugs -> 2 months of hardly any drugs + loads ‘n’ loads of meditation -> Loads ‘n’ loads of drugs”
is basically how you cause a spiritual emergency. It’s literally textbook.
Elizabeth, try not to mistake eccentricity for insanity. Playing the role of Jesus for one day does not make someone insane. John was likely joking around, and by his friends’ and bandmates’ reaction, he probably was. They didn’t take it seriously, at all. Which if he was suffering from mental illness, they would.
This requires a response, @Michelle. John showed up at a business meeting and declared, apparently seriously, that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. If someone did that in your place of work (or mine), you’d give it about five minutes to see if they were serious, and then you’d call a doctor. Which is what they should’ve done at Apple in 1968, and the only reason they didn’t is because John was one of the bosses, and it was a crazy time full of high people doing crazy things. Nobody died, but it’s really indicative of a person going through some kind of crisis–and that’s borne out through the rest of ’68. Was flying off the handle at Maharishi a joke, too? Screaming at Cyn during the Air India flight? Shacking up with an obsessive fan? Trying to entice Cyn into infidelity so she’d get less money in the divorce? And on and on. All jokes? No; all a guy who’s becoming unglued and everybody’s just fucking letting him because he’s Chief Beatle.
That Jesus Christ bit of Lennonsanity wasn’t widely known during Lennon’s lifetime, and if it had been a Super Funny Joke, Lennon or one of the other Beatles would’ve mentioned it in the millions of interviews they did after that. Surely in the context of the 1966 controversy? “You know, funny thing–” But no one mentioned it and, once Tony Branwell wrote it, nobody’s contradicted it. Treating it like Hard Day’s Night Redux is, to me, irresponsible.
This is why I use that word: John Lennon was a person. People who treated him like an icon helped him get sick, then stay sick. Sick enough to eat acid for days on end. Sick enough to explode his family in the shittiest possible way. Sick enough to walk around saying, “I’m the reincarnation of Jesus Christ,” which is quite sick indeed. Sick enough to start doing heroin when everybody knew that was a terrible idea. And nobody, not one person, ever stood up to him and said, “This has got to stop.”
It’s certainly more comfortable to think that John was not an addict; that he was always just joking, or always in control, or even fundamentally the same guy his entire life–but his behavior after acid is vastly erratic. You have to ignore reams and reams of facts for think he’s just joking, and it’s irresponsible to do that. Whenever it’s Lennon or JFK or any other troubled icon you care to name, this “stars are super-people” fallacy kills people, both the stars and fans who try to emulate them. How many addicts did Lennon’s addiction inspire to take that first hit? What would rock even look like from 1965-80 if people like Lennon had never done hard drugs? Or had been (amazing) sober?
Our cultural intertwining of creativity and addiction is so, so destructive; as is our granting license to self-harm to people who are rich and admired. That’s why I really try to push back against it on this blog. That’s not criticizing John, it’s trying to see who he was, really, and emphasizing the good, kind, caring parts of him, which were many. Lennon was murdered by a man whose consciousness had been irreparably altered by drugs; for that reason alone, Lennon fans should cast a malign eye on incidents like “I am Jesus Christ.”
Laura, I know that Francie Schwartz had an axe to grind with Paul, but I didn’t know she was a huge John & Yoko fan. I’m pretty sure the “Jap tart note” story originated from her.
I used to read Francie’s long defenses of Yoko on rec.music.beatles. She was absolutely indefatigable, to the point that posters assumed she was on the payroll. And maybe she was? Would’ve been a smart move.
Haven’t read those defenses of Yoko by Francie, but her writing them makes me wonder if her animus toward McCartney was driven by her desire to be another Yoko (Paul’s partner) and failing.
Velvet Hand: Exactly!
@Michelle – I’m quite sure that John’s friends did know he had a mental illness. Or at least they probably had an inkling of it. But these were Northern men, and it was 1968. People tended to just get on with things. I think John was a problem that no one knew how to deal with so they pretended his mental illness was a joke.
I don’t agree that John was joking when he said he was Jesus. He had been awake for 48 hours at that point and was off his head. I think it’s more likely he was having a breakdown.
Strong agree with all of this.
No culture had rules for how to behave when someone–especially one of the four co-CEOs of a massively profitable business–took a lot of drugs and started acting weird. We were just barely beginning to figure out how to handle people like Brian Epstein (unsuccessfully, in his sad case). But a guy on acid and god-knows-what-else? No clue. Sit and smile?
Drug-induced crazy behavior was common among hippies by 1968. Lennon’s “I’m Jesus” moment is absolutely congruent with that; the difference is he had a whole business riding on his mental health. There were lots of people walking around the Haight and the East Village and Shepherd’s Bush/Chelsea (Londoners check me on the neighborhood), taking acid then declaring they were God, the Son/Daughter of God, Satan, etc etc etc. I have a neurologist friend who was seeing patients at Bellevue during the late 60s, and these kinds of psychedelic-induced ruptures were common. And we’ve all heard of the tale during the Pepper sessions, and seen the footage of the kid during the Imagine sessions.
I think Lennon was having a breakdown, but one of a very particular type: a spiritual emergency, as defined by Stanislav Grof. I’ll write more about this when I get time.
@Michelle, there’s no reply button (and I’m getting that VPN page again, oh well), but yes, it’s Schwartz – and only Schwartz – who tells the story. She was and is most definitely a huge fan of J&Y, and the book in which she told of her time with Paul, including the note, was published by Jann Wenner’s publishing company. Schwartz stayed in touch with John and Yoko for many, many years and may still be in touch with Yoko.
Laura (and everyone else having this VPN issue): HD’s web fixer is on vacation this week, so it may be next week before we get a better answer. Sorry this keeps happening.
@Laura, I didn’t get the idea Francie stayed in touch with J&Y after Paul ended their affair, though she did talk quite a bit on usenet about hooking up for dinner with Yoko ONCE in 1999. But yeah, she was definitely a fan of the Ballad of J&Y story and the cosmic love of a century stuff (no, Francie, they were two consenting adults married to other people who hooked up and got married). She vehemently denied the report in (I think?) Rosen’s book that she had written John a letter begging for help getting in touch with Paul regarding having borne Paul’s secret child.
@Michael Gerber and @Michelle interestingly, John’s friend Pete Shotten is with him through the whole “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” thing, and he doesn’t report it in his book in a joking way at all. He seems to be hoping more that John will give it up or snap out of it and seems relieved when John drops it a day later.
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But yeah, as MG said — how in 1968 would one deal with something like that coming from one of the most famous men in the world, especially if his friends were used to him going “off the rails” now and then because of drugs or drink or whatever was going on in his head? They’d likely just hoped, like Pete, that it would pass quietly.
Well we have to ask: what was the alternative?
Shaming wasnt going to come from the other Beatles, which were the only people John would’ve possibly listened to.
Rehab for psychedelics was nonexistent; these were all new drugs. And from the case of Brian, we can see that the understanding of dependence was nil. Drying out? As a rock star? How? “Just stop” wasn’t going to work with John.
In fact, John’s interest in Maharishi might possibly have been an attempt to fix whatever made him an addict.
So what could anybody do? Nothing; pray?
Maybe because- despite not being what one would call a free Britney fan- I’m very caught up in corruption of Conservatorship case and how her mental illness has been weaponised against her, I’m kind of glad they didn’t commit John after one possible mental breakdown or possible drug induced delusion where he called himself Jesus. That’s not to say that John wouldn’t have benefitted from conventional therapy and rehab, but in a situation where he has some control of choice and free will. I do think John recognised he needed help by his own quest to better himself, it’s just that he picked people like Janov and the Maharishi who weren’t exactly equipped. I’m just glad he seemed more emotionally and mentally equipped when he died and sad that he didn’t get to keep building on that and getting better and having better relationships because some one bought a gun instead.
I also don’t believe that John encouraged or influenced people to take up heroin. From what I’ve read and heard others talk about, you don’t just take up heroin. There’s normally a whole pathway of drugs and alcohol someone is consuming first before they get to heroin. And a lot of experts have said a common gateway drug on to heroin is doctor prescribed pain killers and sedatives.
Nor do I think John ever glamourised his heroin use. In fact he was probably more an advocate for better understanding of addiction then the simplistic “Drugs are bad kids- don’t do drugs”.
I think blaming John for others slide into heroin would be like blaming James Taylor who said he was the one that first gave John opiates. Yes its morally questionable but ultimately something inside John and Yoko made them or lead them to taking up on that choice.
And yet, John kept churnin’ out the hits (and, occasionally, album fillers) while acting like someone with liverwurst for brains.
Maybe that’s why he wasn’t institutionalized and/or fired — unlike Brian Jones, who’d contributed fairly little to the Stones’ music for quite a while by that time, or Syd Barrett, whose behaviour AND music had become unreliable after “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”.
Maybe having the ability to keep on churnin’ ’em out was also what kept John going, which could be why he didn’t end up like Brian (dead) or Syd (indescribable really).
But he didn’t keep churnin’ out the hits, exactly…to my surely biased eye/ear there’s a definite decay to Lennon’s work after Feb. ’68. Some of it I LOVE (“Come Together”) but those high points are fewer and fewer. In ’63-64 he’s driving the band, from ’65-’67 he’s more than keeping up with Paul…and by ’68, he’s starting to decline; by ’69 it’s singalongs like “Ballad of John and Yoko,” a catchy little story-song he would’ve excoriated Paul for.
And Lennon knows it, too–that’s why he pivoted to “being an artist.” Artists need only create for themselves, and in that regard, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is no better or worse than “A Day in the Life.”
@Michael – Yes, and I would also point out that not only did he shack up with an obsessive fan, but he chose that very night, after formally announcing he was Jesus Christ, to do it.
Let’s look at the sequence of events again:
1. John and Paul go to New York. We know that people are worried about John’s state of mind because they hope the trip will do him good – that Paul will be a calming influence.
2. As far as we know, John’s behaviour in New York is not particularly concerning. He is interviewed on television and appears normal.
3. On his way to the airport, he is disturbed enough by Linda’s presence to remember the journey and rant about it in an interview several years later.
4. Immediately after the flight home, he goes on a bender and stays awake for 48 hours.
5. He calls a meeting and announces he is Jesus.
6. That very night, he shacks up with Yoko.
These are the circumstances under which John and Yoko became JohnandYoko. She was part of his breakdown.
Her genius was selling it as a love story and people buying into it. But it wasn’t a love story, it was a tragedy, and when you put it into context, it’s very clear to see.
@Nancy, nice point about Francie’s possible motivations— I’d never thought of her bitterness quite that way, but Francie did seem to idolize JohnandYoko as a couple in a strange way separate even from their individual identities.
@MichaelG: But “Ballad of John and Yoko” was a hit, as was “Come Together” (though not one of my faves except for the lyrics). “Revolution” also got a lot of airplay and still does. So technically, he was still producing hits. Whether you like them is a matter of taste. You don’t care for “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”? Lots of people do, including self-proclaimed #1 Beatles fan Dave Grohl who has it in his top five if not the top. John spent many late hours in the studio overdubbing all the guitars on that song. He still had a great work ethic, great musicianship, and was still productive whether you like the songs or not. And I never heard any of the Beatles say he was anything but a joy to work with in the studio all the way through the Let it Be sessions (Yoko’s presence notwithstanding) and Abbey Road. His enthusiasm for the Beatles entity may have been waning, but the others’ enthusiasm for working with him never did. To Velvet Hand’s point, who would institutionalize and/or fire someone like that?
“The Ballad” was a #1, so point taken. But I think it is a lesser work, and exactly the kind of simple, catchy song that Lennon was endlessly excoriating Paul over.
‘A joy to work with’ during the Let It Be sessions? Michelle, John (or JohnandYoko at least) was a nightmare during those sessions and the Get Back tapes are filled with conversations between everyone around John about how best to deal with him.
I realise that history is now being rewritten to ‘prove’ that the sessions were actually filled with joy, but the tapes speak for themselves.
@MichaelG — When referencing “the hits”, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about single A-sides (only). John didn’t get a lot of those after “All You Need Is Love”, but was that really because his songwriting and -performing skills declined?
I’m aware that you consider the White Album a lesser work, and that YMMV, but as LeighAnn has pointed out in another thread, many of John’s songs from “the long, slow afternoon of the Beatles’ career” (mmmhhh) are well-loved, many of them because they are quite remarkable.
Fact: My parents loved tWA so much, they named me after it. Could have been worse, could have been Bungalow Bill. Huh huh huh.
@Velvet — just going through comments one last time before we shut ‘er down.
I absolutely DO NOT feel the White Album is a lesser work! I just don’t like it, because I feel the bad vibes growing in the band, and what I adore the most about the Beatles is the very Sixties type of harmony I feel from their music. While I don’t feel White was “John and a backing group, Paul and a backing group, etc”, I do sense them growing apart as people and musicians, and also (this is a HUGE part of it), I feel 1968 seeping into the sessions.
1968 was a bad, bad year. Like 2020 bad. I can’t listen to “Revolution #9” without hearing the tumult in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in the moments after RFK was shot. Interestingly, the track was first recorded five days before, and then was finished two weeks after. (Started 5.30.68; RFK shot 6.5.68; ended 6.20.68)
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” has its partisans, Devin included, but to me, 1968 is when Lennon really stops matching McCartney. Instead of being great songs, Lennon songs become good songs made more interesting by their place in his story–“Julia” for example, or “Dear Prudence” are lovely songs, but they’re helped by the biographical information we all know. Compare this to “Blackbird,” which may or may not be about civil rights but is simply kickass. Or “Hey Jude”–simply one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded–and “Revolution,” which is musically pretty dull–a simple, heavy shuffle–but gathers import from its times. If you want a song like that, “Street Fighting Man” simply blows it away, and that pains me to type because I think the Stones are retarded. (I’m using this clinically–dumb; posing; self-stunting.)
The songs I think Lennon will be remembered for–“Help!” “Tomorrow Never Knows” “Strawberry Fields Forever” “All You Need is Love” “I Am the Walrus”–were over by ’68 with the possible exception of “Come Together,” which owes a lot of its heft to Paul’s bassline. Stuff like “Across the Universe” was considered minor by the band itself, and even tracks that I love like “Hey Bulldog” are unquestionably minor (dismissed by Lennon as “a good-sounding track that doesn’t mean anything”).
Whereas McCartney is still ascending in ’68 and ’69 — hugely productive, varied, and still totally committed to being a pop musician, and making popular art–Lennon is dealing with a serious drug addiction, martial troubles, moving away from his genius (pop) into really dated notions of the avant-garde, and actively looking for what’s next. To me, all this shows in his music; how could it not?
A lot of Lennon’s late-Beatles output is helped by the fact that it sounds much more modern than the earlier stuff; sonically, “She’s So Heavy” is much closer to what we listen to now than “She Loves You”–but that doesn’t make it a great song. It has all of Lennon’s flaws–a certain ponderousness from insufficient melodic ideas, sung with his beautiful voice, covered over with studio tricks and given importance by his own biography. Not bad, still Beatles, but not “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which is an example of how Lennon takes these same flaws, and turns them into gold.
After February ’68, Paul’s still making primo Beatles music, and still knows what that is. John’s increasingly looking around at other groups–the Stones, Clapton–and trying to make their kind of music: “Yer Blues” “Revolution” and so forth. It’s still great–it’s Lennon–but to me it’s not primo Beatles music. If I wanna hear revolution in ’68, I listen to “Street Fighting Man” or “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” not Lennon’s weirdly uncertain, Beatlized version of same.
@Michael: Paul is more specific about his mother in songs like Yesterday and Let it Be. Julia contains imagery that could be about anyone. I don’t need to know the backstory of Dear Prudence to enjoy it.
By the way, I find it interesting when you say you don’t like the White Album because of the bickering that was going on behind the scenes and the splintering relationships, yet you’re quick to point out that delving into the dark side of the Beatles makes them far more interesting (I agree, despite John’s dark side being the only one discussed – maybe Paul doesn’t have a dark side; I doubt it – he’s just good at hiding it) and their achievements more worthy of admiration. Isn’t the White Album even more amazing for the fact it was made, with successful results, despite the band falling apart? You let the context cloud your judgment, and dislike John’s songs in particular because he was the reason the band was breaking up.
@Michelle, I don’t like listening to the White Album. I think it’s an amazing collection of songs…which I don’t like listening to. The history of the group from May ’68 to April ’70 is fascinating, that’s why we talk about it constantly and not other, harmonious times that produced music I personally like better.
I DO believe that John Lennon was intent on breaking up the group after May ’68 (or at least hurting Paul), and while that was a rather outlandish position to take at the beginning of this blog (2008), the work of Mikal Gilmore and others is making it more and more the dreaded Standard Narrative. The old “wedding bells” idea, or “they were bound to break up” idea–neither of them have ever held much water to me. They’d all been married for years, except Paul; similar groups like the Stones were together for decades. There was nothing preordained about a breakup; it was triggered by specific things that happened between May ’68 and April ’70, and fans that are afraid to examine those specific things…well, this is not the site for them. The facts are the facts–the absence of Brian as a lubricant, and the presence of Yoko and Klein as profound irritants, plus John’s heroin addiction, are what broke up the band. And no amount of arguing is going to change that; “it just happened, because things happen” is not a valid counter-argument, and part of the reason I’m shutting comments is we’re getting a lot of that level of wishful thinking.
Paul surely does have a dark side, we all do. But he, unlike John, did not spend the last ten years–25% of his life!–giving us raw data on that dark side. Paul, like Yoko, has outlived the profit in muckraking. We discuss John’s “dark side” because John discussed it. And I like that about John; I don’t need him to be perfect or even particularly good to be eternally grateful for his music, and genuinely affectionate towards him as a person.
And this is where you and I differ, and will never see eye to eye: it’s precisely *my affection* for him that makes me look at him closely, trying to understand him. After a lot of close study, I suspect that he was an addict, and addicts lie. So particularly as he gets deeper into his illness after India, John’s a puzzle; what is true? What is partly true? What is a lie? I dislike John’s songs when I perceive them to be part of a story he’s selling me, or when they express a kind of narcissism and immaturity that I’m painfully familiar with from the addicts in my own life.
Anyway, I’ve been super-clear and consistent on these points, comment after comment. You might consider why you’re defending him so tirelessly? Who is he and his behavior standing in for? Don’t tell me, but do tell yourself. Your fixation on fighting with me on my blog is peculiar. I wanna get a certain viewpoint across, on my blog, and my determination comes from my own suffering at the hands of addicts. You are determined to prove me wrong, on my blog. Why? Why don’t you start your own blog? Why are you determined to push back against my particular take on John Lennon, a person neither of us met? I’ve been very clear why I say what I say, and I just said it, bluntly, again; I studied, found what I found, and say it here, specifically to clue people into how addicts work. I believe that if a person feels a particular affinity for John Lennon, it’s highly likely they are close to an addict. I was!
You on the other hand, never speak to why you give a shit. Why is it so important to you that people have certain beliefs about this long-dead celebrity. Stop commenting here and get clear on that.
Underneath it all–fandom since age 5, 13 years of writing this blog, plus a whole goddamn novel–is respect for what John Lennon accomplished, and affection for the flesh-and-blood person that was put through the meat grinder of wealth and fame and power, and compassion for the psychological and psychic pain he endured. That’s my baseline “judgment” on John Lennon, and the only one that really matters. I love the guy, not the White Album. My way of showing that is idiosyncratic, but–let it be.
Sorry Michael, didn’t mean to misrepresent your previous statements on tWA. (Side note: To me, not liking to listen to a piece of music means that that piece of music is a lesser work, for presumably solipsistic reasons.)
I must have been 11 or 12 when I first came across a copy – probably one owned by my parents which I proceeded to “occupy”. I’d only heard the Red & Blue double LPs before (and not, consciously, much other pop/rock music except possibly Nena and a couple of Blondie’s hits) and didn’t know at the time which Beatle was which, what most of the words meant, when the album was made or what role it played in the story of the group.
Instead, listening to it made me feel like I was being given illicit glimpses into the weird world of grown-ups, but there was nobody who could have explained these glimpses to me. Why were some of the songs so loud and others so quiet? Why had they included “Helter Skelter”, which made me feel SO scared, and songs like “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Julia” that made me feel all fuzzy and warm inside? Why did one of the songs prominently feature the word “sexy”? (None of the other Beatles songs I knew did!) Why didn’t the poster have any words printed for Revolution 9? (I could clearly hear words being spoken and sung and would have loved to know what they were!)
In my case, you’re right about the “John-love”/”addict nearby” thing, by the way. My dad was a heavy drinker – didn’t ever hit us but apart from that was a terrible human being. When he did have money, he would try to atone for that with presents, which is how I got that blue box with all the UK albums in it that was around in the 1980s. That was one of the few of those gifts that was on point though – when I got a record I wasn’t interested in at all for my birthday a few years later, I wanted to exchange it for the “Tripping the Live Fantastic” 3-LP and was made to feel really bad about being so greedy.
Also, I love Hey Dullblog and hope you can find the strength to let it continue. I still don’t know anyone in person who has an interest in Beatle Lore which is why this is one of maybe 5 websites I visit regularly. The other “core” reason I visit is, of course, that Hey Dullblog isn’t dumb while the rest of the internet mainly is.
Love
Velvet Hand
Love back at you, VH. Your thoughts on White are the kind of thing I’d like to post. Write it up! 🙂
The Beatles are one of the world’s unassailably Great Things, and there is wisdom in the realization that they, too, suffered and struggled with addiction and codependence and the whole absurd roundelay. They were not superhumans; they did not escape; they were like us, like your dad, flawed; and yet, wow, what music!
That Lennon was an addict, Ringo is–maybe all of them were (look to Paul and pot, and George and several things) –and yet they made things that we cherish, it helps us understand our own lives. Make better decisions. Addicts are not rare and they are not monsters, even though they can do monstrous things; and the whole fucked-up support systems they create cause such suffering. When we are close to addicts, it’s so important to separate the person from the disease, and see the attendant illnesses. What a thing it would be if The Beatles, the flawed people John/Paul/George/Ringo, could help us gain WISDOM as well as pleasure.
Wikipedia definition: Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by demonstrations of attention and affection. It can be used in different ways and for either positive or negative purposes. Psychologists have identified love bombing as a possible part of a cycle of abuse and have warned against it.
A narcissist uses this tactic to ensnare their victim. Yoko aggressively pursued John after their Indica Gallery meeting and continued her focused attention on him while the Beatles were in India by writing to him.
Yes! Totally right. Wrote him constantly, IIRC.
I want to know what caused John to ‘split’ from Paul. It appears to me a lot of his antics with Yoko were to get back at Paul. Did it happen in India? Linda?
Re the lovebombing: I also think – from a lot of research on this topic for personal reasons – that John had Complex PTSD and attachment trauma from his childhood. Attachment trauma is linked with deep fear of abandonment, feelings of worthlessness, belief in ‘the one’ and that someone will rescue you, difficulty with maintaining realistic relationships and a tendency to abandon your own agency. Also vulnerability to narcissists. That love bombing is very seductive when you’re so insecure, and looking for someone/something to fill the void, which can only really be addressed through lots of therapy.
On a slightly different topic, ie too much LSD: I know someone who took maybe 200 acid trips. He was different afterwards and not in a good way. the lively, funny (if troubled) person I knew was gone.
I think a big reason was that Paul wanted to work alone on his songs, including play all the instruments. John saw no point in having a band anymore. George too didn’t want to be told how to play his guitar. Not every explanation for why things happen has to be complex. If John used Yoko to get back at Paul, then Paul used Linda to get back at John. Paul, ever the perfectionist when it comes to music, basically “voluntold” Linda to join his band and play on his albums though she wasn’t a musician, seemingly because John did so with Yoko.
Agree. I find it very unlikely that had Yoko never came in to the picture that the Beatles still wouldn’t have split up because as you touch upon Yoko wasn’t the problem- she was at best a symptom of the problem and my two cents is the fact they were tired and were becoming fed up by the constraints of being a Beatle. John Paul George and Ringo have each individually acknowledge in various interviews.
Yokos presence may have made the breakup more acrimonious perhaps but they would likely have broken up at some point regardless. I think Paul just recently said something to the effect himself.
Honestly the more I read, the more I feel a lot of Paul and John’s relationship breakdown boils to a s**t ton of misunderstanding between the two of them. They both had a tendency to feel incredibly hurt, wounded and betrayed by the other but in a lot of ways it was a situation where one of them is “how could you hurt me like this?” and the other is “I never meant it like that, I never thought he’d take it like that, it wasn’t personal to hurt him” etc.
They were young men with very different personalities, years of built up petty jealousies and resentments conflated with a whole lot of money and fame. And in reality their relationship was only probably really bad and distant for like a year or two. On the whole they had a good friendship it’s just that as they got older they moved in different directions.
In the whole Yoko wanted to ensnare and trap John by love bombing, if that’s the case few years later she kicked John out because he was both cheating on her and by her admission she felt suffocated and stifled by the relationship and exhausted by the public’s anger and harassment of her.
John was not powerless. He asked Pete to bring Yoko to the house, he wanted her in the studio, he wanted to stay with her when she was in hospital and he clung to her as much as people presume she stalked him.
Whether their relationship was 100% healthy is debatable but it was a mutually consensual marriage between two people who right or wrong loved each other.
LeighAnn, good points. I’d also reemphasize something that’s been said before: these young men in 1960s England did not have access to the kind of psychological / therapeutic orientation that we now take for granted. Communicating about difficult emotions and being able to reflect on patterns of behavior was just not something they grew up with. I don’t think anyone needed to have nefarious motives for things to fall apart — it’s really pretty amazing that they didn’t fall apart earlier.
Anybody buying the line that “Yoko wasn’t the problem” or “Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles” please just do one thing.
All major business decisions by Apple have to be approved by all four parties. Which means, if Yoko is pissed, nothing happens.
Not Anthology. Not 1. Not the 2009 remixes, or the 50th anniversary box sets. Not Rockband. Not the Ron Howard movie. Not the Peter Jackson movie. Nothing. That’s billions of dollars of revenue.
Now think of the person you dislike the most.”Would I say I liked them, for a billion dollars?”
It may be so, Yoko may have had nothing to do with it. But there’s a HUGE reason for all four Beatles to make nice, and that should be factored into your appraisal.
Another thought that came to add on to is after Yoko and John get together following his Lost Weekend that there seems to be more balance and maturity in their relationship in that they don’t seem to have an obsessive need to cling to one another. They were happy to divide and conquer the business and home and child rearing, Yoko didn’t object or stop John from occasionally travelling with Sean with out her, Julian spent time with them in New York and John in those last few years was trying to reconnect with his extended family. Even Double Fantasy was a more balance creative venture.
So I do think that they self reflected on that 68-69 in each other back pockets period and adjusted their relationship once back together. Again I’m sure their relationship was not perfect and they had their moments, especially given Yokos brief relapse, but I do think they evolved as people from 1968 to 1980
@Cazz, great comment. I’m always interested in people with any information that sheds any light on the level of LSD use Lennon had. Do you mind my asking if the change was incremental? Lennon up until December 65 or so seems to be basically the same person, and 66 seems to be the year he changed.
Thanks @MichaelBleicher. I tried to find sources on how Lennon was bored in Surrey and dropping lots of acid – they are floating around in the internet somewhere. Apparently Lennon said he did a 1,000 trips, which seems to be an exaggeration (where would he have found the time?) Discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/beatles/comments/aod219/if_john_lennon_took_lsd_1000_times_over_the_span/
Then I found this quote on the Beatles Bible from Cynthia Lennon:
‘When John was tripping I felt as if I was living with a stranger. He would be distant, so spaced-out that he couldn’t talk to me coherently. I hated that, and I hated the fact that LSD was pulling him away from me. I wouldn’t take it with him so he found others who would. Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again.’
Cynthia Lennon
A quote from Lennon himself:
‘I had many. Jesus Christ. I stopped taking it ’cause of that. I mean I just couldn’t stand it. I dropped it for I don’t know how long. Then I started taking it just before I met Yoko. I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s and all that shit. We were going through a whole game that everybody went through. And I destroyed meself. I was slowly putting meself together after Maharishi, bit by bit, over a two-year period. And then I destroyed me ego and I didn’t believe I could do anything. I let Paul do what he wanted and say, them all just do what they wanted. And I just was nothing, I was shit. And then Derek [Taylor] tripped me out at his house after he’d got back from LA. He said, ‘You’re alright.’ And he pointed out which songs I’d written, and said, ‘You wrote this, and you said this, and you are intelligent, don’t be frightened.’ The next week I went down with Yoko and we tripped out again, and she freed me completely, to realise that I was me and it’s alright. And that was it. I started fighting again and being a loud-mouth again and saying, ‘Well, I can do this,’ and ‘Fuck you, and this is what I want,’ and ‘Don’t put me down. I did this.’
John Lennon
Lennon Remembers, Jann S Wenner
I told a friend recently I’d dropped acid 6 times and she thought that was a lot! I’m kinder to my brain these days
Interesting.
I think Lennon’s original mental state was something he tried to medicate/control via drugs (beginning with alcohol), which is still common today and in 1957 would’ve been the only realistic option for him. (No teen therapy in Liverpool back then, I’d guess.)
Then the drugs became their own disorder; addiction yes, but also the spiritual emergency I’ve mentioned, which perhaps occurred in India. That would make all kinds of sense.
The acid alone would’ve altered John. It’s amazing that the guy in 1980 was recognizable at all. He was a genius, rich, and famous, but he was just a person with a person’s nervous system.
I agree with you that there was a lot of self-medicating. I think he carried a lot of emotional trauma which wasn’t even a thing back then. Having seen what too many drugs did to this friend of mine, it is amazing John held it together. Maybe that is a testament to his strength of character. My friend was not a strong person (despite a more emotionally stable life). We are all different and the effects of drugs on neuro circuitry are not fully understood. Having done some study in neurophysiology however, the brain has a capacity – within limits – to regenerate and heal.
John again on acid:
‘I’ve never met anybody who’s had a flashback. I’ve never had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I’ve never met anybody who had any problem. I’ve had bad trips and other people have had bad trips, but I’ve had a bad trip in real life. I’ve had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant. I don’t have to take anything.’ All We Are Saying, David Sheff, 1980
I think it would be fair to say that ‘millions of trips’ is exaggerating a little. I’d settle for hundreds.
My reply feature isn’t working, but the idea that John was a “joy” to work with is, like the idea that John was “just joking” when he announced he was Jesus Christ, one of these notions that deserves pushback not because this is the Internet, but because if we’re not going to be honest about the evidence, there’s no point in discussing the Beatles 50+ years after they’ve broken up. There is no evidence that John was “a joy” to work with in 1968-69. I can think of various specific examples, but the main point is that installing an outsider who did not like the Beatles, did not respect their creative process, and *did not keep her disdain for those things to herself* was not joyful for any of the other Beatles or George Martin. Neither was showing up to sessions stoned on heroin, and there’s definitely quotes about how that addiction was hard for the other Beatles because they never know in what state John was going to show up. Neither shitting all over McCartney’s and Harrison’s songs during the Get Back sessions — which is *on tape* — or bringing a double bed into Abbey Road for the portion of the sessions to which he actually was present.
It’s one thing to have differing interpretations of what something in the historical record means, but pointing to something and simply declaring that it’s something else troubles me, not least because it’s something we struggle with as a society in general right now, and if we can’t be honest when discussing a defunct rock group, how are we going to confront climate change, pandemics, and a slide toward facism?
Given how self-consciously messianic John would become in 1969 -both in his appearance and public (but unfortunately, perhaps, not private) behaviour -I am inclined to think not only was his announcement that he was JC not a joke, nor a fleeting delusion that dissipated with a single acid trip, but a prolonged conviction that probably did not begin to abate until his breakdown in early 1970.
Well stated @Michael Bleicher.
One of the aspects that I am finding distasteful in my post mid-life sudden interest in the Beatles is the automatic reaction that is expected by many to strike a seraphim like pose in reverence when it comes to discussing John and the JohnandYoko combo.
This is nothing less than a wilful refusal to approach the facts as they are and to do so without adornment and/or embellishments.
Most history requires fifty years to pass before the best analyses can be made. Even well trod terrain such as The Cuban Missile Crisis is even now getting fresh insights from scholarship.
We are at that fifty year point now post Beatles and one would hope and expect that we could, collectively, set hagiography to the side in return for cool and crisp scholarship. I think it has gotten much better, but there is still a great ways to go. Fortunately sites like this are helping the cause of rational viewing of the events and personalities of the Beatles before, during, and after.
Spot on, @Neal — I have always felt that, since The Beatles were a world-shifting event, I believe they deserve the same level of forensic discussion as conventional history–while at the same time, attempting to avoid the obvious blind spots of the historian’s art. Namely, if something didn’t leave a written trace, it didn’t happen.
My hope is that we use the historical record to get to some closer vision of the truth, and then a deep knowledge of the principles as people to surmise appropriately.
But that impulse, which you see on this site and some others is more than counterbalanced by the internet’s culture of conflict, and reflection of every topic through the speaker. If the speaker is wise and thoughtful, the opinion can be useful (or not); but if the speaker is mired in a distorting personal issue, the opinion can move the discourse away from the truth. And on the internet, the past doesn’t exist, not as an equivalent to the present. The past is a cartoon, an imperfect, rather dumb version of what’s happening to me, right now. This makes discussions of pop culture particularly challenging. JohnandYoko, for example, is never discussed in terms of 1969, only the present.
A seldom-discussed but interesting aspect to “JohnandYoko” is simply how appealing it was to some at the time–how snugly it fit into that wave of feminism–and how much of our current discussion isn’t really about John or Yoko or even JohnandYoko, but a shadow-discussion about patriarchy now on the one hand, and contemporary messaging on the other.
Far from being reviled, Yoko’s domineering, business-first persona is unquestionably lauded, because it fits with a certain contemporary vision of feminism and empowerment. And because those things are good (and they ARE good), discussion of her life is called GOOD! and then shut down. Lennon wrote a whole song about his isolation from Yoko–“I’m Losing You”–the better version of which (with Cheap Trick) was vetoed by his wife. Those are facts, and they paint an unflattering picture. But because they suggest that Yoko wasn’t a very nurturing partner to John, a certain kind of fan airbrushes those facts.
The idea of the nurturer-yet-CEO is a feminist fantasy; just as CEO-but-Christian is a masculinist fantasy. We will never see Yoko Ono clearly until we cop to the comforting lies a certain kind of messaging feeds.
JohnandYoko is pure wish-fulfillment; it was for certain people in 1969, and it is for a different kind of people in 2021. But what was it then? How did it function in the lives of John and Yoko and the people around them? Was it wise, in the end? Or not? A certain kind of honesty and detachment needs to be applied here, and people just don’t do it. Not yet, anyway.
John did write about 50% of the White Album and Abbey Road and outside of Come Together and The Ballad of John and Yoko, songs like Julia, She’s So Heavy, Because, Happiness is a warm gun, Dear Prudence are well regarded musically and lyrically.
Paul reportedly would go around playing Happiness is a warm gun to anyone who would listen to ask their opinion so regardless of any personal or substance issues the Beatles themselves still valued John’s creative input. Contemporary takes on Plastic Ono Band call it one of the precursors to grunge and metal music. Imagine will probably still be an anthem in another 50 years because of the timelessness of its message.
As for whether he was a joy to work with I think the point of the break up was they all weren’t a joy to work with. Ringo quit because of Paul, George quit because of both Paul and John, George was becoming more interested in playing and writing with other people then his band and wasn’t he trying to push for new members, George Martin got fed up of all their drama and quit. John’s heroin use and Yoko was a definite impact but I think there was unpleasantness shared around.
But then as Giles Martin and Peter Jackson have said when going through the archives it’s taught them the Beatles were more often then they are given credit for capable to put that aside for the sake of music.
I love John’s work on the White Album, Abbey Road and “Across the Universe”. I don’t think its a step down at all. But I’m a Beatles fan so what do I know.
@LeighAnn – I don’t know what your source is for the Paul/Happiness is a Warm Gun story, but I would be very interested to find out. Much like your claim that you had ‘heard’ that John’s IQ was 160, I have never read that anywhere, and I also think it is nonsense.
Have you ever been the business partner of a heroin addict? Quite clearly not because if you had you would understand that being the business partner of a heroin addict is about as far from being joyous as it is possible to be. The problems in that band were caused by John and Yoko. If the others behaved badly, they did so because of the pressures his heroin addiction put on them and their joint business.
John brought song fragments into the Let It Be sessions, and Paul turned them into songs. What choice did he have? Someone had to take responsibility and none of the others were capable. I am quite sure that Paul wasn’t a joy to work with. Nor would anyone be under those circumstances. Most people would down tools and walk out – which he did, as soon as he was able to do so with his reputation (at least partly) intact. The amazing thing is that he didn’t do it sooner, and that is a testament to how much he loved John – though I can’t quite decide whether John deserved it.
Will Paul’s own words help?
PAUL: “I’d like to talk about it ‘cuz I like it, you know. It’s a favorite of mine. Umm, the idea of the ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ thing is from an advert in an American paper. It said, Happiness is a warm gun, sort of thing, and it was ‘Get ready for the long hot summer with a rifle,’ you know, ‘Come and buy them now!’ It was an advert in a gun magazine. 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.'”
I mean you only have to listen to the music and the vocals to see how happy and energised the Beatles sounded in that song.
Forgive me if I’m wrong but I can’t help but think your implying that John was being carried by Paul and the other Beatles making him somehow less worthy of acclaim for his own contributions.
But The Plastic Ono band is a well regarded album that critics in contemporary takes have written about how influential it was in the eventual grunge rock genre. Musicians like Bono Lenny Kravitz and Kurt Cobain have mentioned in interviews how impactful that album or songs on that album were for them. Paul didn’t help John “finish that off”.
The Imagine album again well regarded and the song Imagine will probably still be an anthem for the next 50 years. Paul didn’t help John “finish that off”.
John is a more then capable musician in his own right. Just like George and Ringo were more then capable musicians in their own right and found success in their own right.
I highly recommend you watch Pauls documentary on Hulu because 50-60 years on you can see how highly he regards all his bandmates and what they achieved together.
All four of them made magic together AND all four of them imploded together.
@LeighAnn – I said that the problems in the band which led to its break up were caused by John and Yoko, and specifically, by John’s heroin addiction. I’m not sure why you have interpreted that as a statement that John was not a ‘capable’ musician or that Paul did not hold him in high regard. It’s indisputable that The Beatles was John and Paul’s band and that together they wrote the songbook of the 20th Century.
However, it is absolutely true that (1) John was being carried by Paul during the Let It Be sessions and (2) the statement that John was ‘a joy to work with’ during those sessions is absurd.
Of course, the truth is neither here nor there if it’s that important to you to believe that John and Yoko weren’t to blame or that John’s life wasn’t devastated by his heroin addiction. People will generally believe what they want to believe, right?
As for Plastic Ono Band, I don’t really have an opinion, except to say that I am not surprised at all that it had an impact on Bono and Kurt Cobain.
Except the problems in the band weren’t all caused by John and Yoko of John Heroin.
The Beatles didn’t want to tour after 1966.
Brian committed suicide. Paul has spoken – I think during anthology- about how he pushed Magical Mystery tour because he was worried if they didn’t get back in to the studio they would fall apart. John said they felt they were f@cked after Brian died.
They created Apple which was a financial chaotic nightmare that none of the Beatles were really equipped to run successfully.
They lost the rights to NEMS and Northern Songs.
Paul pushed for Linda’s dad to be their new manager which caused tension with the other Beatles who felt he was already asserting to much control over the band.
John, with support from George and Ringo, Pushed for Allen Klein which caused tension with Paul who didn’t trust him and because he wanted Eastman.
Creatively they weren’t collaborating as a band and it was very much whoever’s song it was would tell the others how to play.
They all had personal resentments with one another.
George was losing interest and was increasingly seeking out other musicians and was embracing his Eastern philosophy beliefs.
Ringo was losing interest as he felt they weren’t really playing as a band on records anymore but instead recording in fragments and that he was often left to sit around uselessly in the studio as a result.
John has said that after they stopped touring it made him think about what life is like after the Beatles and is what sparked him to start pursuing interests outside the Beatles.
Paul was constantly made to feel like he was the bossy leader by having to keep cajoling the rest of the Beatles who didn’t want to be there making him depressed as a result.
Yoko and Heroin are a factor in the Beatles breakup but they weren’t the only factor. As all four Beatles have suggested at one point or another.
None of the Beatles from what I have seen ever went on the record and seriously indicated or expressed support for getting back together full time.
And myself personally I don’t see the point in trying to blame or vilify specific Beatles for the breakup because I honestly don’t think they were poorer for breaking up. They achieved in 8 years what very few bands or performers/musicians have achieved even today, if any at all. Even if they had managed to put aside their bitterness, clashing egos and Johns heroin and Yoko, would they have produce anything that eclipsed what they already managed to achieve? Or instead of finishing on top would they have made a whole bunch of sub par albums, struggled to keep up with the changing music landscape and petered off in popularity and influence?
If John and George had lived and they stayed a performing band into their 80s like the Stones would that really have made them a more significant band then they already are?
I’m just happy that on a personal friendship level they got back together, and musically we’re still contributing and helping one another.
If John and George had lived longer maybe they would have reunited for one off significant occasions like Live Aid or the London Olympics or something like Glastonbury or Coachella.
But my love and appreciation of the Beatles isn’t dependent on them staying together.
Why is what LeighAnn said about Paul playing “Happiness is a Warm Gun” to people so hard to believe? According to Wikipedia (The Beatles on Apple Records – 2003), both Paul and George named it their favorite song on the album. Does John have any redeeming characteristics in your opinion? I’m curious.
@Michelle, I’m going to approve this comment but openly combative things like “Does John have any redeeming characteristics…” are going to get you trashed from now on. Please try to restrain yourself.
Paul also used the song’s three distinct parts transitioning in one song for Band on the Run as well.
@LeighAnn, an important point of fact: Lennon did not write about 50% of Abbey Road.
Come Together — 75% John (25% to Paul and Ringo for that killer rhythm, which wasn’t John)
Something — 100% George
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer — 100% Paul
Oh! Darling — 100% Paul
Octopus’ Garden — 100% Ringo (with an assist from George)
I Want You (She’s So Heavy) — 100% John
Here Comes the Sun — 100% George
Because — 100% John
Medley — 80% Paul, 20% John (and John HATED it).
Here’s an example of John’s commitment level at this time: “(Sun King) was just half a song I had that I never finished so it was just a way of getting rid of it without ever finishing it.”
A Hard Day’s Night is John Lennon going full-blast; that simply wasn’t the case in 1969, and to believe otherwise is to ignore basically ALL his statements about the later Beatle years. His feelings about the LP are very clear, not super-positive, and here.
Out of 9 tracks (if you count the medley as one track) he wrote three songs Come Together, Shes so heavy and Because and contributed pieces to one other with the medley including Sun King and also it was both his and Paul’s idea to have the guitar battle in The End. So that’s 4 songs out of 9. Your right not precisely 50% percent but 44-45%. If you count the medley as individual tracks then yes his contributions look like less.
But the three songs he did contribute are quality contributions that are highly regarded and even outright loved contributions so it hardly suggests he was creatively deficient.
Also if John was on a creative decline from 69 how does he go straight into two very well regard solo albums, one of which is regarded as influential on later music genres like grunge, metal and even punk.
I personally feel that what’s great about the Abbey Road is that all of the Beatles pulled their weight on that album and that the music sounds like it was made by a band that wanted to make a great album.
Also I would add if we are not going to give 100% credit to John for Come Together because of Paul bass playing on the track. Then that’s the same as not giving 100% credit to George for Something since Paul also played great bass on that song – in fact he probably had a better bass line in that song then CT- and Paul and John helped George with the early writing/formation of the song. I wouldn’t deny George full credit for Something.
@Michael Gerber. You raise points that are meat and mead to thinking about how we approach the Beatles as history.
Apart from the usual traps that might ensnare even the best of historians and writers/researchers, I had not, until you described it, realized just how widespread it is within Fandom to use the Beatles as mirrors to seemingly, and perhaps even solely in many cases, reflect the observer’s likes, dislikes, and purported morals/principles/standards.
Certainly we all enjoy projecting our likes and dislikes outward at times, and not to sound too school-marmish about it, there is a time and a place for it and that time is not when one should be sifting the facts in a dispassionate and disinterested manner. The pitfall, as you so aptly describe, is that the Beatles are reduced into becoming that reflecting pool onto which each generation pours its cultural zeitgeist and norms. Tempting to be sure, but that is not proper history.
Not that we should advocate for a dry and dusty “just the facts ma’am” wet blanket approach for the Beatles are fun to each of us for different reasons, but imbuing them with motives and thoughts that were not theirs to start with is a hiding to nowhere.
It is dawning on me that it is actually much more rewarding to approach this history without that encumbrance of larding it up with pre-conceived notions and biases. While there might be a sugar rush of doing it the Fandom way, it leaves one still hungry.
A bit of a mea culpa here however. You mention how the Beatles were world-changing and that is why I advocate that Paul sit before a panel of qualified writers, researchers, historians, and commentators for as long as it is required to try to tease out some of the remaining questions.
Three problems with that of course. The first is that it would be his memory alone and cross-checking questions of motives and feelings is impossible even if he were to do this–which he will not.
The second, as you touched on elsewhere, is that it still takes four to decide anything that comes out as representing the Beatles. Would he have to vet such a project with the other three parties? Perhaps.
The last reason is the cause of my mea culpa. Maybe I fall into exactly what I just criticized Fandom for doing and that is projecting my idea onto Paul that there are still things out there that he needs to discuss. My wish for more. My idea that what we know is somehow akilter to what was fact. He obviously has not felt the need to discuss much other than the top layer and so it will remain.
So in leveling my ire at Fandom I realize that I, errantly, wish there were a way around how history really “works.” But alas!
@Neal, well said.
But we must remember that it was this reflecting pool quality which, in some small part, made The Beatles the special thing they were, and are. John talked about them being in the crow’s nest of the ship of the Sixties; they didn’t discover things like LSD. Much more interestingly, they had an unerring sense of what to amplify and what to avoid, as well as being progenitors.
After 1980, however, they’ve changed from a definable ongoing phenomenon in conversation with their era into a kind of raw material. Mew generations form this matter into what they desire it to be–witness the turn towards George in recent decades. We’re about to shut this blog down, and part of the reason is that I feel this process happening more and more, and want to preserve a kind of integrity; I know Devin and I were very particular about respecting the Beatles as historical source material–addressing them in their own time, their own context–and I feel Nancy has done that too. But there’s simply not a lot of interest here or anywhere for that, and hasn’t been for years. One could write a fascinating post on (for example) the impact of The Beatles on the Weathermen/SDS, for example–but the discussion would devolve quickly, and I’m simply too old to referee John vs. Paul or Yoko vs. the World. It’s just not important, useful or interesting.
Even topics like Lennon assassination theories haven’t been allowed here simply for titillation. One, I wanted to air them because at that time, the culture was full of them–and that said so much that was interesting about the period 1963-80. Two, there was a definite “rush to judgment” in the case, in part because it was so, so painful for anyone who had a strong interest in the Beatles or the utopian dreams of the 60s. And three, I felt that given who John Lennon was particularly in regards to conspiracy culture (he loved it), he not only wouldn’t have minded the discussion, but relished it. If it had happened to Paul, he would’ve been the leading proponent of it. So there’s been a definite editorial bent to Dullblog since the beginning, but all the posts are being endlessly encrusted with the wrong kind of fan-talk. So we’re either going to run it without comments or go on indefinite hiatus.
The tendency of fans to put their own beliefs into Beatle mouths is also because we have so much raw data. You can find a quote for almost any belief, especially in John’s statements. Feminist OR wife-beater; murderer or pacifist; ascetic or brute capitalist–it’s all in the historical record, there if you want to create a Custom Lennon. With John particularly, it comes down to judgment after wide reading and thinking, and most fans–heck, most people–simply don’t want that. They like what they like, and feel the rest tends to tarnish–something I’ve never understood. The things that other fans eschew, I feel make J/P/G/R much more fascinating and human, and their accomplishments more impressive. That’s why I’ve never really minded Goldman, nor really understood the uproar about him. To squawk over the possibility of Lennon visiting Thai whorehouses–that’s a fan’s morality, not a late 70s rock star’s. To say, “I wouldn’t visit a Thai whorehouse” is of course entirely appropriate; but to feel it’s a scurrilous attack on a guy who admitted frequenting whorehouses? I don’t get it. To say, “Well, he was married, so it’s an attack on his marriage”–once again, that’s applying a conventional morality to a guy whose life, and surely marriage, was resolutely unconventional. And to not see that at this late date is…these people were not like us. That’s why we’re writing about them.
If John Lennon were all the things in Goldman’s book, every single one, he would’ve still made all that great music. So maybe I wouldn’t have liked him, or he me; but that’s a fan’s fantasy anyway.
@Michael wrote: To say, “I wouldn’t visit a Thai whorehouse” is of course entirely appropriate; but to feel it’s a scurrilous attack on a guy who admitted frequenting whorehouses?
Can you direct me to where John admitted frequenting male prostitutes? I googled Goldman/Thai whorehouses and found this line in the book: “John might have indulged himself with a Thai boy.” You don’t see the problem with that?
HD crew, I begin to see your issue. This kind of quibbling over specifics when your point was about the generalities would frustrate me, too. Because when John has admitted visiting whorehouses, then the finer points of “but WHICH kind of whorehouses are they saying he visited?” is just … bizarre, but okay. (Here’s a thing from my point of view: underage prostitution is going on RIGHT NOW and pervy Joe Schmoes, without even Beatle-levels of access, are partaking; that’s the tragedy, not that some dude in 1988 insinuated that John Lennon, who could buy an ancient Egyptian mummy and install it in his house, might have also partaken.) And yet, as you say, that’s not the REAL point. Ultimately, what made Goldman’s book painful for me was not the scurrilous gossip (engendering the kind that of plebian outrage I can only imagine John Lennon would feel bemused over; I’m reminded of Yoko’s SHOCK over someone saying that John MASTURBATED omg) but the casual cruelty and lies he ascribed to John when John was supposed to be the one with the big heart, and the reliance upon the occult and shady characters like the Greens and buying antiquities for Special Powers and all that nuttiness, and his depressions and addictions and what they ultimately meant for his life. That’s where Goldman failed to account for the people who DID love John Lennon personally and professionally.
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Anyway, I’ve learned a lot from this blog, even if I don’t always agree 100%, and I’ll be sorry for the loss of intelligent conversation, and further insight and information. 😀
@Michelle, I of course deplore sex trafficking and any kind of coerced sex, regardless of age. But I also do not think it is particularly rare, and given our knowledge of people like Jeffery Epstein and Weinstein, it seems regrettably common among the very wealthy and powerful. And we know about Thai sex tourism because people engage in it. We do not know if John Lennon did that; we can guess, but it’s only a guess. We do not know why Goldman wrote that; we can guess, but it’s only a guess.
I certainly hope John did not do that, because (as my wife just said) “he was too smart not to see the harm it would cause.” But as I’ve said so many times on this blog, I simply find it difficult to judge any of these men on their sexual behavior, whether known or suspected. Their lives were just too singular, too strange in this particular regard. And I think most people are exactly as moral as circumstances allow them to be, especially in the case of physical appetites like sex or drugs. When I was 20, I was dating the nice, intelligent young women of Smith College; when John Lennon was 20, he was dating the surely equally nice, intelligent young ladies who worked on the Reeperbahn. The mores of Smith and of the Reeperbahn could not be more different; as would be the experiences doled out by each. I just can’t judge fairly; my life has been too different.
Goldman seeks to titillate, to outrage, and to destroy an idol. For me he succeeds in none of these goals.
I do not take Goldman 100% literally. I consider his portrait of Lennon to be somewhat impressionistic, as was his portrait of Lenny Bruce (a book which Lennon supposedly read and liked). Goldman’s methods were to research and interview extensively, then use the novelist’s tools to tell the story; standard New Journalism techniques, if cartoonish in result. A lot of the same people who bitch about Goldman’s scalding portrait of Lennon have no problem with Hunter S. Thompson’s equally demonic portrait of Richard Nixon, which was based on much much less research, and was published by (of all places) Rolling Stone. Could it be that what we are willing to know about someone is determined not by the truth, but by whether they are a hero or a villain?
With this thought in mind, I simply hold “The Lives of John Lennon” very lightly, and would encourage every reader to do the same–read it, but don’t necessarily believe it. Clearly that statement was meant to shock and, in your case, it did. Was it true? Who knows? Was the one about Korean brothels in New York true? Who knows? (I can tell you that in 2019, I went to the wrong address for a lunch date on 57th Street, and stumbled into a Korean brothel. Being Midwestern, I blushed and beat a hasty retreat. I considered calling…some authority. But who? And tell them to do what? Would those girls be harmed if I blew their cover? It was not clear.)
Goldman’s Thai surmise makes me think more deeply about how little I *really know* about Lennon’s private activities, and ponder how the unfolding of his life might’ve impacted his sexuality.
John Lennon’s sexuality was formed on the Reeperbahn, and was finished on tour with The Beatles. Given the very excessive environments he was in, it would take an uncommonly abstemious man to maintain a sex life anything like that of the average fan. And Lennon was not uncommonly abstemious; he was in fact the opposite. He was a rockstar in the middle of the Sexual Revolution, an era where anything could be cured with a shot of pencillin.
So did he sleep with women? Yes. Hordes, likely. Men? In my view, probably. Underage people? Likely–bodies do not come with a time stamp. Groups? Likely. Every race creed color and persuasion? Sure. Did he at least TRY outre sexual practices (ie, kink)? Very likely. A have a friend who is a dominatrix, and she told me it’s like this: “Kink is simply spicy food. Normal sex is like comfort food. Always enjoyable, but sometimes you want something a bit more exotic or out of the ordinary–spicy–especially if all you’ve eaten is comfort food.”
I do not think John Lennon’s sexuality–or his drug use–or his tax bracket–was anything like that of an average Beatles fan. I don’t know if he had sex with Thai boys. I do know this is what he said to Jann Wenner:
“What about the tours?
The Beatles’ tours were like Fellini’s Satyricon. If you could get on our tours, you were in. Wherever we went there was a whole scene going. When we hit town, we hit it, we were not pissing about. You know, there’s photographs of me groveling about, crawling about in Amsterdam on my knees, coming out of whore-houses and things like that, and people saying, “Good morning, John,” and all of that. And the police escorted me to the places because they never wanted a big scandal. I don’t really want to talk about it because it will hurt Yoko, and it’s not fair. Suffice it to say, just put it like they were Satyricon on tour and that’s it, because I don’t want to hurt the other people’s girls, either, it’s just not fair.
YOKO: How did you manage to keep that clean image? It’s amazing.
Because everybody wants the image to carry on. The press around with you want you to carry on because they want the free drinks and the free whores and the fun. Everybody wants to keep on the bandwagon. It’s Satyricon. We were the Caesars…”
I know a fair bit about Caesars, and that passage in Lennon Remembers always makes me think of the following from Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars:
“[43.1] On retiring to Capri Tiberius devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions.
[43.2] Its bedrooms were furnished with the most salacious paintings and sculptures, as well as with an erotic library, in case a performer should need an illustration of what was required. Then in Capri’s woods and groves he arranged a number of nooks of venery where boys and girls got up as Pans and nymphs solicited outside bowers and grottoes: people openly called this “the old goat’s garden,” punning on the island’s name.
[44.1] He acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or be told, let alone believe. For example, he trained little boys (whom he termed “little fishes”) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles. Unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction.”
I think one should read Goldman in much the same spirit as one reads Twelve Caesars. There is truth in it, sometimes a lot; but all of it is not the truth, and sometimes none of it is. It is a fable, a morality tale. And I simply don’t see much meaningful difference between what Goldman spun and Lennon admitted, in this particular case. To believe that Lennon, as he crawled out, had much thought for the legal status of the prostitutes he’d just visited is…a man who thinks of such things does not go to whorehouses in the first place. He realizes he’s in the wrong place, stammers, blushes, and walks back down the stairs.
@Michael
Sorry to read that you are shutting down your blog though I can understand why from your explanation.
I do hope you keep it archived and available however, as many of the articles are absolutely first rate. It would be a shame to have the Beatles interested public not be able to read such good writing.
Let us know if you set up a funding effort to keep those articles on a public site.
Fair winds I your future efforts!
Thank you, Neal! I may start a blog on the history of the 60s and 70s.
I do expect to be able to pay to keep the old articles available.
I’m sorry this is shutting down but I can understand why. I only discovered it recently, and have learnt a lot. In being realistic about what drove the Beatles apart, we should try and stick to facts, difficult though that is because even what people say is filtered through their perspective/agenda/emotional state. I just know for sure that the break-up makes me sad. I do wonder though, if they’d together whether the music would have continued to be great or dropped off in quality. Some people think they were a band in decline. I wouldn’t put Let It Be at the same level as Revolver. Though of course compared with what most bands produce, Let It Be is still a masterpiece.
@Cazz, there will still be posts. Check back.
I think the Beatles would’ve surprised us again and again; nobody expected them to make the transition to Rubber Soul; or Revolver; or Pepper; or White; or Abbey Road. The business was so big and their fanbase aging, so they probably wouldn’t have been the dominant force they’d been before 1968, but could they have produced albums of the quality of Abbey Road, reflecting whatever differing styles that attracted them? I feel certain.
The breakup was a failure of imagination, particularly on Lennon’s part. (I used to include Harrison in that, but in the last ten years that’s softened based on some new facts.)
@Michael Thanks for your reply. I think you’re right about Lennon playing a big role in the break-up. I think he was having some kind of crisis and thought getting out of the Beatles would fix things, without considering what he was throwing away … What did you discover about George? I really liked George when I was younger, but these days I look at him being sullen and whiny and just get irritated at his complaints about being a Beatle.
Yea, while I love George Harrison as a musician sometimes he can be a bit hard to take with some of his eye rolling, disregard, and distancing himself from the Beatles. For fans who would give anything to have lived his life, been in the Beatles and become a legend…it just sounds ungrateful. Almost like he’s too cool for the Beatles. George wanted the fame and success as much as the rest of them but I think just grew too weary and afraid of the crowds and disliked the constant pressure and attention…plus he was not always heard within the band. Paul and John never saw him as an equal. George was Pauls friend before he was Johns…and watched while Paul formed a bond with John and a legendary songwriting partnership. George wasn’t just along for the ride he was a contributor to it all, but the fact that he was always the baby of the Beatles and not taken as seriously as he should seems to have left some bitterness.
Yes @Dave
Looking at Harrison now he sounds so ungrateful. He had an extraordinary life, with plenty of money to sit around and tinker with the handful of good songs he wrote because of the Beatles. John and Paul could have gone off and been most of The Beatles we know without him. George on his own? Nothing to hold him back from working in a shoe store and playing guitar part time and not be anything really. No worrying about controlling his ‘appetites’ then. And he wouldn’t have been in the Wilburys and whining about them being better. Ugh. I read the other day that David Gilmour said the Beatles were fantastic and he wished he’d been in them. That’s the attitude! And he’s not bad on guitar either.
Still George did put money into The Life of Brian so he gets points for that.
In before you close the comments… seeing that Erin Thorkelson Weber and Karen Hooper have adapted their blog into a podcast, maaaaaaybe that’s a way to continue the discussion aspect that used to occur in the comments section somehow? Create a podcast for the regulars to comment on new entries and raise holy hell on other subjects?
Oooh, I think that’s great–both Erin and Karen are old Dullblog commenters and have so many interesting insights about the band.
With so much pre-existing Beatle-chat in the world, I’m not interested in a Dullblog podcast–I struggle to think of what we’d do better than say, Erin or Karen. And I would feel required to do a lot of research and reading prep, as well as produce it properly, and I simply don’t have time at the moment. I have thought about doing a podcast about the Sixties, mostly as an excuse to interview people I like.
But perhaps Nancy or Devin would be so inclined? I’d support them 100% if they did.
Michael, appreciate your vote of confidence, but at this point I wouldn’t be interested in a podcast. In the past 11 years I think I’ve said the overwhelming majority of what I have to say about the Beatles, and I’ve also become less invested in defending my opinions about them.
I can kind of understand what drew John to Yoko. She was different, a bit controversial and strange, aggressive, incredibly smart, sexual, and obsessed with him. She was excitement coming into his life during a period which he felt alienated, unmotivated, and just lost as a person. He loved Cynthia at one point but I think her silent loyalty, perceived passivity, and what I would guess plainness just sort of made him lose interest over time. Cynthia was steady, agreeable, consistent, loyal. She loved John unconditionally for who he was from the beginning. John just couldn’t appreciate that for some reason. All these things about John’s fear of abandonment, being unloved, unwanted. Well here’s a person who loves you and never left you and you just walk away from it. Perhaps there were some things Cynthia could’ve done earlier to rattle Johns cage a little bit…he seemed to need that. To keep his interest
I never had much respect or appreciation for Yoko’s “art”. To me it’s just not deep, interesting, or the least bit profound. She’s a very smart woman and I respect her tenacity but people like her I tend to see through from the very get-go. And I think John did too at the beginning, but he was in a vulnerable state and eventually she broke him down. On top of that he found her physically attractive which of course doesn’t hurt.
Also John was a teenager when he met Cynthia, and who you want when your 17 and who you want when 28 can be two very different things- especially if during that time you have gone from Liverpool to the biggest star in the world. If Cynthia hadn’t got pregnant it’s almost 100% likely the relationship would not have lasted past 1963 anyway.
(Also didn’t he start dating Cynthia either right before or right after his mother died? I think that plays a part in the psyche of his relationship in the beginning as well)
I seem to recall Paul saying an interview how Cynthia was talking to him early on in their relationship about how she was looking forward to settling down with John and Paul feeling sympathy for her because it was obvious that she didn’t get John and he wanted.
I think John wanted to do the right thing and be the good father and husband, but it came at a time where his life was massively changing. To borrow a Hank Moody quote he was noble in thought, weak in action. And I don’t completely blame him or Cynthia for falling apart like they did. They were two different people who wanted two different things and whose lives were going in very different directions and who were likely much happier and better off apart then together.
I recall reading an interview with John in the late 70s where he said that if his life had been without fame and money, then he was sure that he and Cyn would have made it. This suggests that John married Cyn out of love and not duty. I feel sorry for Cynthia Lennon. She was a gifted artist who won her place at the Liverpool College of Art through merit. She had to give up her career when she became pregnant to John. I think it should be remembered that Cyn was a 23-year-old mother who had many a sleepless night with a new crying baby, then later with teething , potty training and all the other challenges of raising a young child. And all this mainly alone through the whirlwind of fame she never expected to have. Or getting accidentally dosed with LSD she never asked for. It’s unfair that Cynthia is seen as a dull, matronly woman with nothing of importance to give. I don’t know why anyone would expect an exhausted young mother to be able to carry an intelligent conversation with her husband or with anybody during the milieu of the mid-sixties. And shame on Paul for suggesting that Cynthia wasn’t a strong woman. She made a damn good job of raising Julian through extremely difficult circumstances. Personally, I think he turned out to be the most stable and down to earth than the rest of them put together.
I think I’ve read it too…where he says something “If xyz…I know Cyn and I would’ve made it” don’t recall the full quote
Cynthia was an incredible woman and nothing but class and dignity. For what she ended up going through…she always kept her chin up and soldiered on and always tried to give John what she thought he needed. I’m not sure if Paul implied that Cyn wasn’t strong, I think his quote was that Cynthia told him that she just wanted to be the kind to bring John the pipe and slippers at the end of the day…where John needed someone to challenge him, intrigue him, and shake him up a bit.
According to the internet, the quote is:
This is apparently from 1974 (so during the split from Yoko), though I can’t find the source. Does anyone know?
I don’t recall Paul implying that Cyn wasn’t strong, just him saying something along the lines of her having told him she wanted John to settle down and he didn’t see that happening. What comment(s) are you thinking of?
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Although Cyn deserves plenty of props, it’s a bit much to say Julian is more stable and down to earth than the rest of the offspring combined. For the most part, I don’t see a particular lack of either attribute among them, which is pretty amazing considering all the wealth and fame – and scrutiny.
Paul didn’t imply or suggest that Cynthia wasn’t a strong woman. He flat out said she wasn’t on the Howard Stern show several years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azq8ud8oiLY
Bad Paul! If he was thinking along the lines of a strong / bold personality vs. emotionally strong / resilient, he should have made that clear.
For those curious, here’s the quote:
He goes on to talk more about Yoko, so in context, to me it comes across as saying Cynthia didn’t have a strong personality compared to Yoko, not a slam on her inner strength. Of course, YMMV.
Paul didn’t imply Cynthia wasn’t strong. He implied that Cynthias idea of her and John’s future was, from his perspective, very different from John’s view of his own future. As @laura said she wanted John to settle down and be an old married couple and, from Paul’s perspective, that was not where John was ready to go.
I agree it is unfair to say Cynthia is dull and matrimonial. She should absolutely be commended for the job she did in raising her son in difficult circumstances. But then all the Beatles and their wives/ex wives should be commended for the children they raised as other have said all the Beatles kids seem well adjusted, and don’t seem to have fallen into a trap of other celebrities kids who have gone off the wagon. I also appreciate how close they seem to be with one another socially. In regards to Julian and Sean one of the things I appreciate most, whether that is a credit to Cynthia, John, Yoko or all three, is the fact that regardless of any drama or personal feelings about their parents they have never let any of that impact their personal relationship as brothers.
While I do think Cynthia and John loved one another- the letters John wrote Cynthia in Hamburg definitely suggest John loved her- I think it’s pretty indisputable that they were married out of societal obligation and necessity given Cynthias pregnancy. Both John and Cynthia have basically said as much. I believe Cynthia described their wedding day as feeling more like funeral.
I think John was well intentioned and loved Cynthia and wanted to do the right thing by getting married- he also offered to marry his first girlfriend when she told him she was pregnant with another boys child- it’s just that he was likely in reality not ready or emotionally equipped for the responsibility especially at a time when he was becoming one of the four biggest celebrities in the world and all the fame fortune and temptation that comes with that.
Had Cynthia not got pregnant, regardless of how they may have felt about each other I have my doubts their relationship would have carried on through Beatle mania- but it’s obviously just speculation. And having said that I do think Cynthia and her marriage to John is an incredibly important chapter in the Beatles story. Without Cynthia we don’t have some of John’s and the Beatles best songs- for instance Norwegian Wood, If I Fell, Across the Universe, Getting Better (with Paul) I believe even Please Please Me was inspired by or drew from his marriage. Then obviously no Hey Jude.
And while I don’t doubt John would have taken LSD regardless, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to take as much and goes as deep as he did trying to escape the ennui he felt living in Weybridge and then maybe we wouldn’t have gotten Tomorrow Never Knows or Strawberry Fields or Lucy in the Sky etc.
Michael, Nancy and Devin.
I’m so sad to hear that you are closing your site down, but I can certainly understand the reasons.
Toxic internet, irrelevant comments. You have provided such a valuable resource for Beatles fans that don’t want to discus if Paul and John had sex, but people just want to draw it back to that.
Boring right? There’s so many other things to talk about.
I’ll continue to see what’s happening here because it’s the best blog around.
Thank you, Marlo. I am grateful for the many people who have made substantive and thoughtful comments over the years. There’s plenty here to explore for anyone new — not just the posts, but the comment threads.
I understood that the last time Paul saw Cynthia was when he drove out to see her and Julian after John left. The comments she made to him or at previous times could well have reflected her state of mind at the time – tired and lonely. John and Cyn were together for two or three years. She wasn’t a one-night stand. It was fame, drugs and differing goals that wrecked their marriage, not pregnancy. Half of that generation got married because they had to and many of them were happy and successful. It has been suggested on some of the posts on HD that John, on reflection in the late 70s, may have felt his happiest years were with Paul and the Beatles. He may have felt that about Cyn too. Why did he say those words? None of us really know what was inside his head. I do recall Paul saying in a separate interview that he didn’t think Cyn wasn’t a strong woman. Sorry, I can’t provide a source but I remember it. I think we all the know there is more than one definition of strong. I’ve been around long enough to know that Paul suffers from foot in mouth syndrome so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s backtracked on some of his more unfortunate misogynistic comments. The popular perception in and out of the fandom that Paul and Linda were the perfect parents who produced amazing children is dubious and unfair. Their daughter, Heather, had serious mental health issues (attachment disorder like John?) and their son, James, by his own admission, turned to drugs at 16 before Linda became ill. He is not successful in the same way as other Beatle kids are. I don’t know much about his youngest child except she doesn’t seem to be part of the clan.
From what I understand, Sean Lennon now has control of the estate. Yoko has stepped down, more or less.
Question:
Things will change? Things will stay the same?
Personally, I think things will largely stay the same. The estate is a giant ocean liner now. Too big for sharp turns.
Sam, I tend to agree with you that things will largely stay the same, at least for the foreseeable future. I think Sean Lennon is carrying quite a burden, being the heir of his parents’ legacy and making the decisions about the estate. For all the privileges he has, I don’t envy him.
Random thought that occurred to me is that didn’t Fred Lennon have a son with his twenty year old girlfriend? John’s sisters get a lot of coverage but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone or read anyone who has gone into detail about the fact John has a brother. Like what happened to him? Is he still alive? Did John ever have a relationship with him? The only story I can recall is Fred telling him about having another baby and John, IMO understandably, unleashing on Fred and kicking him out.
I believe Freddie had two sons from his late in life marriage. I can’t remember ever seeing anything about the younger, but the older, David, seems to be a professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/chemistry/staff/davidlennon/
The family resemblance is unmistakable. Those Lennon genes were *strong*!
@Cazz. Yep. And what’s interesting is that very early on George was the super persistent bugger who wanted into the group in the worst way (I don’t think his bus rooftop audition actually sealed the deal) but he tagged along long enough and was impressive with the guitar despite Johns reservations about his age and him looking too much like a baby. Also to his credit he was the one pushing hardest to get Pete out and Ringo in, and that was a big moment in Beatles history where George was the driving force. But yea his demeaning and above it all/bored of it all attitude regarding the Beatles sometimes rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes I wonder if his behavior was perhaps due to some sort of PTSD he had due to the insane mobbed at every turn years of Beatlemania. Ringo is on record as to loving it, having fun. But to someone else being trapped in a car while girls crawl all over it and the roof starts to collapse…another person may be fearing for his life. I do think that may have damaged George a bit
@David I think you could be right about the PTSD. But they all went through Beatlemania together, adn I think of all of them he had the most stable childhood. As for the others – Ringo was in hospital constantly as a child and I think his biological father left him, Paul’s mother died, John had massive amounts of childhood trauma …
Interesting article out today on the Get Back project – George comes across as rather curmudgeonly: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/26/beatles-final-days-get-back-let-it-be-john-harris-peter-jackson