Rush-released before too many TV viewers could send their money to Morris Levy, John’s fully mixed album was entitled simply Rock ’n’ Roll. Buyers who expected a straight nostalgia trip in the current mode were in for a surprise. Some of the tracks, like Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” and Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” certainly were just as he used to play them with the Quarrymen and first-draft Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg. Others, like Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” and Larry Williams’s “Bony Moronie,” were slowed down almost beyond recognition; Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” seemed to have collided with the Coasters’ “Little Egypt,” while “You Can’t Catch Me” sounded like the Beatles’ Come Together—subtle payback for Levy’s original complaint that John’s lyric had plagiarized Berry’s. The Ben E. King ballad “Stand by Me,” destined for release as a single, had a faintly reggae feel, testifying to Elton John’s influence, and an edge of passion—desperation even—missing from all the other safe old chestnuts.
The final track, Lloyd Price’s “Just Because,” wound up with a monologue in fruity faux-American tones: “Why, I must have been thirteen when that came out…or was it fourteen or twenty-two? I could have been twelve actually…This is Doctor Winston O’Boogie saying goodnight from Record Plant East, New York. We hope you had a swell time. Everyone here says hi. Good-bye.” The cover was a black-and-white photograph of John taken during the Beatles’ Hamburg days by their exi friend Jurgen Vollmer. In his leather jacket and Teddy Boy forelock, he leaned in a doorway while indistinct figures flashed by and a blur of red neon glowed overhead.
A major objective of the Rock ’n’ Roll album was to reconnect with those many UK fans who, since 1971, had despaired of ever understanding him again. The promotional campaign included a long interview with BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test program (for which he was partly recompensed in Chocolate Olivers, a luxurious British-made cookie as yet unavailable in New York). His interviewer, “Whispering” Bob Harris, asked if he planned a return to Britain once his immigration problems were sorted out. “Oh, you bet!” John replied. “I’ve got family in England. I’ve got a child who has to keep coming over. Hello Julian! I’ve got my Auntie Mimi. Hello Mimi!” To maintain his profile back home, he even recorded a performance for a televised tribute to Lord Lew Grade, archetype of the hated “men in suits,” whose ATV company had gobbled up Northern Songs in 1969.
The burning question for Whispering Bob and every other British interviewer, even after five years of new mega-achievers in the charts, was whether the Beatles might ever return. John’s former fierce antipathy to the idea had by now softened to mere apathy. “If we got in the studio again and we thought we turned each other on again, then it would be worth it…. If we made a piece we thought was worthwhile, it goes out. But it’s such pie in the sky, you know. I don’t care either way. If someone wants to pull it together, I’ll go along. I’m not in the mood to pull it together, that’s for sure.”
At this point he did not resemble a man contemplating retirement but, on the contrary, seemed to derive more pleasure and satisfaction from the music business than since his earliest Beatle days. In Los Angeles, he had chummed up with David Bowie, who now vied with Elton John as glam rock’s premier attraction. Whereas Elton dealt in simple kitsch and pastiche, Bowie intrigued his public with elements of Brechtian theatre, classical mime, even antipop satire, through a comically hubristic alter ego named Ziggy Stardust. On the surface, his whey-faced, androgynous stage persona could not have been more different from the cheerily unpretentious super-icons of ten years earlier. Yet everything about even him—other than the question mark over his gender—was directly traceable back to the Beatles and, in particular, John.
Early in 1975, Bowie had come to New York to record an album called Young Americans, which was to include a cover version of “Across the Universe.” John attended the session at Electric Lady Studios and, during a break, picked up a guitar and improvised a three-note riff around the single word “fame.” The word and the riff gave Bowie his first number one single in America and helped launch the strutting, narcissistic disco style that would dominate record charts and pack dance clubs around the world for years to come. From rock’n’-roll nostalgic, John found himself suddenly catapulted to the cutting edge.
Yoko had long since been granted third-preference visa status as an “alien of exceptional merit”—the final step to a green card. But even after the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been legally compelled to deal with John’s application, it continued to prevaricate, suggesting that his solo musical career had less artistic merit than his Beatle one. He remained in the country on short extensions won by his lawyer, Leon Wildes, afraid even to take an internal flight in case the plane were diverted outside U.S. territory and he would not be allowed back in again. During the seemingly endless round of court appearances, he and Wildes once found themselves waiting in the same room as the INS lawyer. “I knew this guy, so I introduced John to him,” Wildes remembers. “John took out a handkerchief, knelt down, rubbed his shoes with it, and said, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Sir?’”
As Wildes had always hoped—and hoped ever more strongly as the country recovered its senses after the Nixon era—salvation came through the federal courts. Early in October, the Court of Appeals finally ruled on his main submission: that John’s 1968 cannabis conviction in the United Kingdom had been unfair by American standards. The three-judge panel found in John’s favor by two to one, and Judge Irving Kaufman remanded the case back to the immigration court. In legalese, the INS was recommended to use its “discretion”; in practice, it was told to cease all proceedings against John on the basis of an offense now proven to have been legally invalid.
Kaufman’s twenty-four-page judgment said the court “did not take lightly Lennon’s claim that he was the victim of a move to oust him on political grounds,” and characterized the former “subversive” as something like a national hero. “If in our two hundred years of independence we have in some measure realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a place for those committed to the spirit of liberty, and willing to help implement it. Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream.” The verdict was leaked to Wildes a day ahead of its official publication, but John by then was hardly in a mood to savor the victory. Yoko had gone into labor, and he was with her at New York Hospital.
After all their plans for natural childbirth, the baby was born by cesarean section on October 9, John’s thirty-fifth birthday. The delivery was difficult, and Yoko had to be given a blood transfusion while John waited in another room, racked by memories of previous miscarriages and badgered by insensitive hospital staff wanting to shake his hand or cadge an autograph. “Then I hear this crying. I’m paralysed, thinking, ‘Maybe it’s another one next door.’ But it was ours. And I was jumping around and swearing at the top of my voice and kicking the wall with joy, shouting ‘Fucking great!”
It was a boy, weighing eight pounds ten ounces. “I just sat all night looking at him, saying, ‘Wow! It’s incredible,’” John would recall. “When [Yoko] woke up, I told her ‘He’s fine’ and we cried.” They could not give the baby his father’s Christian name, since John’s first son had been baptized John Julian; instead, they chose Sean, the Irish version of John, meaning “gift from God,” and Taro, the traditional Japanese name for a firstborn.
The ordeal left Yoko desperately weak, and she was not thought ready to see Sean until he was three days old. However, John was with him virtually around the clock. Bob Gruen had a cousin on the maternity-ward staff, who later said he had never seen such an attentive new father. Concerns over mother and baby kept them in the hospital for much longer than normal. “When we finally left, John carried Sean through the long hallway of the hospital and got into the car,” Yoko remembers. “He sat still, looking at the bundle in his arms and said ‘Okay, Sean, we’re going home.??
? And that was that.”
His British family were notified of the great news, with an assurance that he’d bring the baby over to show them as soon as possible. All reacted with unreserved joy—except, alas, the one whose reaction mattered most to him. Aunt Mimi had never become reconciled to Yoko’s nationality and the baby’s Japanese middle name caused her dismay that it was not in her nature to hide. “Oh, John, don’t brand him!” Mimi pleaded, cutting her nephew to the quick yet again.
John asked Elton John to be Sean’s godfather, in recognition of the supportiveness and generosity that had helped bring about his reconciliation with Yoko. As she recalls, the invitation also had touch of Liverpool canniness. “John said that because Elton was gay, he wouldn’t have any children of his own to leave his money to.”
The only other Lennon album released in 1975 was Shaved Fish, a compilation of oldies, including “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People,” “Happy Christmas (War Is Over),” “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Imagine.” In February 1976, John’s contract with EMI/Capitol expired, and he made no move either to renew it or seek an alternative label.
“We decided—well, mainly John decided—that from here on, he was going to raise Sean and I was going to look after the business,” says Yoko. “He had read somewhere that Paul had made $25 million. He said, ‘We’ll never have that kind of money; we haven’t got any Daddy Eastman behind us, the way Paul has. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll try to make $25 million, but it’s going to take me at least two years.’ The deal was that we both stopped any kind of creative work. Neither of us was going to do any writing or recording and I wasn’t going to do any art.”
She says she was far from happy about leaving the parenting to John, in effect repeating what she had done with her daughter, Kyoko, and her ex-husband, Tony Cox. Had she been a more hands-on mother, she felt, Kyoko might not have disappeared from her life with such brutal finality. That thought was outweighed by the fear that if she formed too close a bond with the new baby, John’s old obsessive jealousy and possessiveness would return. She wanted to ensure “Sean would be loved as a joyful addition to our family and not hated as a hindrance to our relationship as husband and wife. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to take care of the business while John enjoyed his time with Sean.”
The jokey farewell at the end of the Rock ’n’ Roll album thus proved to have been for real, and gave John’s career a pleasing symmetry. He was bowing out with the very same music—the very same song, “Be-Bop-a-Lula”—that he had played at Woolton fete that summer Saturday in 1957, when Paul McCartney walked into his life and the Beatles began.
Sean’s birth seemed to dull, if never fully extinguish, the creative itch that had given him no peace since then: the unending cycle of next lyric, next chord sequence, next single, next album, next soaring hope and plummeting disappointment. He even canceled his subscription to Billboard magazine, indifferent now to who was in or out of the charts, what they had stolen from him, and what he might borrow from them. “He didn’t want to know anything about what was happening in the business,” Bob Gruen says. “If he ever had the radio on, it would be WPAT, the easy-listening station. He wasn’t signed to anyone or contracted to anyone or trying to keep up with anyone or to surpass himself any more. He just dropped out.”
Gone with the drugging and hell-raising were the adolescent selfishness, short attention span, and abhorrence of practicalities that the life of a rock star can legitimize forever. Though a nanny was employed for Sean, John always hovered nearby, ready to do anything needful, convinced that only he really knew how to do it properly. Even diaper changing, that grim horror of Julian’s babyhood, was no problem this time around. Nature stepped in, closing his nostrils, making him breathe instinctively through his mouth, transforming what he expected to be disgust and resentment into tenderness and joy. Like many before him, he realized that the cure for a void in one’s childhood is not to be looked after but to look after somebody else; that making a child’s life secure makes one’s own feel securer.
“The only part both of us found really hard was waking up in the middle of the night for feeds,” Yoko remembers. “We couldn’t handle it because neither of us was that way. So John said, ‘Let’s just drink Cognac to relax ourselves.’ and that’s what we did.” He began playfully calling her “Mother,” as if he were a northern workingman in hob-nailed boots and she a harridan in a hairnet, brewing tea on the kitchen range.
Getting Sean to sleep was his special responsibility. He would sit beside the cot and the dangling mobiles, stroking an acoustic guitar and softly singing some old Mersey folk air like “Liverpool Lou.” When Bob Gruen called up one evening, John whispered down the line that he’d just got Sean off to bed. “I said, ‘I was about to tell you about a rock-’n’-roll show, but it sounds like you’re in a really nice place already,’” Gruen remembers. “People always say John gave up making music in this time, but really he didn’t. He was singing lullabyes to his kid.” When it was his turn to bottle-feed, he’d put on a rock-’n’-roll record and dance around with the baby in his arms, as he’d seen black nurses do on the maternity ward.
It wasn’t just that he no longer went out drinking with his Lost Weekend cronies; rather than be tempted back into those bad old ways, he preferred not to see them at all. “There was a time when Keith Moon was in town—the third of the Musketeers with Harry Nilsson and John—and I had to let John know he was here,” Gruen says. “The message I had to deliver was that Keith knew he was with the baby, and was all ready to come over and be quite polite and just have tea. John was like, ‘I don’t want to have tea with Keith Moon. If I see him at all, I want to get loaded and have a party!’”
Over the next two years, he was often to feel he had withdrawn only just in time from a world that could and, with increasing frequency did, cause “acute death.” His old Black Power crony, Michael X, for instance, had come to a bad end in Trinidad, convicted of murder in 1972 and sentenced to hang. As a former colony, Trinidad still came under British law and acknowledged the Queen as sovereign. Via Jon Hendricks, John and Yoko organized a campaign to win clemency for Michael, which included a petition signed by the likes of Leonard Cohen and Angela Davis, two appeals to the Privy Council, the sovereign’s legal advisory body, and a high-profile debate at Oxford University featuring the feminist Kate Millett. All in vain: under a death warrant personally signed by Elizabeth II, Michael was executed in Port of Spain’s Royal Gaol in 1975.
The Lost Weekend never ended for Mal Evans, the former Beatles roadie, John’s bodyguard-cum-nursemaid on so many wild West Coast nights. Still adrift in L.A., Mal had grown increasingly depressed and confused, and on January 4, 1976, he was shot dead at his girlfriend’s apartment by police who later claimed he had waved an air rifle at them. Without consultation with his family back in Britain, he was cremated and his ashes were mailed to his widow, but got lost in the postal system and were never found. All that reached Lil Evans was a bill from his former landlord for cleaning the carpet stained with his blood.
On April 1, John’s father, Freddie Lennon, died in Brighton General Hospital. Freddie’s final years on the Sussex coast with his young wife, Pauline, had been happy and fulfilled. In 1973, their son, David, had been followed by a second boy, Robin. Pauline continued to be the breadwinner while Freddie looked after both children with the same surprising reserves of unselfishness and dedication John was to discover with Sean. After their last traumatic meeting at Tittenhurst Park in 1970, John had not contacted Freddie and Pauline, so was unaware that he now had a second half brother. In 1974, a British lawyer notified Freddie that he wanted to reestablish communication. But, terrified of inadvertently provoking him again, Freddie did not respond.
Seemingly unbridgeable though the gulf between them, Freddie never gave up hope of convincing John he had not walked out on him that day in 1946, thereby causing the wound that still bled into his music. This desire so far outweighed all fears of fili
al anger that in 1975 Freddie sat down to finish the autobiography he had been ordered to abort five years earlier. In a racy, readable style, touched by glimmers of his Bluecoat Boy education, he described his upbringing in the poor and humble but blade-straight Lennon clan John had barely known, his departure to sea, and all the wrong turns that came afterward. While never badmouthing John’s mother—indeed, speaking of her with undiminished love and reverence—he set down the indisputable facts that Julia had been the one to stray and that he’d been ready to take her back and adopt her out-of-wedlock wartime baby, just as he’d later offered to forgive her affair with Bobby Dykins. Daddy, in short, was always more than willing to come home. Each chapter ended with a postscript addressed directly his son and remarking how, in early life at least, their situations had often been strangely similar.
CHAPTER 2
PS Dear John…Like yourself I too was fatherless, but of course the circumstances weren’t quite as distressing as your own, which left you with a chip on your shoulder, and if I may say so, strangely enough gave you the impetus to rise above yourself to your present status.
CHAPTER 3
PS Dear John…The first time I heard your recording of ‘Penny Lane’, my thoughts immediately reverted to the Blue Coat Hospital, and of course Newcastle Road. I wondered whether some link from the past guided your pen, particularly when Mr Bioletti’s barber’s shop was mentioned, because he used to cut the hair of the boys in the Blue Coat.
CHAPTER 8
PS Dear John…Perhaps the reading of my light-hearted account of my marriage to your mother will bear comparison to the description in Hunter Davies’s biography of your own first marriage. To think you took the plunge in the same Register Office twenty odd years later, following me across the road to the ‘Big House’ for a chicken dinner. But eventually we both found the right partner.