Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries

by Geoffrey Giuliano

John Lennon was a legend in his own time. Deprived of life at a young age, Lennon has become a symbol of the '60s and '70s peace movement. But what do we really know about him as a person?

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2000

Reviews

[Paul Lyons]

What do you say about a book that is full of scathing, gratuitous sensationalism? How does one read a book that is supposedly filled with shocking truths, when that very same book makes bold statements that you personally know are not true? It's a frustrating conundrum, one I faced constantly while reading Geoffrey Giuliano's 2000 book Lennon In America. Yet despite its questionable merits, I read Lennon In America faster than any book I've read in years...

Upon reading the first 20 pages, I figured I made a mistake. Giuliano dives right in at the start of the book with as much dirt as he can dig up. We learn in short time that John Lennon cheated on Yoko Ono, engaging in oral sex with the wife of Wings guitarist Denny Lane. Then we learn about the oral sex he received from original Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe back in the early 60's, as well as his sexual encounter with Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1963. And this is just for starters...Giuliano takes great pains to point out that John Lennon was pretty much a sex-addict...What he could not get from Yoko, he got from others...and when he could not get from others...he looked at porn, hit on men, and masturbated regularly. Among the images John Lennon masturbated to were Patti Hanson (George Harrison's wife) and future star Madonna. Fantastic. What kind of book is this? This is not the kind of book I wanted to read...I checked on the author, and the publisher....all checked out legit. Giuliano has written a number of books on The Beatles, plus books on Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Townshend and more...He's also a singer/songwriter. Lennon In America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries claims to be the result of 16 years of research...citing many sources close to the Lennon inner circle (i.e. former lover May Pang, Liverpool friend Pete Shotton, etc...)...or part of the inner circle proper ( i.e. Sean Lennon, Julian Lennon, etc...). It also claims to base its information on the "Lost Lennon Diaries"...which Giuliano constantly refers to, yet never quotes verbatim. Yet despite it's many claims...Giuliano's sloppy work only serves to undermine it's "factual" telling of John Lennon's story. That said, it's one hell of a read...a real, page-turner...fact or fiction....

The picture that the book paints of John Lennon is not a pretty one...ever. Per Giuliano, John Lennon's post-Beatle life was a total nightmare of drugs, doubt, insecurity, depression, sex and violence. The book's John Lennon was a man who lost any and all control of his life. Far from the picture-perfect marriage put on display for the world to see....Lennon's marriage to Yoko Ono was a troubled one...leaving both parties very unhappy for years. Chief villain, of course, is Yoko One...whose desire for control over her husband's life and estate superseded anything and everything else. Lennon became a slave to Yoko's whims and fancies...She ruled the Lennon household, using her will power, and the consultation of mystics and tarot card readers...and he willfully let her. He ate what she told him to eat. He traveled where she told him to travel...and did not travel to where she did not approve him to travel. It its Yoko who convinced John to move to New York...and leave his Liverpool friends and family behind...forever. Sadly, after moving to America in the fall of 1971, John Lennon never ever returned to his homeland England. He seemed to have missed England terribly, yet Yoko was never enthused enough to schedule a trip for him. Instead, Lennon and Ono spent a considerable amount of time in Japan, where Yoko Ono desperately sought approval from her judgmental, affluent family.

According to the book, John Lennon was incapable of doing anything on his own. Never wanting to take responsibility...he willfully gave it to others. Yoko ran his business ventures, and ran his life. When he got on her nerves, she sent him off to vacation either at a summer house on Long Island, or in Bermuda, or somewhere else. When he was oversexed...she either provided, or allowed John Lennon to have extramarital affairs. Yoko tried to keep her husband happy...even if it meant providing him with drugs. Under Dame Ono, Lennon's health was never good. Either too frail and thin from one bad diet after another...or suffering from the unwelcome effects of cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin.

As a parent, John Lennon...per the book, was a disaster. Despite many efforts, Lennon was never able to feel comfortable enough to connect with his first son, Julian. Their relationship remained sadly strained and awkward to the very end. Despite taking 5 years off to care for his new son, Sean, John Lennon left much of the work to his nannies. Lennon loved Sean, and did spend some considerable time with him...helping to raise him. Yet he too often lost patience with the young boy...sometimes slapping, and kicking the child out of anger. Giuliano paints Sean Lennon as a helpless victim to his father's many dark moods, and temper tantrums...

Giuliano works hard to portray John Lennon as a deeply unhappy man...completely paralyzed by paranoia, depression, insecurity, a cold, controlling wife, and a loveless marriage. Despite the massive success he achieved in early in his life, Lennon would spend hours and days without any direction...holed up in his room...watching television and staring at the wall. He envied the success of his best friend/arch nemesis Paul McCartney...yet was too afraid to make a move...any move in that direction. It's a heartbreaking to read about such a sullen existence for such an important musician. It feels as it the malaise of the 70's, Yoko Ono and the walls of his apartment at the Dakota sucked the life out of him. Lennon once had strong political passions, and fought hard to obtain legal immigration status in the U.S. Yet once the fight was over, and he got his green card in 1976...there was little to no passion left. His days and nights during the mid-70's were wasted and listless...with no end in sight.

Of course, when it comes time to discuss Lennon's comeback in 1980, Giuliano stumbles completely. Despite endless discussion on John Lennon's dreams, drugs, tantrums, and masturbatory fantasies, Giuliano has little to offer when it comes to details on how exactly John Lennon got himself back into the recording studio after so many years away. Only a few pages are devoted to the recording of Lennon's and Ono's Double Fantasy record, its subsequent release and promotion...and followed by John Lennon's murder on December 8, 1980. Of course, Giuliano is dismissive of the record...making sure to let readers know the reaction to the album was "lukewarm" by both the fans and the critics...The book ends on a sad postscript...briefly discussing the struggling lives and careers of Lennon's children...Julian and Sean, and the post-Lennon life of Yoko Ono.

Look, I'm just going to say it...Geoffrey Giuliano is an idiot. His fact-checking skills are piss poor, and his writing if too often rambling, and repetitive. Among the errors I noted in the book offhand...1. Madonna did not release her first single until nearly two years after John Lennon died...so how he masturbated about her years before is anybody's guess. 2. Rod Stewart and The Faces were never an opening act for Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden. Led Zeppelin generally did not have support acts. 3. John Lennon met Paul McCartney on July 6, 1957...NOT June 15, 1956, as stated in the book. These are just the errors I noted offhand, who knows how many other errors are made in the book? Also, Giuliano writes in the Chronology at the end of the book for 16 August 1962 "For reasons that remain a mystery to this day, drummer Pete Best is unceremoniously sacked from the group and Ringo Starr is quickly brought in." Is he kidding? Does he actually think that Pete Best was sacked for "reasons that remain a mystery to this day." This um..."mystery" as he calls it has been discussed at length and solved over a thousand times in countless books, interviews, and television programs since '62. Again, Giuliano undermines his own "16 years of research" with such idiotic statements...

Yet for some crazy reason, I found Lennon In America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries fascinating. Sure, much of it his hogwash...yet it's still a very compelling read...even if perhaps only 10-20% of the book is actually true. Perhaps it was simply my strong desire to learn more about John Lennon, and believe that I was truly reading about his intimate and most personal and private thoughts and actions. I wanted to feel as if I understood John Lennon, the man...warts and all. Giuliano is moronic and untidy...yet I will give him credit for at least putting a good story together...one in which I looked forward to each and every page. What does that say about me, I wonder? Perhaps I like trash? I don't know. What I do like is the fact that Lennon In America presents one story point after the next...with little filler. There's no waxing philosophical about 70's culture, music or politics...there's no over-analytic approach to song lyrics...there's no B story that takes main John Lennon story off on a tangent. No, in Lennon In America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries, Geoffrey Giuliano just presents the "facts"...one after another...as true as Giuliano chooses to tell them. If only Giuliano could have checked his facts, and perhaps provided a less myopic view of John Lennon's life and work...then he would have had not only an engaging and entertaining book, yet a good one as well...

[Spenser Milo]

Sloppy, unchecked, and all written by an author who is so self-important he literally tells the reader how monumental his research is: "Can you imagine what it feels like to hold in your hand a document you know has the power to change the course of Beatles history completely and forever? What do you do with that?"

Well, Giuliano blames Yoko for nearly everything meanwhile adds a picture of him and her together in the photograph section. Giuliano also constantly refers to the so-called Lost Lennon Diaries yet never quotes them directly, only stating how integral they are to all gossip he's researched. Giuliano never misses an attempt to sloppily construct a chapter either. At one point in a chapter we're in 1971, and Phil Spector and Lennon are upset at each other, then suddenly Lennon is stressed about immigration, the dissolve of Apple, and Yoko's "controlling" habits. Only through your own knowledge of how time works, you realize it's actually 1974 with the Spector debacle and it's 1973 with the Yoko controlling habits, and the Apple dissolve takes place in 1976. Not once does the author lead the reader through a cohesive train of thought or a fucking story without quickly pausing to mention, yes, Yoko is bad.

I imagine Giuliano was too much in a rush to professionally edit a biography about one of the most popular figures in music history because God forbid the world should spend another minute not knowing the craziest tidbit the author was able to uncover: Lennon was, in fact, a bisexual man. Wild!

[Juliette]

Found this is a box of junk a friend was throwing out. Like you do with colorful trash, I couldn't help a flip through. And then I read the damn thing. It's as someone said here, like a horrid traffic accident. You keep looking although you feel ashamed of yourself. Of course, the writing is ghastly. But I knew that going in. It's the Yoko thing that kept me there. I suspect a lot of what this piece of shite had to say was close to the truth. About Yoko. Maybe not John. I do know their relationship is summed up in a real work of art - Annie Liebowitz's (sp?) portrait of a nude John curled up around a fully clothed, obviously bored Ono, him almost sucking his thumb. A painful picture but one that shouted the truth of who they were together. This book shouts nothing. Well, maybe it says LOOK! I WROTE A BEATLE'S BOOK. GIMME MONEY!

[K.]

Overly mythologized, sensationalized portrait of Lennon in the US containing source material that should never have been released to the public. Should be in the same crap heap of Lennon biographies alongside Albert Goldman's 'Lives of Lennon'. Garbage.

[Jeff]

I gave this one star, only because I couldn't give it zero. Mr. Giuliano tells his thoughts on John in the 70's, none of which is supported though evidence, or referenced from interviews.

[Teresa]

Pretty trashy. Hard to decide who comes off worse: Lennon, or the huge number of people who failed to protect either him or the people around him, and then gossiped to the author about it.

[Holly Throckmorton]

Very disappointing. The author could not make the story flow and was constantly jumping around. His main points seemed to be Yoko was bad and John was bisexual.

[Julio The Fox]

John Lennon understood that the worse thing that can happen to an artist is not death but decay; the kind of rot that comes with being domesticated. These Lennon diaries from his days in New York in the Seventies, a decade he called "a drag", first living in Greenwich Village and then the Dakota Building in Central Park, show Lennon, accompanied by Yoko Ono, first trying to launch a revolution, artistic and political, from the city he called "the modern Rome", a dubious compliment if ever there was one, and finally settling down into the role of husband, father and rock elder statesman. Like many a Sixties veteran John seriously believed when he settled on American shores that the revolution was just around the corner. He found allies in Yippie spokesmen Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and took to the streets, television and the recording studio publicizing his opposition to the Vietnam war, the massacre at Attica State prison, British occupation of Northern Ireland and most of all "Tricky Dickie's administration". Whether John knew the FBI had placed him under surveillance is not clear, but he courted controversy as a way to plug peace, even if it cost him his Temporary Resident Alien status. His albums from this period, IMAGINE, SOME TIME IN NEW YORK CITY, and MIND GAMES, move back and forth between political anger and personal despair. John soon found out publicity is an American nightmare, and most radicals stay radical only when revolution is en vogue. In private he took to calling Hoffman and Rubin "the Mork and Mindy of the left", and Nixon's re-election by a landslide in 1972 convinced him he'd been right back in 1970 when he declared "the dream is over". Lennon the domesticated cat took in Broadway shows, read incessantly, and finally pulled the plug on his own recording career in 1975. All of this would be of interest only to Lennon maniacs, myself included, except that as his sometime friend and full-time factotum Eliot Mintz noted "Lennon and the Seventies fit each other like hand and glove". John's mid-decade album WALLS AND BRIDGES is stuffed with the platitudes and fantasies of his generation (John later called this LP "dog shit"), while ROCK N' ROLL, an album more remembered for the lawsuits it engendered than for the music, finds Lennon wallowing in nostalgia. John's public drinking, private drug use, and publicized affair with Yoko assistant May Pang were exclamations over a decade of loss. The legal end of the Beatles with the dissolution of Apple Corps made him super-rich, some $300 million at the times of his death, and also isolated from his fans and fellow musicians. John Lennon was now hidden behind real estate, Renoir paintings and Jersey cows, all courtesy of Yoko's business ventures. Seemingly defeated as an artist John opted for fatherhood again in 1975, and at least in print, the duties of cook and baby sitter. John claimed he loved this new "post-Beatles, post-feminist" identity, which took the form of his and Yoko's 1980 DOUBLE FANTASY album, perhaps best analyzed by one British critic: "domesticity seems to have done wonders for John's soul but makes for boring music". John's savage reaction to the death of Elvis in 1977 makes for a fitting epitaph for himself, "Elvis died the day he went into the Army". Only for John Lennon, it wasn't the Army, it was the Dakota Building and its rich walls.

[Pm]

Somewhat amusing trash. Was very taken with the photos of the author with Yoko and Sean. Did they know the sort of knocking copy he was going to write aboit their family? He also scathingly refers to Lennon's sister Julia "promot[ing) her brief adult acquaintance with John in her book." That book had a coauthor... a certain Geoffrey Giuliano. Breathtaking.

The man in incredibly pushy. All those photos of him gawping at the camera with famous people are I.suppose, meant to lend him credibility. They just make him look monumentally conceited. Look at me, look.at me, LOOK AT MEEEEEEEE.

The really interesting thing would be a biography of Geoffrey Giuliano. I bet a few people would like to contribute to that.

[Rick Vickers]

I enjoyed reading this book about my all time hero John Lennon. Some of what is in the book I believe to be true but some other so called facts must be taken with a grain of salt.

[Jessica]

a delicious and captivating read. This book engages the reader in a saucy and tell-all manner. It focuses on the "ono-era" and divulges secrets and facts that other books merely brush past. It focuses on a period that had the world wondering what was going on in lennon's head. The book is post-beatles, yet references details and occurances that had a large influence on the man behind the band. The book informs the reader about experiences pre and post beatles that influenced his genius, and, at the same time, drove him to destructive and unaccepted behaviors. This book is hard to put down and lures you into the head of a man who's genius both inspired the world and, at the same time, forced the icon to be a prisoner of his own art. Hands down an excellent read for any Lennon fan. You will both pity and admire the last years of his life.

[Gwen]

Don't know why this book doesn't have more stars. As far as I can tell it is a truthful rendering of the time John Lennon spent in America. It details how Yoko controlled him and came between him and his family. (Among other things it seems strange to me that after he was able to travel abroad they went to her homeland at least twice and didn't set foot in his.) Yoko held on and now controls his estate and his name (brand).

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore the truth about John Lennon.

[Stephen Cluff]

This book portrayed itself as an unbiased look at John Lennon’s last eight years or so but instead ended up coming across as more of a sensational hatchet job than anything else. I read the whole thing but don’t feel to good about myself for doing it. Reading Lennon in America, I was gripped by the same obsession that makes nearly all drivers slow when passing an accident in order to get a better look. Not recommended, especially if you ever liked anything about John Lennon.

[Geoff W]

It was worth reading, just to find out about Lennon's love for asian women in bikini's and what he liked them to do for him.

[Dana]

I love reading anything about the Beatles. John was weird - but aren't most musical geniuses?

[Melissa]

It has so far been an eye opening experience.

[Darla Frey]

Of course I'm obsessed with John Lennnon! Aren't you? You won't be able to put this one down.

[Pete daPixie]

Many myths shattered in Giuliano's coverage of John's life in America. Spinning on the horns of a tidal wave was lost John.

[Lysergius]

Interesting to track the influence of Yoko Ono throughout Lennon's life in this period.

[Clint Priest]

Great stories on The Beatle's decade spent living in America between New York City and Los Angeles. All Beatles nerds and Lennon zealots will dig it.

[Joe Emery]

Eye opening book about Lennon's personal habits. A good read for any Beatles fan.

[Chris Platt]

Extremely insight into the post-Beatles years of John Lennon. Well written and a fascinating read.