John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

As a result, his view of the world was largely created by sheer myopia—the weird new forms that everyday people and things can take on for the nearsighted and the wild surrealism that can flow from printed words misread. In addition, he possessed the very Liverpudlian traits of a fascination with language and an irresistible compulsion to play around with it. If his weak eyes did not misrepresent some word accidentally, his quick mind did so deliberately, missing no chance of a pun, a spoonerism, or double entendre; he was an instinctive cartoonist in speech as well as on paper.

The two outstanding favorites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian facade, the incessant punning and spoonerizing, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…”) needed no setting to music.

John, the one-off, the super-original, never liked acting alone. As he would prove time and again in the future, to flourish at his most individualistic he needed a partner—a kindred spirit perfectly tuned to his special wavelength, acting simultaneously as a stimulus and an audience.

The curious thing about this stubborn ne’er-do-well was that, away from the classroom and its hated compulsion, he was a bookworm whose taste in literature far outpaced Quarry Bank’s English syllabus and who, left to his own devices, spent hours in the posture of the most conscientious student, reading, writing, or drawing.

thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for The New Yorker and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously “Thurberising” his drawings from about the age of fifteen.

Even the po-faced early fifties had not quite extinguished a time-honored British trait, handed on from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse—that of using all one’s intelligence to be unbelievably silly. Until John reached his teens, he was like a prospector, panning through the drab shale of logic and common sense that constituted his daily life at Quarry Bank and Mendips for those few stray, gleaming nuggets of absurdity.

The Goons’ most besotted fans were middle-class preadolescent schoolboys, those overserious war babies who had hitherto believed the oppressive sanity of life to be everlasting. For John, between 1953 and 1955, they were the brightest spot in his whole existence.

Prior to John’s fifteenth year, the British had regarded the process of growing up as perfectly straightforward. The system was that children went on being children until puberty was well advanced; then, virtually overnight, they turned into grown-ups, wearing the same kind of clothes as their parents, aspiring to the same values, and seeking the same amusements.

Long before it had any personal relevance for him, John had picked up on the fundamental cultural difference: “America had teenagers…. Everywhere else just had people.”

“Heartbreak Hotel” reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity.

John had a lot to guard against and it formed his personality; he was a very guarded person. I think that was the balance between us: John was caustic and witty out of necessity and, underneath, quite a warm character when you got to know him. I was the opposite, easygoing, friendly, no necessity to be caustic or biting or acerbic but I could be tough if I needed to be…The partnership, the mix was incredible. We both had submerged qualities that we each saw and knew. [We would] never have stood each other for all that time if we’d just been one-dimensional.

“If John ever thought anything or anyone was really good,” Rod Murray remembers, “he turned into a completely different person. Much quieter, more thoughtful…ready to talk seriously about serious things. And he thought Stu was really good.”

To avoid an off-putting image of crawly black bugs, John changed it to Beatals—not a pun on “beat” music at this stage, but on beating all competition.

Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them “From this day on you are Beatles with an A.” Thank you mister man, they said, thanking him.

Despite the endemic homophobia, many gay men were able to find happy and stable relationships with others like themselves. But it was Brian’s misfortune to be attracted to heterosexual males at the furthest possible remove from his own gentle and refined nature.

“John and Brian became very interested in each other,” Mimi would remember. “But not in any sordid way. That makes me sick to hear anything like that. What people don’t realise and only I know is that Brian and John both had a great love of art. They would talk for hours on end about art and paintings, and would go to the galleries together. Brian was an intellectual, and I think John found someone he could talk about things to on the same level.”

Despite his youth, Brian was a deeply paternal character who by rights should have married and raised a family. All those hitherto ungratifiable impulses to be provident and protective—and indulgent—he now poured into managing the Beatles, treating them not as his clients but as his children. This approach worked most powerfully on the one who, behind a carapace of toughness and independence, had longed for such a presence in his life since his Uncle George’s death six years earlier.

“John used to say that Stuart was the second person to have left him,” Astrid remembers. “First his mummy left him, then Stuart. I think it was the root of his anger…that people he loved the most always left him.

Moreover, as a producer of comedy records, he had worked and been on friendly personal terms with the arch-Goons Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. On that basis alone, John was practically willing to kiss his shoes.

meanwhile, all that set the Beatles apart from a hundred other pop acts with half a hit was the tireless dedication and sheer chutzpah of their manager.

“Paul was a born diplomat, and always had an instinctive understanding of what journalists wanted.

“You can’t measure success,” John would later reflect, “but…the moment I knew [Paul and I] were successful was when Roy Orbison asked if he could record two of our songs.”

Though the song was full of recognizable Lennonisms (for instance, the meticulous scansion of “apol-oh-gise to he-er”), John always gave Paul full credit for a story line that might not readily have occurred to him. “[Paul] would write a song about someone. I’m more inclined to write about myself.”

Of no small significance was that in 1963 the immemorial grip of Britain’s upper classes finally appeared to loosen. All summer, the developing revelations of the Profumo scandal had shown those with posh accents to be just as capable of debauchery and dishonor as their basest social inferiors.

George Martin, by a long way the greatest altruist and—other than Brian—the most all-round gentleman in pop music history.

The rebellious, don’t-give-a-damn image manufactured by Oldham was, in truth, very much what the Beatles had genuinely been in Hamburg and at the Cavern, before Brian cleaned them up and got them bowing and smiling. As the Stones grew ever more anarchically successful, so did John’s angry regret deepen for having—as he thought—sold out to mainstream show business too easily.

Before the Beatles’ second segment, their new Uncle Ed read out congratulatory sentiments from another giant of American popular music, the composer Richard Rodgers. The coauthor of songs like “My Funny Valentine” and shows like South Pacific called Beatlemania “harmless” and said it would be “a wonderful thing” if young people “continue all their lives to get that enthusiastic about anything.”

The initial phases of shooting A Hard Day’s Night did not impress Richard Lester overmuch with John’s potential as a screen actor. “Paul was the one obviously making an effort,” Lester remembers. “John didn’t try at all. I noticed this quality he had of standing outside every situation and noting the vulnerabilities of everyone, including myself. He was always watching.”

Though his role was to ask questions of John, he found that more often John would quiz him about the domestic and foreign problems that currently darkened America’s horizons: the vicious attacks on Dr. King’s peaceful rallies and marches, and the increasing scope of U.S. military involvement in a far-off, little-known Asian country called Vietnam. “What really surprised me was what a helluva lot John already knew about this country,” Schreiber remembers. “The thing he couldn’t understand was the violence…the murder of Kennedy, the police brutality against innocent marchers in the South, the guns he saw being carried everywhere. I could see the soul of an activist building up in him.”

“John really loved Ringo,” Maureen Cleave remembers. “And he often said how much he loved George, which was a slightly unusual thing for a man to come out with in that era.” He tended to socialize much less with Paul; theirs was always first and foremost a professional relationship.

Paul recalls working methods that had changed little since their truant afternoons in his Forthlin Road living room. “John would get up when I arrived, I’d have a cup of tea and a bowl of cornflakes with him and we’d go up to a little room, get our guitars out and kick things around. It would come very quickly, and in two or three hours time I’d leave.” They seldom bothered to tape a song-in-progress, keeping up the old rule that if both could remember it next day, it worked.

Their individual composing techniques, Martin remembers, were utterly different. “Paul would think of a tune and then think ‘What words can I put to it?’ John tended to develop his melodies as the thing went along. Generally he built up a song on a structure of chords which he would ramble and find on his guitar until he had an interesting sequence. After that, the words were more important than anything else. They used to come out sometimes as a monotone, just one note punctuated by the rhythm of the words. He never set out to write a melody and put lyrics to it. He always thought of the structure, the harmonic content and the lyrics first, and the melody would then come out of that. “However good the song was, John never seemed that confident about it. In all the time we worked together, I never heard him hype his own work in any way. After he’d played over something to me, his first question was always ‘What do you think?’ The second was ‘What shall we do with it?’ After a time, I realised that he was actually embarrassed by his own voice.

“But then, you see, John didn’t like much. It wasn’t just his voice; everything in his mind was much better than reality, always.

In many ways, Martin remembers, John was more easygoing than the perfectionist, workaholic Paul. “If we were doing a song of Paul’s, he’d get hold of his guitar and tell George what he wanted him to play in the middle; he’d get on the drums and show Ringo what he wanted. And that used to irk the piss out of them sometimes, obviously. When John recorded a song, he let other people do what they were going to do: Paul would work out a bass line, maybe add a little bit here and there, and George would do his guitar solo, and Ringo would take care of the beat. John would be entirely focused on his part of things, and leave the others to get on with theirs. As long as the end result was up to standard, he’d be happy. “Paul was his sounding-board, of course, and George had a huge amount of input, which, to my eternal regret, I didn’t sufficiently recognise at the time, but Ringo’s opinion was always important to John, just because he knew that with him there’d never be any bullshit. He’d often turn to Ringo and ask what he thought and if Ringo said, ‘That’s crap, John,’ he’d do something else.”

He took his role as rhythm guitarist with extreme seriousness, learning new chords as diligently as he ever had, sometimes even proudly announcing, “I’m playing a G minor seventh here, Paul!” But all other musical disciplines bored him. “George would work away like a Turkish carpet-maker at whatever it was, whether mending a car or constructing a song,” Martin says. “John couldn’t be bothered even to tune his guitar. He was a completely impractical man. And if there was someone around to do it for him, why not? That was his attitude.

As EMI’s greatest-ever moneymakers, they enjoyed privileged treatment at Abbey Road that the greatest names of the past, Caruso or Sinatra, had not. Studios One and Two, each large enough to house a symphony orchestra, were set aside for Martin and his sacred quartet in open-ended sessions that were as much about exploration and rehearsal as actual recording, and habitually continued far into the night.

In Abbey Road’s Studio One, under the long open staircase to the control room, there was a cabinet full of exotic instruments left behind by other musicians who had worked there down the decades. The four had always enjoyed rummaging through this miscellany of tambourines, sleigh bells, and Moroccan hand drums; now it became an ally in the fight to prove themselves top dogs again, as did Martin’s classical background and every possible resource of the studio itself. Implicitly, from the very start, this was not stuff intended to be played live onstage.

Unlike other drugs, acid involved a degree of forethought and unselfishness: users were advised to take it only among friends in comfortable, familiar surroundings, and had an obligation to provide mutual support if adverse reactions set in. For George, as he later said, this one-to-one caring and sharing finally broke down the barrier he felt had existed between John and him since he first joined the Quarrymen. “After taking acid [we] had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John…. [He] and I spent a lot of time together from then on, and I felt closer to him than all the others…just by the look in his eyes, I felt we were connected.”

Having nothing else to do, the four set to work on a large communal painting. Barrow remembers how, as soon as John picked up a paintbrush, all his usual aggression and impatience seemed to melt away.

Remembering John’s defiance after the Bob Wooler–bashing episode four years earlier, Barrow might have expected him to dig his heels in and refuse to take back a single word. Instead, he was distraught to think he might have ruined the tour, and desperate to make any amends he could. “He actually put his head in his hands and sobbed. He was saying ‘I’ll do anything…whatever you say. How am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I’ve said?’”

John, however, stayed on the firing line until everyone who wished to had taken a shot at him. His replies turned into an extended monologue, which soon went far beyond what he had been coached to say, and, on the whole, hit as many right buttons as his original quote had wrong ones:

So many people lined the streets to the Coliseum, and so many convenient windows for rifle muzzles yawned above, that the Beatles’ limousines were sent ahead empty as decoys while they themselves rode to the venue in a Greyhound bus, crouched double on its floor. Before the afternoon show, there was a bomb scare; demonstrators were reportedly being bused in by the Klan and records being ceremonially burned in oil drums. At the second show, the four had been performing only a few minutes when a firecracker exploded near them with the shallow “snap-snap-snap” of a real-life revolver. Tony Barrow still remembers the horror of that moment. “Every one of us [the tour entourage] and the other three Beatles looked at John, half-expecting to see the guy sinking down.”

Touring might have crushed his spirits and stultified his creativity, but it had also had its advantages. These years on the Beatlemania treadmill had spared him almost all the more tedious obligations of growing from adolescence into manhood and becoming a husband and father. But on another, typically contradictory level, they had also given a stem of duty and responsibility to his existence: when he donned his stage suit, it was in the spirit of a soldier going “over the top” with his comrades. For all the frustrations of the road, there was much that he realized he would miss: the laughs, the Just William japes, the sense of uniquely kindred spirits taking on the whole world. Outside the Beatles, he could not imagine ever finding such companionship again.

The experience proved thoroughly pleasant for them both. Lester’s cast of stalwart British character actors, like Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy, neither despised nor patronized John but respected the seriousness with which he took his role, his willingness to learn, and total lack of big-star airs and graces.

In breaks between filming, John, Kinnear, and Montague would stand on the bridge over a nearby stream and play the game of Pooh Sticks

According to legend, How I Won the War revealed John to be a natural screen actor. With the increasingly successful Richard Lester for a mentor—so the story goes—he could easily have crossed over from music to a busy film career, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley before him. He failed to do so because, at the last, he found it not challenging enough and, more pertinently, realized a film star’s life could be even more confining than that of a Beatle.

John himself always said the lyric was “psychoanalysis set to music” and declared it and “Help!” to have been “the only true songs I ever wrote.” For him, the words signified how little he had really changed in the years since Strawberry Field was his adventure playground. “The second line [of the second verse] goes ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ What I was trying to say was ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius. It’s the same problem I had when I was five.’” In fact, egotism is the last very thing that strikes you. The air of hippie wisdom and stoicism soon gives way to self-confessed mental muddle and perplexity, and finally outright incoherence (“I think I know I mean, er, yes but it’s all wrong…”) that nonetheless still rhymes true and has the correct number of feet per line. Other psychedelic songwriters produced druggy gibberish; John had to produce crafted druggy gibberish.

In whatever John did, he still needed a special crony to act simultaneously as his mentor and follower.

After Christmas, with no new album yet even remotely in sight, Martin decided to release “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” as a double A-side single on February 17. He has since called it “the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

as Ringo Starr later recalled: “A bunch of songs and you stick two bits of ‘Pepper’ on it and it’s a concept…. It worked because we said it worked.”