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They were products of yet another “trough,” as he himself termed the dives into despair and self-disgust that he took every year or so, unknown to almost everyone around him. He had emerged from one circle of Beatle hell only to find himself in another, less crazily hectic but no less arid and unfulfilling, from which the only escape seemed to lie in drugs. A few rare pieces of art turn the bleakest negatives into radiant positives, telling you life is not worth living in terms which reassure you that it is.
His two favorite books in all the world were still Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; indeed, using acid only sharpened his delight in the surreal fantasies that a nineteenth-century cleric apparently conjured from stimulants no stronger than weak China tea and cucumber sandwiches. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” as John would later insist, was inspired by a specific scene in Through the Looking-Glass. Alice walks into a shop to find a talking sheep in a poke bonnet knitting behind the counter; then, all at once, the two of them are drifting
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John was never closer to Paul than during these weeks. Though hotly competitive in songs they wrote individually outside the studio, they remained a matchless team within it, each working unselfishly to set off the other’s latest brain wave at its best. Paul composed a piping intro for Lowry organ that established the drowsy riverbank atmosphere of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before John had sung a word; he also contributed to the lyric, supplying “Cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis” to set alongside John’s “tangerine trees” and “marmalade skies.”
As it chanced, the art dealer Robert Fraser had lately supplied Paul McCartney with René Magritte’s painting of a green apple, entitled Le Jeu de Mourre (The Guessing Game). This image perfectly expressing the freshness and simplicity of the Beatles’ corporate intentions (as well as coincidentally recalling John’s first encounter with Yoko), the company was named Apple Publishing.
Only one person had ever been able to organize John, and it was still difficult to believe he was no longer around. “I still felt every now and then that Brian would come in and say, ‘It’s time to record’ or ‘Time to do this.’ And Paul started doing that…‘Now we’re going to make a movie. Now we’re going to make a record.’ And he assumed that if he didn’t call us, nobody would ever make a record. Paul would say, well, now he felt like it—and suddenly I’d have to whip out twenty songs.”
Despite the earnest matters under discussion, John remained his familiar droll, artless self—a knack that eluded George and, alas, always would.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just say something nice to Paul, that it’s all right and you did a good job over these few years holding us together.’ He was trying to organize the group…. so I wanted to say something to him. I thought, ‘Well, he can have it. I’ve got Yoko.’”
(He often said he’d rather have been one of the Monty Python team than a Beatle.)
“It was the same when he read the bestseller lists in the New York Times Book Review, and was disappointed not to see his name. I’d say, ‘But you haven’t written a book.’ ‘That’s not the point,’ John would say.”
His plan was to live beyond the wild days and be the one to reminisce. He was gonna be the one that survived.”
With the other ex-Beatles—“the in-laws,” as Yoko drily called them—all issues were long since settled.
Billy Joel, whose hit ballad, “Just the Way You Are,” was a favorite of John’s. Identifying Joel’s all-glass mansion one day, he cupped his hands to his mouth seadog-style and shouted, “Billy—I have all your records!”
For days afterward, up in apartment 72, whenever the kitchen door opened, three cats came bounding forward to greet him.
