Hot Take, Get Back, The Documentary

 

 1.  The opening credit  “Numerous editorial choices had to be made during the production of these films” and the closing production credits of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono Lennon speak volumes about the editorial choices which were inevitably made–specifically the exclusion of most if not all of the audio/video data regarding Yoko’s involvement in the Beatle Dynamic. (Read Sulpy and Schweighardt’s 1994 book and listen to the Nagra tapes, upon which the book was based.)

2. If the saddest moment in Get Back was Paul’s distress so painfully on display in the beginning of Episode 2, the most horrifying moment was in Episode 3, when John raved about Allen Klein to George (”he knows me as well as you do!”),  ignoring Glyn John’s obvious warning about Klein’s transparency and openness (and we all know how that turned out.)

3. The utter awesomeness of the rooftop sessions.  Watching Paul give birth to the song Get Back, in real time. The speed by which they write music and perfect their craft. Did I mention the rooftop sessions? This band was born to perform. Period.  

4. The hilarity of  two young and overly serious constables during the rooftop sessions and their comic attempt to get the most successful band in the world to come to heel, all occuring behind an estatic Paul singing GET BACK, upon whom the irony is not lost that the song started as a protest song against the abuse of power.

5. And last but not least, the cherry on top (for me): Mike Macca’s inexpected appearance in the film fake-piano playing and engaging in other forms of Mike Macca nuttiness. 

 

Heir Apparent

Yoko Ono has reportedly handed over the management of her share of the Beatle enterprise to her son, Sean Ono Lennon. Sean has been appointed director of several companies involved in the Beatle enterprise, including Apple Corps. One wonders whether Sean will have the same energy, willingness, or vested interest in perpetuating the Lennono brand as his mother, or whether he will take it in a different direction. What say ye, readers?

A Primer in (Re)Writing History, by Yoko Ono

YOKO ONO:

¹ Q: Cynthia was abroad at the time. One famous story says that when she came home, she was shocked to find you and John together, and that you were wearing her dressing gown or kimono. Is any of this true?

Ono: That’s a dramatic story. I’m not saying it came from Cynthia. I don’t know who… maybe some writer embellished it or something like that. First of all, the driver and Lil, who was Julian’s nanny – they were reporting to Cynthia all the time. She knew. It was an open thing in a way. She said, ‘I don’t want to come back now.’ The first time that she came, she was with Pattie Boyd’s sister [Jenny] and [Magic] Alex [Mardas] and there was another person. So Cynthia and Alex and Pattie Boyd’s sister and whoever the guy was said they were gonna visit, and they came in from the garden side. I immediately tried to sit a little bit further from John, and John said, ‘No, don’t worry about that, it’s OK.’ He just grabbed my hand and we were sitting together, kind of thing. He wanted it that way. I don’t know why. He wasn’t like, ‘My wife is coming, I have to hide the situation.’ Totally not like that. They stayed a while to say ‘hi’, and left from the front door – not in a huff. There was an underlying tension, but we were all civil, like the flower children we were.”

CYNTHIA LENNON:

² We [Jenny Boyd, Alex Mardas] arrived [at Kenwood] at 4 in the afternoon and immediately I knew something was wrong. The porch lights were on; the curtains were still drawn; and everything was silent. There was no Dot to greet me, no Julian bounding through the door, shouting with delight…the front door was unlocked. The three of us walked in looking for John, Julian and Dot.

“Where are you all?” I called.

….I opened the sunroom door. [The curtains were drawn and the room was dimly lit] so it took me a moment to focus. When I did, I froze. John and Yoko were sitting on the floor, cross-legged, facing each other beside a table covered with dirty dishes. They were wearing the terry cloth robes we kept in the pool house, so I imagined they’d been for a swim. John was facing me. He looked at me, expressionless and said “Oh, hi.” Yoko didn’t turn around. I blurted out the only thing I could think of. “We were all looking forward to dinner in London after lunch in Rome and breakfast and Greece. Would you like to come?”

The stupidity of that question has haunted me ever since. Confronted by my husband and his lover, wearing my dressing gown…all I could do was carry on as if everything was normal. In fact, I was in shock…I had no idea how to react.

 

 

¹ John Lennon Remembered by Yoko Ono, Uncut Magazine, 2015.

² John, by Cynthia Lennon.

That Time In Mississauga

Q: OK. But how did you come to hook up with John and Yoko in Dec. 1969?

A: I first made the contact from England by a writer from Rolling Stone named Ritchie Yorke. He said he was in England with John Lennon and Yoko. who were looking for a place to stay, because they didn’t want to do the hotel thing any more. Yorke brought up my name and they called me to ask if it would be OK if they stayed at the house, at that time in Mississauga, not to far from Toronto, where he could still do his business and stuff. So they styed with us and we went on that peace train, to see Prime minister Trudeau. We went to Montreal. We went to Ottawa, and whereever John and Yoko wanted to go. I didn’t know that much about the Beatles at that time because my world was playin’ in bars and that was it. And so it took me two or three years after John and Yoko had left that they were ahead of their time.

Q: What were your first impressions when you met John?

A: Well, I didn’t know too much. I did know that Yoko was super intelligent. She was supposedly be able to speak five or six or seven languages. I know she could call anyone. She put 16 lines in my house and she could pick up and phone the ambassador to Japan, Princess Elizabeth, Peter Sellers. All those people, she just picked up and talked to everyday.

Q: Literally 16 telephone lines?

A: Yeah. they negotiated on a Saturday night, and daylight Sunday morning 16 lines came across the fields into my house. Usually, you have to wait six months for one phone, but this is what happens when you have authority.

Q: At first you saw John as being weak and subserviant to Yoko?

A: Well it was different for me. John was a quiet, good cat. She did all the talkin’. It looked kind of different to me, but I came to understand it as I came to understand John’s background.

Q: Did you have a moment alone with John?

A: Oh yeah. We went out several times, alone but then she got a little hot and started leaving notes. We went outside snowmobiling, and I also had those six-wheel jiggers out there (ATV’s) and John had never played in the snow or anything. Right after that, John ordered a few for his farm in New York. Remember at that time they were doing that together thing and he asked a few times if it was OK to go out and play in the snow and she didn’t say anything and she was kind of hot at him for a day or two.

Q: What about the famous bathtub story?

A: What happened, I guess, is that they went upstairs to draw a bath and laid down, and the bathtub went over. They fell asleep and our new ceilings came in on us. That’s one of many things. There was a fire in my barn. All those little old papers that were between the lithographs that he was signing — thousands of them — and they stacked out there and something set them on fire because it was rice paper or something. there was a wind and it started settin’ everything on fire. John came runnin’ out with a pail for kids to put that fire out.The papers were blowin’ out in the fields. And to top it off, the phone bill was never paid.

Q: In Albert Goldman’s book, “The Lives Of John Lennon,” he said that you had “suffered every sort of insult, from seeing (your) children pouring over the muff-diving imagery of Lennon’s erotic lithographs…” Any truth to this charge?

A: No, no. They didn’t see any of that stuff until later, when they were old enough to see it. John had scratched out nude pictures and stuff of Yoko, and everything, and we still have a bunch of that stuff.

Q: Goldman also said that the limo carrying John and Yoko “crashed” through your gate when they first arrive, and that John Brower, who had brought John to Canada for the “Live Peace in Toronto” gig, three months earlier, became enranged and punched out a photographer. True?

A: No. And that was Heddy Andrews (in the scuffle). John Brower had hired security to keep people from comin’ over the wall. One of the photographers climbed over the wall and was sneakin’ in and it ended up in a scuffle.

Q: Talk about the “peace train.”

A: It was planned all along. You’ve got to remember that it was going to be the peace festival. At that time, it was still goin’ strong. I was told Trudeau was going to supply the security for the concert with the military and have a big one. At first it was going to be the greatest thing that ever happened and then some people started sayin’ weird things to the press and something happened.

Q: What are some of your best memories of your time with John?

A: When he got out of the limo from the airport and I met them at the house, the first thing he said was “I’m going to give you forty days to get back home.” He knew all of my records. He knew most of them better than I did.

Q: Did you jam?

A: Oh yeah, we did a lot of that piddlin’ around.

Q: Anybody record it?

A: Yeah. One of them English cats did. I don’t know if it ever got out or not. That was kind of a wild time. Everybody was runnin’ around playin’ ski-doos and, writers and cooks . That was microbiotic times. You know it was exciting.

Q: What were your personal feelings of John and Yoko.

A: Well John, he was just nice. Yoko was who I didn’t understand because she was super intelligent. She was above a bar-act, which I was. At that particular time, I thought I was doin’ them a favour. I didn’t know that anybody was that powerful. I thought the Beatles were an English group that got lucky. I didn’t know a lot about their music. I thought Yoko’s was (silly). To this day, I have never heard a Beatle album. For 10 billion dollars, I couldn’t name one song on “Abbey Road.” I have never in my life picked up a Beatle album, and listened to it. Never. But John was so powerful. I liked him. He wasn’t one of those hotshots, you know, all those other heavy metallers, you know how they act. John was a gentleman. Quiet, humble and polite. He wasn’t out of control.

Q: Your best rememberance of Yoko?

A: Well, she knew so many people. She called so many people and was in charge of so many things and told the number one man in the world of the Beatles what to do. I couldn’t understand that.

Q: Did you ever ask John about that?

A: No. I figured that was his business. If he wanted her to talk to him like that…but what I couldn’t understand that he didn’t have about four or five of the most beautiful women in the world with him, because he could have.

Terry Ott’s National Post Interview with Ronnie Hawkins about John and Yoko’s visit to his home in Mississauga, Ontario (a mere few hours from my home!) in December, 1969.

Imagined Together

The hardest thing to do is a single person image, because basically it’s me and that person relating, so with John and Yoko, how did that happen. You know, sometimes I think of that photograph as ten years in the making, because I met John Lennon when I photographed him, I think I was in my 20’s, I was working, I was beginning to work for Rolling Stone, I met him and Yoko in New York the early part of my career. And there we were in New York, in 1980, and he just finished the album Double Fantasy with Yoko, and I’d seen the cover, which was both of them kissing. And I just thought oh my gosh….I was so moved by that kiss, there was so much in that simple picture of a kiss.  So I imagined them somehow together. And it wasn’t unusual to imagine John and Yoko with their clothes off because they did it all the time. So what happened was at the last minute Yoko didn’t want to take her clothes off and we went ahead and took the picture and it was a very striking picture of Yoko clothed against a naked John Lennon and [uninteligible] he was murdered later on that [evening]. So it became, it’s actually an excellent example of how circumstances change, and suddenly a photograph has a story.

Annie Leibovitz, discussing her iconic photograph of John and Yoko.

Battle For The Soul

What happened at the Dakota in January 1975? Various biographers have suggested that Ono might have drugged Lennon or hypnotised him, or used her esoteric knowledge of witchcraft. But these farfetched rumours underestimate the power of Lennon’s psychological drives. More intriguing, in retrospect, is Ono’s rationale. Did she choose this moment for a reunion because the numbers were right, or was she afraid that she might lose him forever if he reunited with McCartney? Whose dependence was greater: Lennon’s on the woman he called Mother, or Ono’s on the man who had brought her global recognition? One thing is certain: Lennon and McCartney would have worked together in February 1975 if Lennon had not returned to the Dakota, and history – theirs and ours – might have been very different.

Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money – The Battle For The Soul Of The Beatles