Weekly View » John Lennon

Genesis: Lennon and McCartney

Al Hunter — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 05:08:55 +0000

Fifty-eight years ago this Monday, the headline on the front-page of the July 6, 1957 Liverpool Evening Express read “MERSEYSIDE SIZZLES.” England was in the 10th day of a heat wave that had enveloped all of Europe. The day before it reached 98 degrees in Vienna and a staggering 125 degrees in Prague. The headline proved prophetic because that day was the first meeting of two Liverpool teenagers who would change the world: John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
On that fateful Saturday afternoon John Lennon’s skiffle band, The Quarrymen, performed at St. Peter’s Church in Liverpool. The church fair featured booths selling crafts, cakes, carnival games, police dog demonstrations, and a parade culminating with the crowning of the Rose Queen. The first parade truck carried the Queen and her court. The second truck carried John Lennon and his Quarrymen.
The band was asked to play and sing while the truck slowly lurched its way down the street. When the bumpy ride prohibited the standing band’s ability to play coherently, Lennon sat on the edge of the truck, his legs dangling over the edge, as he dutifully played his guitar and sang for the curbside crowd.
Eventually the trucks came to a stop and the Quarrymen’s first set took place on a blazingly hot stage in a shadeless field behind the church. Sixteen-year-old John Lennon was the undisputed leader of the band. Even though his guitar skills were rough and he often forgot the lyrics to the songs he was performing, he covered it well by ad-libbing his own lyrics. Midway through that first set, 15-year-old Paul McCartney arrived and watched, transfixed, as John held the crowd with his charm and swagger.
The band’s second set took place that evening inside the Grand Dance Hall at St. Peter’s Church. Admission to the 8 p.m. show was two shillings (about 10¢). After setting up their equipment to play, bass player Ivan Vaughan introduced the band to one of his classmates, Paul McCartney. It was 6:48 p.m. on July 6, 1957 and the older, cocksure Lennon sat slouched on a folding chair. When Ivan introduced Paul to John, the two didn’t shake hands, they just nodded warily at one another. Ivan arranged the meeting but recalled that Paul wasn’t going to go until he was informed that it was a good place to pick up girls. At first Ivan thought he’d made a mistake as the two hardly spoke to each another. But Paul, who Lennon himself often described as precocious and wise far beyond his years, was determined to make a good impression.
Paul, sharply dressed in a white, silver flecked jacket and black stovepipe pants with a guitar strapped to his back, whipped out the guitar and began playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” followed by Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop A Lula” before launching into a medley of Little Richard songs. Lennon was floored by the demonstration. McCartney sealed the deal by tuning Lennon’s guitar and writing out the chords and lyrics to some of the songs he’d just played.
After the Quarrymen’s show, the group invited McCartney to come along to a local pub where they lied about their ages to get served. For Lennon it must have been a dilemma to invite the talented youngster into the fold as a possible challenge to his own superiority within the group. Lennon, even then a savvy businessman, realized that McCartney’s addition might mean the difference between success and failure. Two weeks later Paul joined the band.
In a 1995 interview, McCartney recalled: “I remember coming into the fete and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band. I remember I was amazed and thought, ‘Oh great’, because I was obviously into the music. I remember John singing a song called ‘Come Go With Me.’ He’d heard it on the radio. He didn’t really know the verses, but he knew the chorus. The rest he just made up himself. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’ Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave. I remember John was good. He was really the only outstanding member, all the rest kind of slipped away.”
Lennon was equally impressed with McCartney’s instant ease in playing and singing songs that the Quarrymen worked long and hard to learn. McCartney remembered, “I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been ‘A Whole Lot Of Shakin’ by Jerry Lee. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.” Yes, at that historic first meeting, 16-year-old John Lennon was drunk.
In his 1964 introduction to bandmate Lennon’s first book, In His Own Write, McCartney recalled: “At Woolton village fete I met him. I was a fat schoolboy and, as he leaned an arm on my shoulder, I realized he was drunk…We went on to become teenage pals.” More recently, Paul recalled: “There was a guy up on the stage wearing a checked shirt, looking pretty good singing a song I loved, the Del-Vikings’ ‘Come Go With Me.’ He was filling in with blues lines, I thought that was good, and he was singing well. He was a little afternoon-pissed, leaning over my shoulder breathing boozily.”
Pessimists may assume that John and Paul would eventually have met on some other day had that hot and humid Saturday introduction 58 years ago never happened. But despite their mutual passion for music, the two lads lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools and were nearly two years apart in age. All recalcitrant intentions aside, “Imagine” if John Lennon had never become a Beatle. “Imagine” if the band that changed pop culture forever had never existed. Fate is a funny thing. Encounters like this are often the stuff of legend; primarily unwitnessed, unobserved, and unrecorded thereby making them unprovable.
But wait, there is proof. That July 6, 1957, the Quarrymen’s set was recorded by a member of St. Peter’s Youth Club, Bob Molyneux, on his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. Made just moments after that historic meeting, it remains the earliest known recording of Lennon. The three-inch reel includes Lennon’s performances of two songs; “Puttin’ on the Style,” a No. 1 hit at the time for Lonnie Donegan, and “Baby Let’s Play House,” an Arthur Gunter song made popular by Elvis Presley. In 1965 Lennon used a line from the Gunter song – “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man” as the opening line of his own “Run for Your Life.” In 1963, Molyneux offered the tape to Lennon, through Ringo Starr. But Lennon never responded, so Molyneux put the tape in a vault.
In 1994, Molyneux, then a retired policeman, rediscovered the tape and contacted Sotheby’s auction house. The tape, along with the portable Grundig TK8 tape machine that made it, was sold on September 15, 1994 at Sotheby’s for £78,500 (roughly $730,000 U.S.) to EMI records. EMI considered using the recording as part of their Beatles Anthology project, but chose not to as the sound quality was substandard. It was recorded with a hand-held microphone in a cavernous church hall with a high, arched ceiling and a hard floor. EMI decided that although it was an incredibly important recording made on a historic day, the poor sound quality made it unsuitable for commercial release.
The two Beatles never forgot the friend who brought them together. Ivan had first met John when he was three and the two boys shared adjoining backyards. Years later, Ivan recalled, “One wet morning, John appeared on my doorstep clutching his Dinky toys, looking to make friends. And we did, going on to play cowboys and Indians in the fields and cricket in the park.” Paul and Ivan were born in the same city (Liverpool) on the same day (June 18, 1942).
For a time the Beatles put Ivan on the payroll of Apple records, in charge of a plan that never took off to set up a school with a Sixties, hippie-style education theme. Ivan’s wife Jan, a French teacher, was hired to sit down with Lennon and McCartney and help with the French lyrics to the 1965 classic “Michelle.” In 1977, Ivan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and spent the next 15 years working on a search for a cure. During those years Ivan and Jan often spent the evenings out with Paul and his wife Linda in London restaurants. Ivan died in 1993. His death upset Paul so much that he started writing poetry again.
In 2002, Paul wrote the book “Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics, 1965-1999” in which he honored his old friend with a poem titled, “Ivan”: “Two doors open, On the eighteenth of June, Two Babies born, On the same day, In Liverpool, One was Ivan, The other — me. We met in adolescence, And did the deeds, They dared us do, Jive with Ive, The ace on the bass, He introduced to me, At Woolton fete, A pal or two, And so we did, A classic scholar he, A rocking roller me, As firm as friends could be, Cranlock naval, Cranlock pie, A tear is rolling, Down my eye, On the sixteenth of August, Nineteen ninety-three, One door closed.” And it all started 58 years ago: July 6, 1957.

Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.

John Lennon’s Lost Weekend, Part 1

Al Hunter — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 06:08:25 +0000

In the summer of 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s marriage was in trouble. Living up to her reputation as a provocateur, Ono tried to save her marriage by suggesting that her husband start an affair with their assistant, May Pang. The result was John Lennon’s “Lost Weekend”; 18 months of almost constant partying from New York to Los Angeles. That year-and-a-half may have been a step back in time for Lennon’s libido but it was a giant leap forward for the ex-Beatle’s creativity — even if it does tarnish his halo a little bit.
Lennon’s lost weekend produced three albums for himself: “Mind Games,” “Walls and Bridges” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He produced two LPs for his friends Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson and recorded with David Bowie, Elton John and Mick Jagger. But mostly, Lennon’s lost weekend produced outrageous behavior while drunk or stoned. The best remembered lost weekend episode produced a gigantic slice of humble pie for a drunken Lennon at The Troubadour in LA.
The Troubadour in West Hollywood, not far from Beverly Hills, is a legendary music club that has seen its share of history. Opened in 1957 as a coffee house, it began life as a major center for folk music in the 1960s. The Troubadour played an important role in the careers of Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, the Eagles, The Byrds, Carole King, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Carly Simon, George Carlin, Bette Midler, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, the Pointer Sisters, and Sheryl Crow, among others.
It was The Troubadour in 1962 where comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges. On August 25, 1970, Neil Diamond (who had just recorded his first live album at the Troubadour) introduced Elton John, who performed his first show in the U.S. Randy Newman started out there and Cheech & Chong were discovered on its stage. John Lennon never performed there, but on March 12, 1974 he was the main attraction nonetheless.
That evening musician Harry Nilsson introduced John Lennon to the Brandy Alexander cocktail — an introduction that wouldn’t end well. The Brooklyn-born Nilsson was perhaps the closest American friend of the Fab Four, having first met the band in 1968. All the Beatles were great fans of the singer-songwriter and referred to their friend Harry as “the Beatle across the water.” They’d collaborated on songs and films together and when Lennon arrived in LA in 1973, the first call he made was to Harry Nilsson.
That Tuesday night, Harry and John were going to the Troubadour to catch the Smothers Brothers stage show. And to get drunk. “I got drunk and shouted,” Lennon later recalled. “It was my first night on Brandy Alexanders- that’s brandy and milk, folks. I was with Harry Nilsson, who didn’t get as much coverage as me, the bum. He encouraged me. I usually have someone there who says ‘Okay, Lennon. Shut up.’”
As might be expected, Harry and John sat near the stage near such notables as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Helen Reddy, Cliff Robertson, and Lily Tomlin. John’s mistake was trying to keep up with Nilsson, a prodigious drinker who also did cocaine, by matching him drink-for-drink. The two rock stars heckled the Smothers Brothers by trading barbs with the popular TV comedy duo. On an empty stomach, smoking like a steam engine and egged on by Nilsson, John kept up his relentless, profanity-laced diatribe. Actor Peter Lawford, accompanied by a young lady, was seated nearby. He repeatedly yelled at John to stop the tirade.
As things escalated, club security attempted to remove the inebriated duo from their front row perch. The enraged Lennon lashed out, losing his trademark round glasses in the fracas. Tommy Smothers reported that during the melee, Lennon kicked the valet. “My wife ended up with Lennon’s glasses because of the punches that were thrown,” Smothers said. “Foxy Brown” Blaxploitation film star Pam Grier, who was nearby when the incident happened, got ejected from the club. John also sent letters of apology to the comedians, their manager, and the management at the club.
The Smothers Brothers came to Lennon’s defense, explaining that they’d incited Lennon by engaging with him while on stage. They also charged the media with blowing the incident out of proportion. “The heckling got so bad that our show was going downhill rapidly,” Smothers added. “No one cared, because it was just a happening anyway, but there was a scuffle going on and we stopped the show.”
Although the episode was rude and inexcusable, it should be remembered that Lennon and Smothers were friends. On May 26, 1969 when newlyweds John and Yoko staged their week-long “bed-in for peace” and recorded their song “Give Peace a Chance,” it was Tommy Smothers playing guitar. Lennon and Nilsson reportedly had flowers delivered to the Smothers Brothers the next day. Lennon also sent an apology note to Grier reading, “Dear Pam- I apologize for being so rude and thank you for not hitting me. John Lennon P.S. Harry Nilsson feels the same way.”
The next day the press reported: “Customers in the jammed nightclub complained Lennon made sarcastic comments and shouted obscenities during the show.” The rock stars would ultimately be escorted out of the nightclub, noisily knocking over a few tables and trashing several patrons’ dinners in the process. Officially, they were ejected for relentlessly heckling the Smothers Brothers and assaulting a waitress. Lennon insisted the alleged assault never happened, while Tommy Smothers added that without his glasses, Lennon couldn’t tell that the figure he threw a punch at was a woman. The waitress would later drop the charges.
John later said, “There was some girl who claimed that I hit her, but I didn’t hit her at all, you know. She just wanted some money and I had to pay her off, because I thought it would harm my immigration. So I was drunk. When it’s Errol Flynn, the showbiz writers say: ‘Those were the days, when men were men.’ When I do it, I’m a bum. So it was a mistake, but hell, I’m human.”
However, a 50-year-old freelance photographer would not. While Brenda Mary Perkins snapped images of the famous rockers being thrown out of the club, an enraged Lennon took a swing and allegedly hit her right eye. The Nixon administration had recently tried to have Lennon returned to Britain because of an ancient drug charge and John didn’t need the attention, although his actions might say otherwise. When the photographer filed charges at the sheriff’s office, Nilsson turned on the charm and quelled the investigation. Ms. Perkins filed a complaint with the Los Angeles Police Department. After a two-week investigation, the district attorney dropped the charges for lack of evidence.
However, John saw a darker side to the photographer’s intentions, when he stated, “Well, I was not in the best frame of mind. I was wildly drunk. But I was nowhere near this chick, she’s got no photographs of me near her. It was my first night on Brandy Alexanders, and they tasted like milkshakes. The first thing I knew I was out of me gourd. Of course, Harry Nilsson was no help feeding them to me, saying ‘Go ahead, John.’ It is true I was wildly obnoxious, but I definitely didn’t hit this woman who just wanted to get her name in the papers and a few dollars.”

Next Week: Part II of John Lennon’s Lost Weekend.

Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.

John Lennon and the UFOs

Al Hunter — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 05:08:01 +0000

In my lifetime, I’ve watched as trivia has leapt from the pages of obscure library books to become popular board games and highly rated TV game shows. I try hard not to replace or confuse trivia for history, but I think trivia has a place in our history books nonetheless. Sometimes, trivia about a historical person or event helps rationalize or humanize that person, place or thing allowing us to relate to it in a more down-to-earth fashion. So, since I can’t find anything else to write about this week, I’ll share with you a trivial story that I’m betting you’ve never heard of before. Thirty-nine years ago this Friday, August 23, 1974 was a typical hot summer night in New York City. Beatle-gone-solo John Lennon was on what he would later call his “Lost Weekend,” an 18-month-long fling with former assistant May Pang during his break-up with Yoko Ono lasting from the summer of 1973 to the winter of 1975. John and May had just returned home to their East 52nd street apartment, after spending the day at the Record Plant East recording studio, where John was in the final stages of his Walls and Bridges album. Lennon loved the location of the 52nd street address as it was only one building away from the East River. The view from his top floor apartment, overlooking Brooklyn’s Navy shipyard docks, reminded him of Liverpool. Another draw for Lennon was the fact that reclusive actress Greta Garbo also lived on the block and he counted himself among the legion of her fans who tried daily to catch glimpse of her. That August night began no differently from any other evening for John and May. John made and received phone calls, watched TV and listened to the day’s recorded studio work while making notes. The 52nd Street apartment was hot that night, but by 8 o’clock the air had cooled off enough for May to turn off the air conditioner and open the windows to catch the breeze coming off the river. Just a few feet off the apartment’s living room was the building’s roof, accessible through a side window. This rooftop acted as the couple’s private observation deck, offering a million dollar view of New York’s eastside. The haze had now cleared over the cityscape and around 8:30 p.m., May decided to take a shower, leaving Lennon alone in the living room reviewing mock-ups of his new record’s cover. The cover art on the final product would be a painting by a 12-year-old John Lennon.
As May was drying off, she heard John yell from the outside roof, “May come here right now!” Startled, she ran out to find him completely nude standing on the roof and pointing wildly at the southeastern sky. May wasn’t surprised by finding John naked on the roof, John was a closet nudist: if you need proof, Google “Two Virgins” and you’ll understand, what surprised her was what he was pointing at. Just south of the building was a brightly lit “textbook” circular UFO, hovering silently less than 100 feet away from the couple. As John Lennon would later describe, “I wasn’t surprised to see the UFO really, as it looked just like the spaceships we’ve all seen on the cinema growing up, but then I realized this thing was real and so close, that I could almost touch it!” As they watched in astonishment, the UFO glided silently out of sight. May later told a reporter, “the lighting on the thing left us awe-struck, as it would change its configuration with every rotation.” According to May, the object made no sound and the main structure of the craft could be clearly seen for the duration of the event; lit by the dying rays of the setting sun. May ran back into the apartment and grabbed her ever-present 35mm camera (Her mountain of photos of John Lennon and their “lost weekend” are legendary.)
Once back on the roof both she and John took numerous pictures of the craft. May recalled how John stood screaming at the UFO, arms outstretched, to come back and take him away. She said, “He was very serious and I believe he really wanted that thing to take him with it back to wherever it came from, but then that was John Lennon, always looking for the next big adventure.” The couple watched as the object glided past the United Nations building and slowly veered left, crossing over the East River, then over Brooklyn before simply blending in with the heavy commercial air traffic found over southern Long Island. The couple climbed back into the apartment and John picked up the phone to call his friend, noted rock photographer Bob Gruen. Lennon told Gruen to get over there as soon as possible as he had some film he needed developed immediately. As they waited for Gruen to arrive, John began drawing sketches of what he had seen, noting its size and distance. John then called Yoko Ono at the Dakota apartment to tell her about the UFO. May remembers that Yoko became upset at John because she hadn’t seen it too and felt that he had “left her out of all the excitement.”
Bob Gruen arrived and John excitedly told the photographer what had transpired. Gruen later recalled “I took the film home and put John’s roll between two rolls of film I’d taken earlier that day and developed them”. “My two rolls of film came out perfectly but John’s roll was blank. Later I asked him ‘did you call the newspaper?’ and he said “I’m not going to call up the newspaper and say, This is John Lennon and I saw a flying saucer last night.” So Bob Gruen called up the local police precinct and asked if anyone had reported a UFO or flying saucer. The police responded with “Where? Up on the East Side? You’re the third call on it.” Then Bob called the Daily News and they said, “On the East Side? Five people reported it.” Finally, Gruen called the ultra-conservative New York Times and asked a reporter if anybody had reported a flying saucer? The reporter hung up on him. Neither John Lennon nor May Pang would ever forget their UFO experience. John even mentions the encounter in the booklet that accompanied the Walls & Bridges album released in the autumn of 1974. On the bottom right of the back cover it reads: “I saw a UFO J.L.” May Pang has an audio tape of John, recorded just a few weeks after their experience, where Lennon discusses his thoughts on UFOs in general. Lennon states that he had “no doubt that the craft he saw was from another world” and nixed the idea that it could have been a “secret government test plane.” John Lennon believed the craft he saw was part of a much larger fleet stationed just north of New York City, near the Indian Point nuclear power plant. In the tape, Lennon expressed his personal theory of how these craft use the earth’s gravitational field and take energy from our nuclear plants to counter the earth’s gravity. John also voiced his opinion and suspicion of a high level conspiracy to cover up verifiable UFO sightings and close encounters with aliens. He continued that “if the masses started to accept UFOs, it would profoundly affect their attitudes towards life, politics, everything.” He added, “It would threaten the status quo…Whenever people come to realize that there are larger considerations than their own petty little lives, they are ripe to make radical changes on a personal level, which would eventually lead to a political revolution in society as a whole.”
However, John Lennon was not a newcomer to the “UFO Phenomenon. He was a known subscriber to the British UFO journal Flying Saucer Review, aka FSR, as far back as his years with The Beatles in the late 1960s. Several copies of FSR have been found, and subsequently auctioned off, addressed to John Lennon. May Pang reported, “Oh no, ‘74 wasn’t John’s first sighting… In fact he told me that more than once he suspected he had been ‘abducted’ as a child back in Liverpool!…” She continued, “And he felt that experience was responsible for making him feel different from other people for the rest of his life.” Yes, according to May Pang, John Lennon believed he had been “abducted” by aliens as a lad in Liverpool, but he didn’t like to talk about it.
The more you know about John Lennon, the less you understand. He was a walking contradiction. He was fiercely anti-capitalism but lorded over nearly every Beatle mass marketing scheme during his early days with the Fab Four. He was deeply spiritual, but averse to organized religion. He was an intensely private person, yet readily greeted and signed autographs for fans outside his Dakota apartment. Those last two contradictions contributed to his untimely assassination by a crazed, mentally disturbed fan in December of 1980. Knowing this, can it come as any real surprise that John Lennon believed he had seen a UFO 39 years ago? I suspect not. When dealing with John Lennon, one need only refer to John’s own words, spoken only hours before his death, to San Francisco DJ David Sholin of RKO radio, “Who knows what’s going to happen next?”