BEFORE: Let's kick things off tonight with "This Day in Rock History", because there's a lot to get to. First off, July 29 is the anniversary of Bob Dylan's (alleged) motorcycle accident in 1966 - however, as I've learned in several documentaries, and written about here already, this was probably just a ruse for Dylan to get away from the press for a while, and mentally recover from the booing received on his half-electric tour with The Band. Plus, only a few months after breaking several vertebrae, he was making the basement tapes with The Band? Gotta call B.S. on this injury.
But also on July 29, 1963, the folk group Peter, Paul & Mary released their cover of Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind", which got all the way to #2 on the U.S. singles chart. And on July 29, 1968, Gram Parsons left The Byrds, just before a scheduled tour of South Africa, because he didn't want to play for segregated audiences. Parsons had basically joined the Byrds in early 1968 to replace David Crosby, then left a few months later and formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hillman. And on July 29, 1974, Cass Elliot died after a heart attack, although false rumors would persist for many years that she died from choking while eating a ham sandwich.
But since today's film is about John Lennon, let's get to some Lennon-related anniversaries. On July 29, 1965, the Beatles' second feature film, "Help!", premiered in England. Critics reviewed it as worse than "A Hard Day's Night", but I personally maintain that "Help!" has better songs. There, I said it - but I'm more of a "Rubber Soul" fan, and "Help!" was their album right before "Rubber Soul", if I remember correctly. And on July 29, 2005, John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for "All You Need Is Love" sold at a London auction to an anonymous bidder for $1 million.
Drummer Jim Keltner, who played on the "Jealous Guy" track of the "Imagine" album, carries over as an interview subject from "Sound City", but Lennon also carries over via archive footage.
THE PLOT: The untold story behind John Lennon's 1971 album "Imagine", exploring the creative collaboration between Lennon and Yoko Ono, featuring interviews and never-seen-before footage.
AFTER: Yesterday's film was all about the recording of famous albums, so that theme continues in today's film, which focuses on the recording sessions for the "Imagine" album, mostly at John & Yoko's estate in Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill in Berkshire, UK. Much effort and expense went into converting one of the mansion's rooms into a sound studio, and then shortly after "Imagine" was recorded, John & Yoko moved to New York City. So was that money well spent? I guess that depends on who bought the estate next, it would be great if that person was in a band and needed to record an album. (Ah, it turns out John sold it to Ringo, who lived there for the next 15 years...). For good measure, the non-story about releasing "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" in late 1971 is also included here.
I was only about 3 years old when "Imagine" came out, so I barely knew much of anything, let alone who the Beatles were or what they were doing in their solo careers - that came later for me, after I went through the obligatory Beatles phase in college. My roommate was a hardcore Beatles fan, more than me, and he had a lot of the solo albums, and he turned me on to "How Do You Sleep?", which is a track from the "Imagine" album that's a direct attack on McCartney. Already this week I've seen the feuds that broke up The Birds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, but those guys had nothing on the rift between Lennon and McCartney in the early 1970's. Hell, East Coast vs West Coast rappers had nothing on them. To be fair, McCartney started things by poking fun at Lennon on his solo album "Ram", with the song "Too Many People", and having appeared in full-page advertisements with his wife Linda in which they wore clown costumes and were wrapped up in a bag. (Yoko's thing was to sing while inside a bag, or be interviewed while inside a bag, or make an interviewer get inside a bag. Yeah, the 1960's were weird, and Yoko was a big part of that.)
You can hear the references to "bagism" in three different Lennon/Beatles songs - obviously in "Give Peace a Chance", there's the line about how "everybody's talking about bagism, shagism, dragism, madism, ragism, tagism..." only really, nobody was talking about baptism except to say how stupid it was. Later in "Come Together", there's the mysterious line about "He bag production, he got walrus gumboot..." Bag Productions, Ltd. was the name of John & Yoko's company used for making films, books, and other media ventures. And then in the Beatles song "The Ballad of John & Yoko", there's a line that goes "Made a lightning trip to Vienna / Eating chocolate cake in a bag". All these years I've been picturing two people eating a piece of cake from a bag, and only now do I realize that both people were probably INSIDE the bag, eating cake. Big difference.
Lennon managed to get both George Harrison and Ringo Starr to play on tracks on the "Imagine" album, it's almost like Mum and Dad were trying to win over the kids. George and Ringo probably didn't care, as long as they got to play on both Paul and John's solo albums, that was probably like having two Christmases when your parents get divorced. The album also famously contains the protest anthems "Gimme Some Truth" and "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier, Mama, I Don't Wanna Die", plus "Crippled Inside", "It's So Hard" and finally, "Jealous Guy", which had been written in 1968 and recorded during the "White Album" sessions, I think, only they had so much material back then that they couldn't even fit it all on a double album, and by then George and Ringo were fighting to get their songs included too, so as part of the negotiations, John got to keep "Yer Blues" and "Sexy Sadie" on the White Album, but had to give up on "Jealous Guy" in favor of some George Harrison song like "Long, Long, Long" or "Savoy Truffle". Ringo only had written one song for the double album, but it was "Don't Pass Me By", and that's a keeper. But why did John favor his songs "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" (terrible) and the co-Yoko production "Revolution No. 9" (even worse than terrible) when he had "Jealous Guy" ready to go? Maybe it just wasn't the right album for "Jealous Guy".
But you all showed up tonight to learn about "Imagine", didn't you? Surprised to find out that John didn't realize he had a hit on his hands? He apparently played the track for all of his friends and employees to get their opinions on it - they're all interviewed here, and every single one of them says they knew it was a number one song as soon as they heard it - so why didn't JOHN know that? Or were they all just blowing smoke up his arse? Remember, he was paying all these people for various things - photographer, assistant, secretary, driver - why wouldn't they say they liked the boss's new song?
There's an awful lot of anti-Yoko sentiment among some Beatles fans - but while she's not credited as a co-writer on the song "Imagine", there's clear evidence here that she, essentially, wrote the song. Yoko had released a book of poetry called "Grapefruit", and the poems mainly consisted of instructions or tips for living that made no sense, such as: "Hide and Seek: Hide until everyone goes home. Hide until everyone forgets about you. Hide until everyone else dies." Um, OK, sounds like fun. But many of these little thinkpiece poems began with the word "Imagine" - like:
"Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in. Spring 1963."
or this one:
"Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for one hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tuna fish sandwich and eat. 1964 Spring."
Well, it doesn't seem like a big leap from there to "Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try." Does it? I think John just took some of Yoko's poems and cleaned them up a bit, made them rhyme, and drew some illogical conclusions about the results, and there's your song. Lennon later said that he really should have shared songwriting credit with Yoko, but hey, community property, so does it really matter in the end?
I say "Illogical conclusions" because I think the song "Imagine" represents a really naive, almost childlike view of how to fix the world. And remember, this was a time in history where there were many protests going on against a never-ending war, marches for civil rights and calls for an evil President to be removed from office - but you kids today wouldn't know anything about all that, now, would you. (I'm being facetious, of course, but where are the good protest songs for 2020? Where's the millennial Bob Dylan? Where's the next John Lennon when we need one, desperately?)
So as you might expect, some people in the early 1970's had some issues with Lennon singing "Imagine there's no heaven" and naturally assumed he was anti-God. He may have been, but didn't he have a right to be? How come some people can accept any religion except the lack of religion? Or respect a different God, but not the lack of God? Same goes for "Imagine there's no country..." - did he just say that? Is he Anti-American, Anti-Britain? Damn, I love my country, where does this limey bastard get off, suggesting that we'd be better off without countries?
My issues begin with the fact that "Imagine" makes some leaps in logic that I don't think are valid. Even if you could get everyone to "Imagine there's no heaven" that doesn't mean that everyone is immediately going to start living for today. Hell, I'm not ready to pack it in, I've got to keep working for another 20 or 30 years if I'm going to plan for retirement! Live for today? Man, I've got work tomorrow, and the kids have a doctor's appointment, I can't stop and live for today. And if we could "Imagine there's no country" does that mean that there will suddenly be "nothing to kill or die for"? Have you seen the same people as I have? Even if you take away countries and borders, they're still going to find something to kill each other over, you can count on that.
Then we come to "Imagine no possessions", does that mean that everyone will suddenly be sharing all the world? Doubtful. You're just never going to get everyone on board with this, everybody loves stuff. I love owning stuff, I have trouble parting with stuff, I want to own all the stuff. Plus, there's a bit of hypocrisy involved when the man singing "Imagine no possessions" has an estate in Tittenhurst Park and his own recording studio. OK, let's imagine giving up our possessions, only you go first, John Lennon.
It's clearly part of Yoko's childlike thinking - which shortly thereafter produced the famous lyric "War is Over / If you want it." Really? Is that all it takes to end a war, just wanting it? A lot of people wanted the Vietnam War to be over, for many years, and it seems like wanting that didn't make it happen. Oh, you meant eventually, or in theory? Sure, you have to want something to happen before you can make it happen, but this still seems like a gross oversimplification of global politics. Artists, man, they're so crazy.
There's even more hypocrisy, I think, evident in "Jealous Guy", which is all about Lennon loving Yoko so much that he felt jealous - umm, right? Actually, now that I research it a little, it seems that "Jealous Guy" was originally called "Child of Nature", and it was inspired by the same lecture from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that also inspired McCartney's song "Mother Nature's Son". But as stated above, there were too many songs to fit on the White Album, so "Mother Nature's Son" was in and "Child of Nature" was out. Lennon changed the lyrics during the "Get Back" sessions and the song became "Jealous Guy", and then it became about being apologetic over his failings as a husband.
But didn't Lennon sort of break up with Yoko in 1973, and have a year-long affair with May Pang? How do we reconcile his jealousy and calls for forgiveness, when it was so easy for him later to fall in love with someone else and take time off from Yoko? (It's possible that he could put up with Yoko's nonsense for longer than most people could, but come on, everyone has their limits.). John and Yoko got back together in 1974, and we now look back on their relationship as one of the great love stories of that time, but somehow that's not the whole story. Many of the documentaries seem to ignore stuff like this or sweep it all under the rug, but I'm trying to stay in touch with reality here.
The most chilling scene in "Above Us Only Sky", though, is a sequence in which a Vietnam veteran shows up at John and Yoko's estate, the man's name was Curt Claudio, and he'd been writing to Lennon for some time, because he felt that in some of Lennon's records, he was speaking directly to him through the radio, or turntable or whatever. Then this guy came all the way to England and tracked down Lennon's address and just arrived one day, and Lennon met with him and had a conversation, trying to dispel the notion that any messages in the songs were directly addressing Curt, or giving him life lessons or secret instructions, or anything of that nature. (A similar thing had happened in the late 1960's with Charles Manson and the song "Helter Skelter", and that didn't end well.). But Lennon met with the man, talked him down, and then invited him in for breakfast. It's not too far of a mental leap from Curt Claudio to Mark David Chapman, but that's how Lennon apparently was when talking with his fans - and some of his fans were a little dazed and confused.
So there you go, we've learned a lot today - Paul McCartney and John Lennon feuded in the early 1970's, Yoko Ono actually wrote the lyrics to "Imagine", John Lennon had a year-long affair in 1973, and some of Lennon's fans were crazy and potentially dangerous, but he let them get too close. Good work, everyone, I'll meet you back here tomorrow for our next exploration into revisionist rock and roll history. Remember, Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident wasn't really that bad.
Also starring Yoko Ono (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band & the Basement Tapes"), Julian Lennon (last seen in "Whitney: Can I Be Me"), Tariq Ali, David Bailey, Ray Connolly (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today...Sgt. Pepper and Beyond"), Jack Douglas, John Dunbar, Douglas Ibold, Elliot Mintz, Kieron Murphy, Dan Richter, Allan Steckler, Eddie Veale, Klaus Voormann (last seen in "Concert for George"), Alan White,
with archive footage of John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr (all carrying over from "Sound City"), Phil Spector (last seen in "Private Life"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Eric Clapton (ditto), Curt Claudio, Mike Douglas (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Gloria Emerson, Mal Evans, David Frost, Nicky Hopkins, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Jack Palance (last heard in "The Swan Princess"), David A. Ross, Andy Warhol (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind").
RATING: 6 out of 10 eggs on toast
No comments:
Post a Comment