Fire and Rain (39 page)

The bushel of material amounted to a journey through Harrison's mind, past and present. The songs dating back to the waning days of the Beatles revealed the strain on his psyche and patience at the time. Written during the filming of
Let It Be
, “Wah-Wah” equated band meetings with a massive, lingering headache. Harrison would later claim “Isn't It a Pity” was a comment on a low point in an unspecified relationship—
presumably with Boyd—but its coda, a sarcastic take on the sing-along finale to McCartney's “Hey Jude,” couldn't have made the subject of his words more apparent. “Run of the Mill” chronicled, with admittedly oblique imagery, the time when the business of running Apple began to wear on the band, while “Beware of Darkness” was, he later wrote, “selfexplanatory”—a take on the sinister side of the music business some felt was aimed at Harrison's otherwise ally, Allen Klein.

The post-Beatles George, or the one he hoped to become now that he was free of them, poked through optimistically. His relaxed, inspiring bonding with Dylan emerged in a version of Dylan's “If Not for You” and “I'd Have You Anytime,” a country-lilt ballad they'd written together. Harrison made Dylan the subject, again abstractly, of “Behind That Locked Door,” a show of love and support for his songwriter friend. The Krishna George, the one who would find peace and tranquility on his own, commandeered “My Sweet Lord” and “Awaiting on You All.”

Fortunately, Spector didn't allow Harrison's tendency toward stern, sour-faced lyrics to derail him. Applying his Wall of Sound approach to a rock orchestra, Spector transformed “Wah-Wah,” “What Is Life,” and “Awaiting on You All” into joyful cacophonies—thundering herds of multiple guitars, percussion, and choirs that did a more than commendable job of smoothing over Harrison's sometimes strained voice and rhymes (“visas” and “Jesus” in the case of the latter song). Spector brought out the hooks and energy in Harrison's songs; he even made the chant “Krishna, Krishna” in “My Sweet Lord” palatable. The ballads, like the title song, had a stately, nineteenth-century eloquence, the musical equivalent to Harrison's Friar Park mansion. From the springy guitar lick that drove “What Is Life” to Pete Drake's sweet pedal steel in “Behind That Locked Door,” the album—the two LPs of original songs, anyway, not the third disc of ho-hum jam sessions with the musicians—was unflaggingly warm and inviting, as if Spector had yanked out the best side of his collaborator's personality.

Far more than McCartney's or Starr's projects, the start of Harrison's record sealed the band's fate for those who worked regularly with them. “It was, ‘This is what we're going to be doing now—four solo albums,'” recalled engineer John Kurlander, who worked on some of the sessions. To Spector's frustration, though,
All Things Must Pass
took months to complete. The sessions began in late May and stretched out, languidly, throughout the summer. In a corner of the studio, Harrison constructed a small shrine, complete with lit incense sticks and a framed picture of the beloved spiritual teacher and yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda. “George took his time,” Voormann recalled. “He got comfortable. He made the studio into his little home.”

As the work dragged on, far longer than he expected, Spector grew bored and irascible. Drummer Alan White, who'd played on Lennon's “Instant Karma,” noticed a gun sitting on the recording console. He'd heard stories about Spector's unpredictable, explosive side, but the sight of a weapon took White and others off guard.

One day, late in the sessions, Spector showed up drunk, and Voormann watched as the producer fell backward off a chair, hurting his arm. Visibly unhappy, Harrison told Spector he'd finish the record without him. By then, the bulk of the project had been completed, and Harrison wrapped it up himself at EMI Studios in September and October. Once and only once, he popped into an adjoining room to check on the status of another historic event, the album on which John Lennon was putting the consequences of his primal scream therapy onto record for the first time.

To Dan Richter, the change in the Lennons was apparent as soon as they returned home to Tittenhurst from Bel Air. For starters, their hair was longer, the close-cropped look of six months before relegated to history.
Lennon made jokes about gaining weight from eating too much ice cream in Hollywood, and his sense of humor, his engagement, were again on display.

So, apparently, was his relationship with Ono. “Take a picture of us,” Lennon asked him one fall day, “we've got this drawing.” Lennon showed Richter a sketch of a man and woman sitting together against a tree. Once, Richter had been able to tell Lennon and Ono's handwriting apart. But no longer; the penmanship on this piece of paper was such a melding of their two styles that he couldn't tell which one had drawn it.
Wow,
Richter thought
, they're even
drawing
alike
. Whatever turbulence had been taking place between Lennon and Ono had been resolved, at least for the time being.

Richter grabbed what he called a “cheap plastic camera” and the three of them headed out to the front of the main house, right off the large front yard. It was a sunny, beautifully crisp afternoon, and Lennon and Ono ran between the trees together like children just dismissed from school. “They had a lot of energy,” Richter recalled. “The whole purging that had taken place with the Janov thing put them in a very positive space.” With their original sketch in mind, Lennon and Ono finally sat down and leaned against a tree, Ono in Lennon's lap. Richter snapped away before Lennon and Ono reversed positions, Ono now cradling Lennon.

From the start, the photos were intended to grace the covers of separate albums Lennon and Ono had finished making after they'd arrived back in England. In late September, Lennon reached out to Starr and Voormann, telling them he had a group of new songs he wanted to record, quickly. When Voormann heard Lennon had hired Spector again, he envisioned another crowd-of-thousands production. Instead, he found himself in the studio with only Lennon and Starr, Spector keeping an exceedingly low profile and allowing Lennon to shape his own sound. (Coming on the heels of the Harrison sessions, Spector may have been
humbled; he also instinctively knew Lennon was opting for a different approach and went out of his way to respect his wishes.) “Phil was very subdued and melded in,” Voormann recalled. “He did not push any Phil Spector sound on us.” Starr later recalled having no memory whatsoever of Spector being around.

That sound, as Voormann and Starr discovered, was naked and minimalist; most of the songs were played only by the core trio of Lennon, Voormann, and Starr. Lennon wrote out the lyrics on large pieces of paper, the chords listed underneath them. The trio ran through each song a few times, Lennon alternating between piano and guitar, and then recorded them. Voormann flubbed a few notes here and there, but in they stayed. Lennon was taking the original concept of
Let It Be
and pushing it as far as he could.

One night, Lennon insisted on recording in spite of a voice raspy from oversinging. With special guest Billy Preston accompanying him with churchly, dramatic piano flourishes, Lennon launched into “God,” which worked itself up to a relentless, unapologetic list of everything in which he no longer believed: Jesus, John Kennedy, Buddha, yoga, Elvis, the Bhagavad Gita, Dylan (“Zimmerman,” as he called him), and, finally, the Beatles. Beforehand, he pulled Voormann aside. The last line was going to be “I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Should he add, “and Yoko,” he asked? He didn't want to hurt her feelings. Voormann didn't know what to say; it was Lennon's choice. In the final version, he had it both ways: He believed in “me . . . Yoko and me.” Clearly Lennon wanted to keep everything copacetic with Ono.

If
McCartney
didn't demand much, Lennon's
Plastic Ono Band
demanded everything—complete concentration and immersion in Lennon's state of mind, and a tolerance for a sonic approach that was akin to stripped-down wood. It was pop music, but not pop like anyone, especially Beatle fans, had envisioned. “Mother,” his way of confronting the mommy and daddy issues that haunted him, was more a pained
mantra than a song, Lennon's voice rising up to a scream at the end of each line. “I Found Out,” which lashed out equally at Jesus and Harrison's beloved Krishna, was gut-bucket Liverpool blues. “Working Class Hero,” featuring just Lennon's voice and shuddering acoustic guitar strums, was as unflinching as the starkest black-and-white photograph. The songs were open wounds, the arrangements—like Lennon's voice and guitar on “I Found Out” or his equally ravaged guitar work on “Well Well Well”—scratching at them until they bled.

Lennon and Spector were savvy enough record-makers to know a few gentler moments were called for, so out came “Hold On,” Lennon's reassuring words to himself, Ono, and the world, floating along on his gentle tremolo guitar, and “Love,” a gorgeous quasi-prayer whose delicate arrangement—Lennon's guitar, Spector's piano, and Voormann's bass—enhanced its natural beauty. Starting with the funeral bell that opened it,
Plastic Ono Band
was neither easy to listen to nor meant to be.

During the same month of October, the band and Spector dashed off a very different project, Ono's own
Plastic Ono Band
. Again, Spector stayed largely out of the way, allowing Lennon and Ono to call the shots. If Lennon's record of the same name was his way of exorcizing his personal demons, Ono's album was Lennon's way of exercising his musical ones. The music was feral and ferocious (“Why”) or defiantly eccentric (“Why Not,” which sounded like country blues from outer space, thanks to the strings sticking to the magnets on Lennon's National slide guitar). Ono's voice, a quivery siren wail one minute or a delicate coo the next, rode roughshod over it all. The music was entirely improvised, and even Starr, who kept any self-indulgent tendencies as a drummer in check, let loose from time to time.

When the packaging was finished, Lennon and Ono intentionally chose a shot of Lennon leaning on Ono for
his
cover, and Ono in Lennon's lap for her own. To Richter, the idea was “classic John and Yoko. And it was a very Yoko idea, of a man and woman as yin and yang.”
The choice of photographs also spoke to what Lennon told Richter were his masculine and his feminine sides, the intertwining of men and women that Ono championed.

Lennon was justly proud of both albums and knew his record especially was far more accessible than previous projects with Ono, like the sound collages of
Life with the Lions
. When executives at EMI and Apple saw the dual covers and heard the music, though, their guards went up. Why wasn't Lennon's face on the cover? “Can't you talk to him?” a label executive said to Richter one day, pulling him aside. “This is going to ruin his career. It's another nail in the coffin.” In particular, they were concerned that the albums, especially Lennon's own, didn't have “that Beatles sound.” What was he thinking, they thought? And why did Ono have to put out her own album too?

At the very least, the Lennons had one attentive audience. In Los Angeles, Arthur and Vivian Janov received a copy and played it for one of their group sessions at the Primal Scream Institute. Everyone, including the Janovs, listened raptly. Few could believe they were listening to a John Lennon album whose thoughts and concepts had originated in that very room on Sunset Boulevard.

In honor of Lennon's thirtieth birthday, October 9, Harrison saluted his friend in song: “It's Johnny's Birthday,” a silly, playful sing-along, sounded like a carousel speeding up and slowing down. (Harrison liked it so much he included it on
All Things Must Pass
.) Despite all that had transpired and collapsed over the past year, Harrison, Lennon, and Starr remained close. Lennon stopped by at least once during the
All Things Must Pass
sessions, and Alan White found himself in the mind-boggling position of jamming with two Beatles while a third, Starr, whacked a tambourine. White asked Starr to play drums, but Starr demurred.