Fire and Rain (10 page)

After a few hours, Diltz stopped clicking and went off on a more glamorous assignment: hanging out with Jim Morrison to examine the skid-row photos Diltz had taken for the cover of the upcoming Doors album,
Morrison Hotel
. Morrison, along with the likes of David Crosby and Stephen Stills, was the sort of charismatic pop star Diltz was accustomed to shooting. Taylor had talent, but he wasn't part of any particular scene; if anything, he seemed like an apolitical loner. To Diltz, he was just another guy with a guitar, one of many coming up around then.

To John Fischbach, Taylor was simply a stoner buddy. A few years older than Taylor, Fischbach had, like many of his friends, left the East Coast for the West, in his case by way of Colorado. A record producer and engineer, he was in the midst of setting up a studio in town and lived with his girlfriend, Stephanie Magrino, in Laurel Canyon, the tightly—incestuously—knit musical community in the hills. Through Magrino, who'd befriended King, Fischbach met Taylor.

His new acquaintance's predilection for hard drugs wasn't a secret. “For God's sake, everybody was high,” Fischbach recalled. “He was just
one of us.” On those occasions when Taylor dropped by Fischbach's home, the two would ingest whatever substances were available, grab fistfuls of rocks, jam them in their pockets, and jump in the pool. After sinking to the bottom, they'd sit on the floor for as long as their lungs would allow. Neither knew why they did it; they just did. At that point in their lives, there wasn't much else to do, anyway.

The Fischbach-Magrino home was one of many where Taylor crashed in the early months of 1970 as he awaited the release of his just-finished record. Essentially homeless, Taylor would alternate between Asher's home, a couch in Kortchmar's house on Hollywood Boulevard, and the habitat of any friend who'd have him. The situation was loose and carefree, especially when it came to relationships. On Martha's Vineyard, Kortchmar had noticed Taylor's effect on girls, and Chapel Hill lore had it that when Taylor was in high school, he and one girl had sex in the nearby woods in a poison ivy patch. Both wound up in the hospital, Taylor showing a friend the somewhat embarrassing place where he'd made contact with the plant.

In Chapel Hill, Taylor had been dubbed “lady-killer” by friends, and the same nickname could have also applied in Los Angeles. Although Taylor had a girlfriend he'd met in London—Margaret Corey, daughter of comic Professor Irwin Corey—plenty of other women in his new community, including Magrino, had crushes on him. “It was from a time when nothing much was expected of me,” Taylor recalled. “So I didn't have the expectations, the
burden
of expectations, of coming up with something that was going to be commercially successful. It was a relatively free and easy time. I had a sort of group, a family in Los Angeles, that I was managed by, living with,
loving
with. And making music with. And that was a nice thing.” Taylor had a new home and community, both fairly insular and disconnected from any turmoil outside Los Angeles. Vietnam was not a concern: Given his earlier stay at McLean, the Selective Service deemed him unacceptable for the army.

On the other side of the country, in Martha's Vineyard, Taylor's younger brother Livingston, a developing singer-songwriter about to sign a record contract of his own, played an early copy of his brother's LP for acquaintances. “I could see they thought it was nice, but they didn't know how good it was,” Livingston recalled. “And I looked at them and said, ‘No, you don't understand. This is a truly great record and it's going to be
enormously
popular.'” To the friends, the idea still seemed fairly preposterous.

CHAPTER 3

“We try not to make plans,” John Lennon emphasized to the newest group of reporters gathered around him. He was referring to himself and Yoko Ono, who sat quietly beside him, flashing a retiring smile. In his almost singsongy Liverpool lilt, Lennon continued: “I don't really like knowing what I'm gonna do for the next eight months.”

Even for someone who preferred to live life on the fly, it's doubtful Lennon had planned on being where he was now, on the chilly afternoon of January 5. A few weeks earlier, he'd been in Toronto, talking up a festival he was helping organize and meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Now, on the fifth day of the new decade, he was giving a hastily organized press conference in what felt like the most remote locale possible, a college in the remote northeast of Denmark.

For anyone who'd kept up with the Beatles' changes in wardrobe and hairstyles, he looked and sounded like the revamped modern John: wire-rimmed glasses, shoulder-length waterfall of brown hair, full beard. Ono flanked him on one side; on the other was her six-year-old daughter Kyoko from her first marriage, to Tony Cox. Cox himself, sporting sunglasses and a smirk, sat next to Kyoko, along with Cox's new, stern-looking wife, Melinda Kendall. When the local press had heard Lennon was in town and wanted to know why, Lennon agreed to the press conference.

As soon as it began, he still flashed a bit of his familiar combination of wit and sneer. “All right, you rumor mongers, let's get going!” he cracked. To the reporters, he denied reports he'd bought land there, said
he loved the snow, and addressed rumors about the Beatles' finances. “The people around us made more money than the Beatles ever did, I'll tell you that,” he said bluntly. “None of the Beatles are millionaires. But there's a lot of millionaires who became millionaires around the Beatles.”

Although he wouldn't dwell on it that afternoon, the past year had been a particularly turbulent one for the Beatles and Lennon. The filming sessions at Twickenham almost a year before had been unpleasant enough. Then they'd reconvened in July to make a new album,
Abbey Road,
the old-fangled, studio-produced way, but the four were rarely in the same room together. One reporter who visited during the sessions witnessed McCartney giving Harrison a particularly hard time over a guitar solo—and that was when a journalist was around. The days when they were together, all for one—in Liverpool and Hamburg, on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
having pillow fights for the press in hotel rooms—now felt as distant as Lennon's childhood. Factor in a sometimes hostile press, heroin, and intragroup business friction, and no wonder Lennon—who'd turned twenty-nine three months before—had removed himself, even temporarily, from it all.

As 1969 receded, Ono grew desperate to reconnect with her daughter, whom she hadn't seen in years. Cox, who'd been given custody of Kyoko, was temporarily living in Denmark. Shortly before Christmas, the Lennons had flown to Aalborg and been driven to Cox's rented farmhouse outside the small town of Vust.

From the start, Lennon went along with Cox's lifestyle requests, like undergoing hypnosis to stop smoking. Few were surprised he was agreeing to all this for Ono's sake. Wearing matching black turtleneck sweaters at the Danish press conference, the couple came across as a hairier, countercultural version of the Bobbsey Twins. In a recording studio in London that winter, they sat together in a control room, listening to a new track and chewing gum in time. “They breathed the same air and completed each other's sentences,” recalled Dan Richter, a friend who was
house-sitting at their home outside London that winter. “They were like Romeo and Juliet, only older.”

Lennon remained his seat-of-the-pants self, as John Brower, a young Canadian promoter and club owner, had witnessed in the fall. One September day, Brower had phoned the Apple offices to ask if Lennon would be willing to participate in a multi-act festival, the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, that Brower was organizing. To his surprise, Lennon took the call and agreed—and then almost missed the chaotic flight over. On the plane, Lennon and the band he'd thrown together for the show—Ono; Eric Clapton; artist, bass player, and longtime friend Klaus Voormann; and Alan White, a twenty-year-old drummer between bands—rehearsed in seats at the back of the plane. (When Lennon called to offer him the gig, White thought it was a joke and hung up; luckily, Lennon called back.) Before the show, Lennon took heroin and wound up leading the band through a bedraggled, under-rehearsed set. But the rawness and electricity of the event inspired him. He hadn't received a rush like that from his regular band in what felt like years.

Brower, a dough-faced twenty-three-year-old with sunken eyes, had been inspired too. After the festival, he approached Lennon with a far more grandiose, almost fantastical plan: a “music and peace conference” to be held outside Toronto over the July 4 weekend. Brower and Ritchie Yorke—a Canadian journalist who'd come to know Lennon during the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival—would organize it, and Lennon would recruit the talent. Everyone was hoping for a turnout of two million—an event that would dwarf Woodstock and announce to the world that a new era of peace and harmony had descended on the planet in the year 1970.

Brower and Yorke were the next to arrive in Denmark, even though, like Lennon, they hadn't planned on it. Lennon had summoned them by phone in order to discuss plans for the festival, and they had no choice but to take the long flight from Canada. On the morning of January 15,
the day after they'd arrived, the two of them—along with Anthony Fawcett, the Lennons' personal assistant—found themselves sharing a taxi from their hotel in Aalborg to Vust. As rain turned what been a foot of snow into dreary slush, they stared out the windows at the desolate landscape until the cab pulled up at what looked like a deserted farmhouse. At the door, Cox asked them all to remove their shoes, leave any drugs behind, and step inside.

The sight that greeted them was like nothing they'd expected. Yes, upon his arrival Brower had met with a mysterious, bug-eyed “doctor” Lennon had also flown out to Denmark and who was talking about extraterrestrials visiting the festival. Sure, they'd heard the story the night before from a local hairdresser, who told them she'd been summoned to a farm to trim John Lennon's hair. Before she began, Lennon had shown her a copy of his passport photo, from the
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
days, and asked her to cut it even shorter. Ono cried as her husband's locks fell to the floor. When it was over, Lennon asked the haircutter to move on to Ono and then Kyoko. It was as if Lennon was both returning to his past and simultaneously cutting his ties from it. Adding to the strangeness, all the shorn hair was collected into bags and carted away.

Despite these stories, neither Brower nor Yorke expected to be so taken aback by a gaunt Lennon, his hair buzz-cut short, staring at them from the kitchen table. He looked less like a Beatle and more like a Vietnam POW after months in the Hanoi Hilton. “That was a shock,” Yorke recalled. “It was a pretty dramatic moment.” Seemingly confused by all the adults around, Kyoko ran up to Brower and said, “I don't like my hair, I want my old hair back.”

From that point, the meeting took a dramatic turn akin to Lennon's makeover. In no uncertain terms, Lennon announced the festival should be free. Brower was stunned by the comment: How would they be able to pay for such a thing if that were the case? Lennon didn't want to hear it. “It was all a bit dismaying,” Yorke recalled. “There were conflicting
agendas. What we hoped to start with John was certainly not turning out the way we'd hoped.” To Brower and Yorke's surprise and chagrin, Allen Klein popped into the kitchen—despite the fact that Lennon had asked them to compile a dossier on Klein's reputation in the music business.

Less than an hour later, Brower, Yorke, and Fawcett were back in a taxi, returning to the Aalborg hotel. What had just happened? Having digested a mysterious tarry black substance on toast in the Cox kitchen—probably hashish, although he never knew for certain—Brower was doubly befuddled. Where was the Lennon that Brower and Yorke had met with a few months before—even the funny, animated man at the press conference for the festival in Toronto just before Christmas? “Fawcett said, ‘They love their hair,'” Brower recalled. “So cutting it was like embarking on this new path.” But what was that path, and where would it lead? No one, perhaps even Lennon, was sure at the moment.