Fire and Rain (32 page)

By way of his close friend Harrison, Starr had already moved on. In the weeks after McCartney's press statement, Harrison had decided the time had come to make an album of his own. He'd first ventured into solo waters with
Wonderwall Music
, a collection of mostly instrumental electronic tracks released in 1968 as the eponymous soundtrack for a film, but he now had a stack of songs left over from Beatle sessions as well as new ones he'd composed at Friar Park. With the encouragement of Voormann and Chris O'Dell (who helped him type out the lyrics), Harrison made plans to put his songs on tape.

The previous December, Harrison had sat in with Delaney and Bonnie (and their mutual friend Eric Clapton) on some of the American soul duo's European shows. Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett—he from a small town in Mississippi, she from St. Louis—had made their name in Los Angeles as a white-trash version of Ike and Tina Turner. Clapton had seen their fiery stage show firsthand when Delaney and Bonnie opened for his now-defunct band Blind Faith and, inspired by their R&B and soul grooves and onstage hospitality, had hooked up with them as a backup guitarist, at least temporarily.

Harrison had much the same experience. Weary of open warfare in the Beatle camp, he'd sat in with Delaney and Bonnie onstage in London in December 1969. (Lennon attended the same show, and Bonnie Bramlett was struck by how small he was in person.) At his wife's urging, Delaney Bramlett invited Harrison to join them for a few of their European shows. “I said, ‘Just ask him—what's he going to do, say
no
?'” Bonnie Bramlett recalled. “He hadn't played in three years and his fucking band broke up. Ask him!” Harrison told them they should drive up to his house
and simply knock on the door; his wife, Pattie Boyd, would be too polite to turn them down. The Delaney and Bonnie caravan did just that, and Harrison emerged with his guitar and hopped aboard. The experience gave him the chance to play guitar in a relaxed, nonjudgmental atmosphere, without any attendant Beatle hysteria. The Delaney and Bonnie gigs also introduced him to a group of superb American musicians—keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon—while cementing Boyd's growing infatuation with Clapton. At her and Harrison's house, Boyd told Bonnie Bramlett and Rita Coolidge, one of their backup singers, that she was in love with Clapton and was thinking of leaving Harrison. Neither Bramlett nor Coolidge knew what to say.

By way of Charlie Daniels, the bass player at his casual session with Dylan, Harrison had reached out to Pete Drake, one of Nashville's most revered pedal steel guitarists. Harrison loved the use of steel guitar on Dylan's recent albums and wanted to integrate its sweet, supple cry into his own work. At Harrison's recording sessions, Starr, who drummed on a good deal of the tracks, told Drake he was in a bind. He wanted to make another album in London, but between scheduling time and finding the right pop producer, the process could take months. Inspired by his drive into London—he was picked up in Starr's six-door Mercedes and saw piles of country cassettes strewn about—Drake flashed on an idea: Why not make a record in Nashville, a town known for its quickturnaround schedules? With Drake producing, the whole thing most likely wouldn't take more than week.

Before he knew it, Starr, joined by Apple's Neil Aspinall, was on a plane to Nashville by way of Atlanta. Drake wasn't joking about efficiency. By the time Starr arrived in Nashville on June 22, Drake had already selected a group of songs for him. One by one, the songwriters appeared at Starr's hotel room to help him learn the material. Arriving at Music City Studio two days later, his hair and beard newly trimmed as if to prepare for more conservative surroundings, Starr found himself
in a very different world than the one he'd left behind. Joining Drake in the control room was Scotty Moore, Presley's original guitar player. The studio musicians gathered around him, a formidable lineup that included guitarists Jerry Reed and Charlie Daniels, were seasoned, no-nonsense, and hardly in awe of Starr's presence. “You couldn't ignore that this was a Beatle,” recalled Daniels. “But the guys were not so overwhelmed, by any stretch of the imagination. They were used to working with stars. It was, ‘Hi, Ringo, we're happy to have you in town—now let's work.'”

Even when work began, no one was certain that an Englishman slipping into the role of downbeat redneck would make sense. During his first cracks at tackling the songs, Starr was visibly unnerved at the sight of Drake, an army of Nashville studio pros, and a chorus of backup singers waiting on him to complete a vocal. But gradually Starr warmed up, laughing at his own stumbles and putting everyone at ease. By the end of the third day, Nashville's assembly-line system had worked once more, resulting in fifteen finished songs.

Some of them, like “Without Her” and “Waiting,” were soapy, overbaked weepers that perhaps intentionally buried Starr's voice. But Drake wisely chose blue-ribbon honky-tonk songs like “I'd Be Talking All the Time” and “Beaucoups of Blues” that cannily played into Starr's happyloser persona. The musicianship, from Reed's speedy picking on “$15 Draw” to the airtight clip-clop beat that drove “Fastest Growing Heartache in the West,” was no joke, and the album featured a genuine moment of anti-Vietnam solemnity. “Silent Homecoming” detailed the arrival of a soldier returning home in a coffin. “Proudly he had served his country/In a war he didn't seem to understand,” Starr sang, making a more profound political comment in song than any of his former bandmates had yet managed.

Throughout the three days, few of the musicians knew what to make of Starr's presence in the country capitol. Most had little interaction with him, and Starr declined to speak with a
Rolling Stone
reporter covering
the sessions, only answering a few questions from the young son of one of the musicians. No one dared ask him about the Beatles, and the request to cover “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was ignored. “Ringo wasn't the top country singer I've ever heard,” recalled Daniels. “I have to be honest—I'm a fan of Marty Robbins. But it was an admirable thing to do.”

Throughout, Starr remained his affable, unpretentious self. During a break, he and the musicians gathered in an empty lot next door for a quick photo to grace the in-progress album's artwork. “He was like one of the guys,” said Ben Keith, a local picker recruited to play dobro and steel guitar, “except he had an English accent.” In anticipation of a possible invasion of press or Beatle fans, three plainclothes cops guarded the studio. Their presence proved unnecessary: No one unexpected or dangerous appeared at Music City the entire time Starr was there.

Arthur and Vivian Janov began working their way around the large, unfurnished room at their Primal Scream Institute on Sunset Boulevard. The patients who needed immediate help and were in palpable psychic pain were the Janovs' first priority. One by one, the Janovs approached the eighteen or so reclining on pillows or sitting on the soft rugs that had replaced the couches and office furniture once in the room. The Janovs wanted the space to be comfortable and comforting—particularly for two of the patients in the room, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

On the other side of the country from Nashville, Lennon was having an atypical summer of his own. Several times a week, he and Ono would leave their rental house on a side street in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air and drive to the Institute. To the surprise of the other patients, they readily settled into the group sessions, which lasted two to three hours each and cost a more than affordable fifty dollars a session.
Lennon and Ono's most intensive conversations, though, occurred in the Janovs' private office, a small, dimly lit room with padded-wall soundproofing for optimum privacy. “The whole thing,” Arthur Janov recalled, “was to facilitate a return to the past.”

With only Janov at his side (Ono would have her own separate sessions with Vivian Janov), Lennon openly spoke of his personal history. According to Janov, Lennon neither screamed nor curled up in a depressed fetal position. He would sometimes cry but mainly talked—about the Beatles, the sad life of Brian Epstein, and the songs he'd begun writing for an album he'd decided to make on his own. The conversations sometimes continued at the Bel Air home. “I went into a big discourse about religion,” Janov recalled of one conversation there, “and he said, ‘Well, God is a concept by which we measure our pain.' He would take all these complicated things we were talking about and put them into very simple terms, which was his genius.”

Since Ono was more skeptical of primal scream, her individual sessions with Vivian Janov weren't as freewheeling. “She came from a very different background,” Vivian Janov said. But during their personal time together, Janov came to realize Ono wanted to use the therapy to repair problems with her and Lennon's relationship. “They both were in some kind of turmoil over their marriage,” she recalled. “That may have motivated her. She wanted to mend whatever was happening between them.”

The Lennons had planned on staying four months, through the end of August, but the trip was ultimately curtailed. The reasons were never clear. Janov felt Lennon thought the FBI, at Nixon's request, was monitoring him and attempting to drive him out of the country. Vivian Janov felt he and Ono simply missed home. The fact that the Janovs filmed most of their group primal sessions may have been a factor. Arthur Janov maintained the sessions with Lennon and Ono were never filmed, but that Lennon may have heard they were, and the mere thought of leaked
footage was enough to send the couple scurrying back to London. “He probably went to a group where we were filming,” Janov admitted, “but I made damn sure that no film ever got out. And believe me, if I had film I could have been a multimillionaire.”

By late July, they were gone. As a way to acknowledge Janov's role in helping him reconnect with buried feelings and emotions, Lennon left behind a gift: a songbook of all his Beatle lyrics, each annotated with notes and cartoons. He was leaving another part of himself behind.

Before they returned to England, Lennon and Ono swung up to San Francisco. There, with Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone,
they finally saw
Let It Be
. The movie had premiered in the middle of May in New York, then a week later in London and Liverpool. None of the Beatles attended any of the openings, leaving reporters to resort to gawking at actress Joan Collins, writer and comic Spike Milligan (co-creator of
The Goon Show,
the revered Monty Python precursor), Apple singer Mary Hopkin, and McCartney's former girlfriend Jane Asher—hardly an A-list of British celebrities. A special train hired to escort the Beatles to the Liverpool event arrived empty.

Lennon's private premiere amounted to a daytime showing at a local theater in San Francisco. What he and the general public saw was a fairly unblemished chronicle of four men struggling to connect and work together after the thrill had gone. Even in that regard, though,
Let It Be
was a letdown. The movie's dramatic highlight was a mildly testy exchange between McCartney and Harrison, as the former attempted to show the latter how to play a new song. “I'll play, you know, whatever you want me to play,” Harrison said, his voice dipped in barely controlled irritation. “Or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. Whatever it is that'll please you, I'll do it.” Otherwise,
Let It Be
was largely tedious: footage of the band rehearsing, attempting to rehearse, or killing time between rehearsals. Bashing out their new material in best Cavern Club style reduced sublime songs like “Across the Universe” to clunky thuds. In the
course of six short years, the ebullient Beatles of
A Hard Day's Night
had been replaced by four grumpier, scruffier men who seemed to be existing in four different worlds. In a strange way, the film's very dullness was the point: Other than McCartney, who was happy to ham it up for the camera, the others looked disinterested in being Beatles.

Lennon later told Wenner he felt “sad” watching the film. The incessant focus on McCartney and his band-leading ways—and the much smaller amount of footage devoted to Ono—irritated Lennon as well. In another sign that something had ended, the theater was almost empty.