Fire and Rain Read online

  Taylor had written overcast songs before, but “Fire and Rain” took that intensity to a new, almost frighteningly stark level—and, ironically, was greeted by his friends as a potential breakthrough. “When I played it for Joel O’Brien, he said, ‘You know, that could be a very commercial, big song for you,’” Taylor recalled. “Peter thought that, too.” In Los Angeles in January 1969, Taylor, Kortchmar, and bass player Charles Larkey, King’s boyfriend and new collaborator, put an early version of the song on tape, but it didn’t feel right. Back in Los Angeles almost a year later, they tried again and cut it, efficiently, on December 9. Initially Kunkel played his part with drumsticks, until Asher, recalling their rehearsals, suggested the softer, swishier sound of brushes. The revised rhythm became a signature part of the arrangement, an emotional sputter and touch of drama at the end of each chorus. Meanwhile, King added spare piano chords, as if tiptoeing around Taylor’s melancholy.

  At the end of the third day, Taylor told Asher that was it. Even though they’d only recorded nine songs, he didn’t have any more. “Well, we should really finish this and deliver it and get it down and get the money,” Asher told him. The two came up with an idea to combine three half-finished songs into a brand-new one. Everyone returned to Sunset Sound on December 17 and quickly cut “Suite for 20G,” named in honor of the amount of money they’d receive once they handed in the completed album. “Twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money back then,” Kunkel recalled. “It meant Peter could buy some furniture.” Adding up the costs of studio time and musicians, Asher realized they’d spent $7,600 recording the entire album. He was so green he felt he’d be in trouble with Smith for not spending enough of the label’s money.

  Taylor was pleased with the results but unsure of where the record might take him. “We were just making another record,” Taylor recalled. “We were better at it. Peter was a better producer. We had a more focused idea and the players on it were good. We were in Los Angeles in a professional recording studio doing professional work. It’s always good to make an album quickly and in a concise way, because it makes it have a cohesion and makes it hang together in a natural way. But I had no idea if it was any good or not.”

  Everyone, including Taylor, agreed on one thing: The cover was striking. Four days before the “Suite for 20G” session, Henry Diltz—an affable thirty-one-year-old photographer and folk musician who’d taken the photo used for the iconic cover of Crosby, Stills & Nash—had arrived at Asher’s Longwood Avenue home. Sitting on the living-room floor beneath a large window, his back against the wall and his legs spread out before him, Taylor sat quietly, picking out the notes of Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susannah” on guitar. He, Diltz, and Asher then drove out to an isolated farm off Bonham Boulevard in the Lake Hollywood section and veered down a dirt road, finally arriving at a hippie commune in the woods. Given how unvarnished Taylor’s music was, the sheds and barns in sight felt like the right setting.

  Diltz snapped away as Taylor, in a blue denim work shirt, walked around the property. At one point, he leaned against a post and stared straight ahead. Frowning beneath a King Arthur shag and a stoic, Gary Cooper-as-folksinger gaze, he suddenly looked like a star. “Hold that a minute,” Diltz said, grabbing his color camera to snap off a few frames. Diltz hadn’t intended the color shots to be for more than a slide show for friends, but after developing the shot, he saw its potential.

  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 fi
rst 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.

  On January 25, Lennon and Ono finally returned to London; the next day, Ringo Starr left. By then, Starr had two comfortable homes: a house with a garden in Highgate, a hilly London suburb, and a centuries-old Tudor mansion in Elstead in county Surrey that he’d purchased in 1968 from his friend, actor Peter Sellers. With its oak-beamed rooms, wandering packs of ducks and geese, and separate movie theater, Brookfield House, as the Elstead home was called, was a welcome retreat from the pressure of Beatlemania.

  Still, Starr had to leave, even for a bit. As unappealing as the thought of inquisitive reporters was—he dreaded the inevitable questions about how the Beatles were getting along—he had a movie to promote and a career of his own to map out. With Maureen, his low-key wife of nearly five years, and Apple administrative director Peter Brown, he boarded a plane for Los Angeles.

  The
oldest Beatle and the last to join, Starr had been a drowsy-eyed but amiable child growing up in Liverpool. To everyone around him, he still was. He’d been the first to say he was leaving: After a tense 1968 recording session, he stayed home and didn’t return for several days (when he was welcomed back with a drum kit enshrined in roses). They knew he would come back: More than the others, Starr was always happy with his job, so why change anything? According to one former Apple employee, Richard DiLello, Starr’s presence was especially welcome the day Lauren Bacall called and said she wanted to swing by with her daughter to meet a Beatle. Starr, the only Beatle available on short notice, charmed them so much that Bacall felt as if they were all in the offices. Starr’s interest in the business of the Beatles, while never as intense as McCartney’s, rose in the new decade: Now it was he, not McCartney, who was the most visible at 3 Savile Row and most passionate about the idea of the Beatles. As the four pulled away from each other, Starr steered closer to home base.

  The previous October, Starr had launched a project of his own, an album of standards from the pre-rock era—purposefully cornball but guileless songs like “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” and “Stardust,” with big-band arrangements courtesy of Quincy Jones and McCartney. “The idea of Ringo doing his own album made us all think, ‘Oh, really?’” remembered Paul Watts, an EMI marketing executive at the time. Plenty of others, including Starr himself, didn’t see the project as more than a way to pass the time and record long-ago pop songs his mother would enjoy hearing him sing. Over the course of four months, with the Beatles on an extended hiatus of some sort, Starr worked on the album at his leisure.