Jonathan Cott interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968, at a time
when they were starting to do creative and political work together as a
couple, and Lennon was starting to feel, as Louis Menand put it in a New Yorker
essay, that there might be someone he “cared about more than
Ringo”—that is, more than he cared about continuing to be part of The
Beatles. (The book isn’t about blaming Ono, or anyone, for breaking up
The Beatles. As Menand also put it, this was “a natural development,”
and would have happened sooner or later.) A dozen years later, Cott
interviewed Lennon again, three days before he was murdered, as part of
the big publicity push for Lennon’s first album in five years, Double Fantasy.
By then, Lennon knew he was on friendly ground: Both interviews were conducted for Rolling Stone,
which by the end of the ’70s was the official Boomer handbook, devoted
to assuring the children of the ’60s that they had come of age during
the Renaissance, and to coddling the era’s rock idols. (This was a
couple of years after Jann Wenner took over the front page of the
record-review section to write a scathing rebuttal to two of his critics
for having dared, in previous issues, to find fault with the latest
albums by Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones.) And Cott writes that he
became so friendly with Lennon and Ono that he “would run into them at
odd times and places, and the three of us would occasionally meet up for
dinner.” This book includes the substance of those interviews, heavily
padded out with descriptions of the circumstances under which they came
to pass, along with “an account of one of the most unusual and lively of
our dinner conversations that took place on March 17, 1971,” and a
catching-up conversation with Ono from last year. The result is a
testament to one of the most cherished principles of the Boomer
generation of rock critics: Anyone who ever broke bread with a Beatle is
entitled to get a book out of it.
For anyone old enough to remember the ’60s—or anyone who, as a
student of popular culture, has spent some time paging through yellowing
copies of Rolling Stone and the “Riffs” section of The Village Voice—this
book has a certain nostalgic charm. Cott writes, “Many people came to
think of the four Beatles as symbolic dream figures and presences—like
the four evangelists, the four seasons, the four phases of the moon, the
four corners of the earth—and in an elementary sense, each Beatle, in
the way he became defined by his face, gestures, voice, and songs, took
on an archetypal role: Paul, sweet and sensitive; John, restless and
rebellious; George, mysterious and mystical; Ringo, childlike but
commonsensical.”
Contemporary writers on pop music are often accused of hyperbole and
strained effects, but they don’t blather quite like that. Most of them
don’t feel the protective need to include stage directions with the
dialogue, telling readers how to react, as when Cott precedes a Lennon
quote with, “As he once amusingly said…” And having had the advantage of
growing up after the great high/low-culture wars of the ’50s and ’60s,
most music writers take it for granted that pop musicians can be
artists, and don’t try to impress readers by forcing bizarre
associations between their subjects and high-culture figures. Cott does
exactly that, following a description of John Lennon delivering his
famous wisecrack about “the cheaper seats” at the 1963 Royal Command
Performance with a passage beginning, “A century and a half earlier, in
1812, another one of my heroes, Ludwig van Beethoven, was walking down
the street of a Bavarian resort town with the distinguished German
writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe…”
This slim, attractively produced book might make a good
stocking-stuffer for a Lennon fanatic who isn’t interested in learning
anything new about the great man. (It would be an even better gift for
an Ono fanatic; part of Cott’s motivation for assembling it seems to be
“So there!” to her “uncomprehending and abusive detractors.”) But
perhaps because his worshipful affection for Lennon blunted his
journalistic killer instinct, Cott doesn’t seem to have caught his hero
on his best days. The conversations recorded here have little of the
freshness and bite of the ones in Wenner’s Lennon Remembers, or the 1975 TV chat with Tom Snyder, or even the posthumously published Playboy
interview conducted by David Sheff, which covers much the same ground
as Cott’s second full interview. John Lennon could be a great talker,
especially when he felt challenged and had something to prove. He had a
lot of anger and even meanness in him, and that was a big part of what
fueled both his creativity and his magnetic energy. Like a lot of
tributes to Lennon (and Ono) that have come out since December 1980,
many of them from people who claim to have been among the few who really
knew him, Days That I’ll Remember seems to have only ever heard about John the Nice Guy.
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