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- Beatles and Class Open Thread - April 29, 2021
Reggie (left) and Ronnie Kray, photographed by David Bailey
For those (mostly American?) readers who haven’t run across Ronnie and Reggie Kray, they were a pair of murderous twin brother gangsters who ruled the London underworld in the 1960s. Probably the most notorious British criminals since Jack the Ripper (sorry, Crippen). Before settling down to serious lawbreaking, the Krays were amateur boxers run out of the Army for being too wild; Ronnie was gay (sorry: “I’m bisexual, not gay. Bisexual“) and Reggie was straight. Ronnie was also paranoid schizophrenic, while Reggie was apparently neurotypical which is…kinda worse?
So what do they have to do with our Beatles? Nothing—and of course, everything. In the late 1950s, the brothers were working for a Liverpool gangster called Jay Murray, someone that The Beatles and their manager certainly ran across as they set the North on fire. Then, after the Fabs moved down to London, they were frequent guests at Kray-owned casinos. When some Beatle writer blithely drops “Brian racked up enormous gambling debts,” it’s likely that some of those debts were owed to the Krays. Who were legendarily ruthless.
Entertainers and mobsters always mix, for lots of reasons. Entertainment venues are often mobbed-up, and all-cash businesses like concerts are a natural—if you sell 4,579 tickets at £3 each, and claim you sold 4,102, that untraceable £1431 (£3 x 477) is yours to keep. Untraceable cash is the lifeblood of criminal enterprises (and espionage too, by the way). When Brian got his famous “paper bag money,” it was this untraceable cash, which was then distributed hither and yon.
The Beatles were a particularly juicy target: not only were the biggest act in the world, they had definitely adult tastes, which coexisted uneasily with the squeaky clean image that they needed to protect. And they had a manager who wasn’t just a gambler, but a gay man with a taste for rough trade. They were, put simply, a blackmailer’s dream. (Take it from Dizz Gillespie.) “There were photos of me crawling round on my knees coming out of whorehouses in Amsterdam,” Lennon famously said. Who took that photo, who kept it hidden, and how much did it cost?
“I gave you my expensive lighter! What more do you want, you bloodsuckers?”
In this era, the connection between gangsters and singers was more overt than usual; John & Paul nestled next to Ronnie & Reggie in David Bailey‘s Box of Pin-Ups, taking Swinging London’s pose of a classless society to absurd, naive lengths. The codes of propriety that might’ve insulated four men so important to Britain’s balance of trade were put temporarily out-of-order. But as I’ve said recently on the site, this was a “dog that didn’t bark”—at least for as long as Brian was alive. Never spoken about, likely never even written down, from 1964-67 The Beatles sat at the center of a web of clandestine agreements, payoffs made and received to keep the machine running and everybody getting their cut. However, after Brian died, things apparently changed. In 1968, George and John were both busted in a way that was unimaginable in, say, 1966.
There’s so much here, and it’s the story that writers like Mark Lewisohn can’t, or won’t, touch. Most of the people with first-hand knowledge—including both the Krays—are long dead. And who really wants to dig around in all this muck? But right after finishing my Beatle noir novel Life After Death for Beginners, I began plotting a sequel set in London in 1967, centering around all this material, having my Lennon character unraveling the death (murder?) of his beloved manager, who was suicided during some rough sex. (Not my theory; I believe I first read it in 1982 in Peter Brown’s book.) But then I got sick, which is probably Life’s not-so-gentle steering me away from two years spent hanging out with creeps and criminals, junkies and Satanists, thinking of blood and death and murder. I’m a peaceful spirit, folks.
Spanish Tony.
So why am I bringing this up now? The Krays are coming up in the comments, and also last week Michael Bleicher forwarded me this bit of conspiracy theory, supposedly a deleted chapter from the autobiography of “Spanish Tony” Tony Sanchez, drug dealer to Robert Fraser and The Rolling Stones. (I think of Spanish Tony as the Stones’ version of Magic Alex. What is it with these guys and their nicknames?) Even if this “suppressed chapter” is a total pack of lies, it demonstrates the closeness of all these worlds—crime, showbiz, drugs, and so forth—at that time and place.
Anyway, in addition to all the murder and mayhem, Ronnie and Reggie Kray did do one good thing in their lives: They inspired Monty Python’s Doug and Dinnesdale Piranha. If you haven’t heard it, take a listen.
Related posts:
Speaking ill of the dead: Phil Spector
The Merseybeat gang, circa 1962
The Savage Young Beatles
John Lennon, Alma Cogan, and the Delicate Mechanism of Efficient Beatles Operations
Beatles mystery: “She’s Leaving Home”
Tony Barrow 1936-2016
Why The Beatles Never Had a Mudshark Story
The Beatles on Shindig
Cilla Black Sings Alfie
Bernie and the Beatles
Brian Epstein Marriage Tidbit
Tony Sheridan, 1940-2013
Great nugget of a post! I had run across the Kray brothers before in mentions of 1960’s London, but it was interesting to see them given this context. Indeed, the entertainment industry and organized crime almost did go hand in hand for eons.
Your mention of Spanish Tony brought up a point that I have wondered about for some time, and that is who was supplying groups like the Beatles with drugs? LSD was legal at the time John was tucking into it wasn’t it? But the rest must have required someone with solid “safe” criminal connections. Not even Pete Schotten hinted at how they were supplied.
Don’t blame you for not following the Kray rabbit trail. That kind of thing must be depressing to wrestle with as a researcher.
Excellent blog btw.
Glad you like it, Neal!
Yeah, to write a book like that, you have to—how do I put this?—live in that world, and I just couldn’t face it. I genuinely love these guys, and I couldn’t imagine every painful detail of such a fate.
Oh, and also? People like the Beatles were getting drugs pressed upon them constantly. Being the guy who turned on John Lennon—being “Lennon’s dealer”—was worth much more than whatever Lennon would’ve paid you for it.
This is also the difference between pot (which can be grown in a million places by a million people) and LSD (which was often the product of idealistic quasi-altruists like Owsley), and heroin, which was the exclusive province of hardcore organized crime. So the turn towards “hard drugs” in ‘68 brought with it a whole new crop, and kind, of really profoundly bad news people into the Beatles’ orbit.
Put another way: when John dropped acid, it could’ve come from a “defrocked” Cambridge chemistry PhD with dreams of turning on the world. When he took heroin, he was getting it from hardcore gangsters, England’s version of the Gambinos, or one step removed.
Great post. One note: Spanish Tony allegedly also supplied John with heroin and cocaine for a while in the late Sixties. So if he had organized crime connections (and who among us thinks a purveryor of hard drugs to the stars who goes by ‘Spanish Tony’ does not have criminal connections?), that’s another degree of separation less between the Beatles and the Krays.
With something like this, I ask myself what seems more possible. Is it more possible that Brian Epstein, gay when it was illegal, addicted to all sorts of pills, and deep in gambling debt, did not run across the most powerful organized criminals in Britain? Of course not. Is it more possible that he managed never to do “business” with them, or not? Is it possible they didn’t want a piece of the action with the Beatles? Of course not.
This is one of the things I assume we’re talking about when we talk about how when Brian died, the Beatles lost the filter protecting them from unsavory people who wanted to get near them. One, Brian had a good intuition for who should or shouldn’t be allowed near the Beatles. But two, when Brian was alive, he held the business power and was so easily compromiseable that I think a lot of the attention was focused on him. Once he dies, you get people trying to control the Beatles, the business, by controlling the Beatles, the individuals, directly. That’s where the two points intersect. Surely that was already happening before Brian died, but he helped to manage it. After he died, the importance of targeting the Beatles was even greater, and he wasn’t there to manage it. Perhaps, though, Brian was losing his ability to say no to such people due to the situation he’d ended up in — debts, blackmail, etc. — and his death wasn’t accidental.
An interesting thought: when The Beatles decided to “handle their own affairs” they put a big fat target on their backs, and THAT, and not hippie fecklessness, was the reason behind Apple’s dismal failure.
Another interesting thought: Epstein’s “mismanagement” of Seltaeb/Tramsact may well be a cover story for a shakedown. Someone might’ve given him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
A dark timeline indeed.
Yeah, what if the insane expenditures at Apple were because various people “needed” something? And: what if Paul wanted to bring the Eastmans in because as reasonably upright entertainment lawyers (apparently) used to doing business in New York, he thought they could counterbalance this? (Or, they’re also dirty, but they’re not Krays-dirty; they’re not going to drown John in his swimming pool if he crosses the line.) And what if John was resistant not just because Klein knew how to sweet talk him (he did) or he was paranoid about Paul controlling the group via his in-laws (he was), but also because these people could and would and did take care of things John needed, or Yoko needed?
And what if people in the Beatles’ orbit were not entirely benign? For example, it’s fairly well-documented that Robert Fraser was trying to get Paul onto heroin in 1967. Why? It’s well documented he did the same thing with Keith Richards, successfully; that “missing chapter” suggests he also did so with Lennon. Why when the rest of London was proselytizing LSD was Fraser trying to get all the princes of Swinging London onto the very un-1967 drug heroin? Like Epstein, Fraser was gay when it was illegal and an addict and a heavy gambler. Who protected him? Is it true that Fraser was an early London connection of Yoko’s? So—she encouraged John to take it, and John got it from Spanish Tony, and Fraser was encouraging the Beatles and Stones to take it?
And then, wait, in 1971 the Stones and the Lennons leave England altogether, right?
I think at the very least one might look at Apple as a perfect cover for all sorts of quasi-legal embezzling and insurance fraud in addition to the drugs flowing through the place.
That’s an interesting way of looking at the Eastman/Klein conflict. Klein has always struck me as someone likely up to his eyeballs in Gentlemen of Sicilian Extraction (I say this as a gentleman of Sicilian extraction, uncapitalized). The Klein story is that he’s simply a tough guy, “the biggest bastard in the valley.” But that’s only true if he has people behind him. You don’t stand up to Morris Levy if there aren’t people standing behind YOU.
Speaking of Levy–supposedly Klein’s first scalp on the wall, back in the late 50s–isn’t it interesting that Mr. Super-Manager Klein’s biggest client, John Lennon, got sued (frivolously, I believe) by Levy, and entered all sorts of legal hell after Klein, too, was in court with Lennon? Klein wasn’t Lennon’s manager at the time Lennon and Levy settled (1975), but he was Lennon’s manager at the time of the “Come Together/You Can’t Catch Me” lawsuit (1970). Why didn’t Klein say, “John, I beat this guy before. That’s one lyric from a song that doesn’t sound anything like your song. Fuck ‘im.”
Could it be that Levy and Klein weren’t enemies, but collaborators fleecing Lennon?
Bullshit lawsuits are a classic mob technique for laundering money or putting one over on someone. So that strikes as quite possible.
I think it’s not just possible, but highly, highly probable that Klein had such people behind him, for the reasons you give. And let’s not forget that in late-Sixties London, that world was perfectly cool with the rock elite (e.g., the David Bailey photos), so it wouldn’t have been a turn-off to John. My instinct is that Paul was fine with hiring bastards but would have preferred to stay away from mafiosi for the same reason he preferred not to take a “thousand trips.”
On a related note, can we agree that Magic Alex had either an intelligence agency or organized crime backing him?
I’ve read Mardas’ father was an officer in the Greek military/secret police. Part of (or at least sympathetic to) the Fascist junta that took over in 1967…familiar to viewers of the movie “Z.”
“Gentlemen of Sicilian extraction”? Let’s look at the people who have been accused of ripping off the Beatles, and guess their ethno-religious background…
Brian Epstein
Dick James (Leon Vapnick)
Lew Grade (Lev Winogradsky)
Allan Klein
Morris Levy
As a proud Sicilian-American (with a definitely…questionable…great-grandfather), I assure you I was wholly in jest.
But Tony? He would say, “If I could’ve gotten a piece of the Beatles, Richard? Who can blame?”
This actually brings up a point worth mentioning: the criminals milking the entertainment biz have never been one ethnicity. In general, they’ve reflected the same urban immigrant populations that produce the musicians themselves–a broad coalition of crooks, bilking a broad coalition of musicians. An industry’s bad actors are going to reflect that industry’s ethnic background.
Which, to me, makes the blue-bloods behind Stramsact…particularly interesting. When blue-bloods form a gang, it’s called “MI-6.”
@Richard wrote: “Let’s look at the people who have been accused of ripping off the Beatles, and guess their ethno-religious background…
Brian Epstein
Dick James (Leon Vapnick)
Lew Grade (Lev Winogradsky)
Allan Klein
Morris Levy”
At least we have the Eastmans (Epsteins) to counteract whatever anti-Semitic stereotype this is supposed to imply.
@Michelle, I noticed that too, but did not want to bring attention to it. I suspect I encouraged it with my tongue-in-cheek denigration of my own ethnicity; in our present political climate, I’d encourage everyone to be extra-sensitive about stereotyping, myself included.
one might look at Apple as a perfect cover for all sorts of quasi-legal embezzling and insurance fraud
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Hmmmmmmm that might put a very different spin on Paul’s unusually subdued demeanor in the New York Apple interview (the one where John says they’re going to set it going “like a top”). The official story has been that he’d smoked something that made him paranoid. It’s never quite looked like that to me, but then my experience with drugs and drugged people is limited.
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Btw my favorite part of that interview is when they’re explaining how artists can come to them for money and the interviewer says something like “and you can help them and make them happy!” and Paul almost sounds a bit irritated when he says “They don’t have to be HAPPY about it” and it kinda cracks me up. “Artists? HAPPY? Pffff!” (he seems to say).
If anything untoward was happening at Apple–anything organized–I don’t think The Beatles knew anything at all about it.
Wait, @Michael Gerber, you’re giving me whiplash here! Who other than the actual owners and founders of Apple would have enough access and knowledge to use it for organkzed untoward dealings?? I’m so confused. This stuff is REALLY outside my wheelhouse.
*organized
Michelle wrote: “At least we have the Eastmans (Epsteins) to counteract whatever anti-Semitic stereotype this is supposed to imply.”
Quite.
Also, people have accused *Brian Epstein* of “ripping off the Beatles”? Oh please. Mr Epstein messed up the Seltaeb thing because he had no clue (about which he was reportedly deeply embarrassed when questioned by Seltaeb’s attorneys), not because he was trying to take the money and run or whatever it is that “ripping off” means in this context.
Apart from that his defining characteristic appears to have been that he was not an asshole – afflicted by wild mood swings, gambling debts and various addictions, yes, but not an asshole. Unlike most, if not all, other “rock managers” since.
Whatever else can be said about Brian Epstein, he clearly loved the Beatles and wanted what was best for them. Which, as you suggest, is rare for “rock managers.”
@Velvet Hand, we’re never going to know, but I think it’s quite likely that Brian was given “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Old Mob trick–get a guy over a barrel (say, with Brian blackmail photos that would, as of 1964, utterly DESTROY The Beatles’ career), then give him a contract to sign. Think about the position he’d be in then: “Either I let myself and the boys be screwed, or I destroy all this. 10% is indeed better than nothing.”
This is a new thought for me, but to be honest, the conception of Brian as a businessman good enough to build the group into what he, and he alone, saw they could be, and also one terrible enough to do the original Seltaeb/Stramsact deal? Never made sense. Plus, this new theory explains 1967/68 very well. Anyway, it’s interesting to think about that.
Agreed, Velvet Hand and Nancy.
@Michael: To your knowledge, has anyone attempted to provide a *different* unified explanation as to why The Fiasco happened, i.e. why Brian and David Jacobs signed that agreement offered by Nicky Byrne?
One fairly interesting point is that the contract was apparently signed in early December of 1963. If I remember correctly, this was a time at which the Beatles’ conquest of America was still in the planning stages and not necessarily assured. It could therefore be argued that Brian agreed to the pitiful merchandising conditions partly because — and despite his absolute faith in the group’s potential AND the almost nightmarish amount of success they were already experiencing in Britain by then — he couldn’t possibly have guessed to what extent they would take off overseas. But I could be wrong!
This seems plausible to me; the timing is good.
While I find these nefarious connections plausible (Seltaeb et al), I’ve never for a second thought of Brian as a brilliant businessman. To me he seems to have been a true believer with great show biz instincts. Luckily, the Epstein family business kept this amazing evangelist afloat throughout 1962 while he did his thing. I’ll be forever grateful.
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On an unrelated matter, I love Michelle’s casting of Martha as a fifth Beatle.
Well remember that’s how he’s been portrayed. But it’s a bit odd for someone to be both a promotional/marketing genius (which Brian was, in the case of the Beatles) and also be utterly unaware of the commercial potential of their property.
It saves a lot of reputations if Brian was some sort of showbiz idiot savant. Maybe he was. Or maybe the story was more complex.
Fair point about Brian, Michael G. His contract with the Beatles gave him a 25% cut forever – or something crazy sounding (to me) along those lines. So, yeah, he wasn’t a babe in the woods.
I *think* that was kinda standard? But point taken.
Brian knew the value of a dollar in one very specific way: he knew that his family’s wealth and prestige in the community probably kept him out of prison. So while I don’t think he looked at his Beatles as a cash-cow to be milked–not at all!–he also was very aware of how their financial success allowed him to live as he wished.
So Paul hired the Eastmans to protect the Beatles from the monster (Apple) he created. Interesting take. We should examine Paul’s idea of talent scouting the masses, which is foolish at best and shady at worst. But hey, at least it gave aspiring groupies like Francie a chance at stardom.
@Michelle – I don’t think the talent scouting is shady. But the Apple Boutique’s “closing sale” where anyone can come in and take anything? Or the out of control payroll or expense accounts? That’s where I’d look.
Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. And not just the boutique.
Yes, the Apple boutique came to mind for me as well. It’s reminiscent of the kind of business that’s a cover for something else, which you often find in organized crime going back to speakeasies.
It seems to me that while Paul was responsible for the mess that was Apple, John shares the blame almost as much if not just as much. I know they were young, but I still find the mess they created astounding.
@Laura, it’s not so surprising given that they were impossibly rich young men who were high much of the time, and who not only had never run a business, felt that standard business practices were oppressive. They may be. To be honest, I think they were very lucky to come out of Apple with any fortunes at all, and had their records not continued to sell, they might not have.
Michael, your explanation of why you stepped away from that projected sequel to Life And Death For Beginners reminded me of this well-known Nietzsche quote:
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
That’s exactly how it felt, @Nancy. I went to bed for basically the next two years. (Not kidding.)
“One note: Spanish Tony allegedly also supplied John with heroin and cocaine for a while in the late Sixties.”
Indeed, what does make the published version of Spanish Tony’s book (assuming the omitted chapter is truly his work; it gets very “Secret Gospel of Mark” sometimes with this shit, let me tell ya) concerning John is largely about his trying to shake John as a client because he was too persistent, headed down a troubling path of addiction to boot, and also Tony did not want to acknowledge to himself that he’d become a dealer. (Relevant excerpt here.)
Hah, thanks for some info on the Krays. I’d started to look them up on my own a little but there’s a lot to take in.
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That “missing chapter” is some crazy reading. It could be total conspiracy BS, or it could have some true bits here and there? At least, as you say, it paints a picture of a lot of disparate Swinging Londoners brought together by the same underworld. I find it interesting that it discusses the Tara Browne connection, something that’s not been covered very well by anybody except Paul in “Many Years From Now.” I’d always sort of wondered if Paul was involved or there the night Tara was killed, and have wanted to make sense of John’s unconventional coverage of the incident. .
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I also find it interesting that it notes that Yoko was trying very hard to get at Paul McCartney before she went after John Lennon (or was pointed at John by Paul). Paul has claimed this before, as has Tony Bramwell (also name-dropped in that “chapter”), but everyone wants to conveniently forget that fact to re-tell the story of how Yoko met John and didn’t even know what a Beatle was, tee hee. I find the whole idea of her as a purposeful “handler” kind of bizarre, considering how badly she was handling her own shit, unless that was the point. I’ve read before, maybe in Goldman (though I feel like it’s elsewhere) that Tony Cox encouraged Yoko to keep seeing John for the influence that he could provide. Although, thinking about it, Yoko kind of ended up as John’s handler. Huh.
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Whatever the case, I can only be glad that Paul stuck to being a cokehead for his Robert Fraser years, and managed not to get hooked on heroin as well. Thanks for the reminder, MG, about the different world heroin inhabits from some of the other drugs.
@Michael Gerber – Thank you so much for posting this article; really interesting.
You say you spent two years ‘hanging out with creeps and criminals, junkies and Satanists’. Can I ask you what place, if any, you think the Satanists occupied in the London underworld? Fraser was the link between the two worlds, right? The Satanists (Kenneth Anger, Roman Polanski, Tony Cox/Yoko) were all part of the American art scene, where Fraser had started out. Did they have links to the Krays via Fraser?
I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on this, as well as what you know about the Process Church/Church of Satan and its links to organised crime.
@Elizabeth, I know nothing more than you do. What you YOU think?
BTW, @Elizabeth, I don’t mean to be gnomic, only that there’s a limited amount of thinking on these topics I can do before I feel toxified.
Satanism, in any Christian society, encourages behaviors, and has a bunch of signifiers that make it useful to people in the crime/IC world. There’s a reason why Aleister Crowley worked for MI-6 during WWI (and a reason he told the public about it). I don’t know anything specific about the Process but what’s been in the mainstream press.
Cults occupy a strange space in our culture, and often have ties to organized crime and the intelligence community…while at the same time being, at least for some, authentic expressions of the religious impulse. Was the People’s Temple a legit religion? I would say so. Was Jim Jones a dubious character with a lot of dubious connections? Yes.
I’m just grateful that The Beatles, sensible in a way that the Stones were not, never got publicly mixed up with cults. (Some might call TM a cult, but at least the form that The Beatles encountered doesn’t seem to have been.)
What do I think? Well, the main thing I think is that the ‘definitive’ story of the Beatles can’t be told without unravelling this stuff properly, which would be (1) impossible, (2) dangerous and (3) ruinous for the Beatles, and especially Yoko Ono.
I think it’s significant that Anger and Polanski are filmmakers, and that the young, drugged-up musicians and actors (and their groupies) who were indoctrinated with this guff were probably too gullible and too wasted to consider the consequences of appearing in experimental homemade films about satanic rituals (etc.) until it was too late:
https://n01r.com/conspiracism-and-death-kenneth-angers-multiple-rumors-of-snuff-films/
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3383946/amp/How-Roman-Polanski-forced-wife-Sharon-Tate-threesomes-make-home-sex-videos-friends-refused-sleep-got-pregnant-wanted-abortion.html
As for the Process Church/Church of Satan, I suspect it existed to indoctrinate the vulnerable and use them to carry out crimes. I would be interested to know whether MDC had any links to the Church of Satan, and would not be remotely surprised to find out he did.
Re Chapman: Well, Church of Satan or fundamentalist Christianity, black robe white robe what’s the diff, really?
(To any fundamentalist Christians reading this: I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the weird intense culty type of Christianity that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, which had elements of mind control. People’s Temple, for example.)
Or saffron robe, for that matter; even the least worldly, most peaceful faiths can be weaponized. For me it’s all about the relationship towards the leader and the agency of the individuals.
When I try to decipher events, I tend to find that beliefs are a distraction; it’s the behavior. In dominant Judeo-Christian societies, as both the US and UK were in the late 60s, a group calling itself “Satanists” would likely attract a lot of people raised J-C who wanted to act as naughty as they’d been taught “Satanists” acted. Maybe they wanted to rob or worse, or maybe they just wanted to have a lot of unusual sex.
Even this last was likely to put you at odds with the law…and likely to rub shoulders with organized crime. And, perhaps, the intelligence community. For an example of this, read about Operation Midnight Climax.
Process, like Manson, hits enough keywords for me to think that it was not simply a group of people exploring an intense niche faith. What precisely deGrimston and MacLean were up to, with whom, I can’t say. Literally nothing would surprise me.
The counterculture stance towards “straight society” predisposed people against “straight religion”— without giving them good tools to, for example, spot a charlatan. Group psychology, behavior modification, hypnosis—these are all powerful tools, and every religion uses them to some greater or lesser degree. So whether your new guru was authentic or a con man, giving people free macrobiotic food or selling them drugs, was a crapshoot. Down to your own personal bullshit detector.
There is also the element of people at loose ends, living outside of society, alienated from their families and old friends, and susceptible to being used. The widespread use of drugs (LSD surely, not to mention the even harder synthetics like STP, and even pot when it’s matched with the wrong neurology) created legions of these people in cities like London, New York, LA, SF.
Put all this together, plus an increasing desire to monitor the counterculture and nullify its political effect, and you have what happened in the Haight or Sunset Strip or East Village or Shepherds Bush (that was the hippie neighborhood in London, right?). Almost impossible to decipher then, much less now. Krays in lovebeads certainly existed. The best book on this topic is Ed Sanders’ The Family.
@Michael – Well, yes. Because all extremist religions and cults, no matter what they call themselves, target the vulnerable, the susceptible and the disenfranchised. It’s why they’re able to convince radicalised Islamists to become suicide bombers, right?
But going back to Chapman, surely he had some organisation behind him? How else would a part time security guard from a modest family background afford to (1) finance a round the world trip in a Westerly direction, and (2) get his hands on a Norman Rockwell painting?
These questions are similar to the ones people ask about James Earl Ray, and they are good questions…that we will likely never have an answer to.
In a just world, high-profile murders of a political nature would be immediately investigated by a commission with the power to subpoena witnesses and refer charges, and their findings would be available to the public. The time to investigate such things is directly after the murder; justice delayed is justice denied. It could be that Chapman is precisely what he appears to be–an unusually organized paranoid schizophrenic. But since the investigation in 1980 ceased after he pled guilty, we will never know.
Chapman lived in Hawaii for Pete’s sake, which has by far the highest cost of living of any state, upwards of 96% higher than the US average. Was his place of residence funded by the FBI or CIA or Satanists too? His wife was also a travel agent, who 1) make pretty good money on average and 2) could probably get a family discount on plane tickets among other perks.
@Michelle, it’s certainly possible that Chapman’s travels were not suspicious, but the fact is nobody really investigated them. They should’ve.
@Michael- I don’t buy that he was psychotic. Psychopathic, yes. But not a schizophrenic. Like you say, his crime was way too organized and pre-meditated. His saying that both God and Satan spoke to him, as well as his story about a world of “little people” in my opinion would not pass tests that mental health officials use to determine whether someone who has committed a crime is malingering. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have dropped his insanity plea.
Because John Lennon was a political figure, his murder should’ve been investigated thoroughly, as a possible conspiracy. But the moment Chapman pled, that was that.
@Michelle -He was a part time security guard, for goodness sake. Even if he earned 20 x the amount he would have in California (or wherever), how could he possibly get his hands on a Norman Rockwell painting?
And he met his wife when he was booking his trip – she was his travel agent.
Sorry, but it doesn’t add up.
@Michael – It seems unlikely to me that John’s murder was politically motivated. I can’t imagine the CIA were that interested in him in 1980.
And besides, why would they send him on a round the world trip in a Westerly direction or give him a Norman Rockwell painting to sell?
No, if Chapman had funding behind him, that funding obviously came from someone with links to (1) the occult and (2) the art world.
Unless there is any record of Chapman winning the lottery of course. Is there?
@Elizabeth you say ‘it seems unlikely to me that John’s murder was politically motivated. I can’t imagine the CIA were that interested in him in 1980.’ I’ve always found this from Sean Lennon in 1998 really interesting (and also completely bonkers that he went there publicly):
“He was dangerous to the government. If he had said, ‘Bomb the White
House tomorrow’, there would have been 10,000 people who would have
done it. These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the
government. Anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests, is insane. Or very naive. Or hasn’t thought
about it clearly. It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad killed. Definitely. And, you know, that worked against them because, once he died, his powers grew . . . They didn’t get what they wanted.”
He immediately had to backtrack, of course, and released a statement saying that his words had been taken out of context (shades of More Popular Than Jesus), he didn’t have anything to back it up, had been speaking from his heart not his head and his statements had been a result of grief and his trying to come to terms with his father’s death.
I don’t know that I agree with him entirely about his dad’s public persona – I’m really not sure Lennon was still seen as an active ‘pacifist revolutionary’ in 1980 (and if he was, would he have told people to bomb or destroy anything, let alone the White House?). That seems more like a thing a murdered man’s son would say, completely understandably, about his father’s Peace Prophet legacy. The political discourse had moved on from that quite a bit. I also think politically and personally, that time was long gone for Lennon as well, who spent some of his capital in those 1980 interviews distancing himself from his radical past.
That all being said, if you’re in government and the guy who was seen as such a threat in the very recent past – the one who fell silent and removed himself from the spotlight – suddenly reappears and is back in the press and popular consciousness, do you get antsy and take precautionary measures to have him removed from the equation?
I don’t know what I think about this, by the way! I know very little about it. Just wading in, really, with not much of a theory to offer…
Generally agree. But just for the sake of discussion:
Remember that
1) Reagan had just been elected and the conservatives were about to start their jihad, led by a lot of the bad actors from the 60s and 70s still pissed off about “how Nixon had been treated.”
2) The new VP had been DCI of CIA, the first time that had ever happened. And, though he always denied it, George H.W. Bush has been linked to intelligence work at least back to the JFK assassination/Bay of Pigs. I believe “Family of Secrets” is where I read about all that. It’s persuasive. The idea that Bush only became part of the intelligence community in 1976 when he became DCI is, IMHO, foolish.
3) Please remember that a similarly addled young white man with an absurd “he’s craaaaazy!” motive shot Ronald Reagan in a very similar way just three months later. A test-run? These kinds of killers, undertaking these kinds of events, are exceedingly rare.
For the record, I do not think that John Lennon was a credible threat to the political establishment in 1980; I think people were very fond of him, and loved his music, but I don’t think that generation was ready to “bomb the White House” if John told them to. In part because both he and them now saw themselves as part of the Establishment.
That having been said, it’s not the reality of the situation that matters, it’s the perception of threat. Were the incoming Republican reptiles (the same people who gave us Iran-Contra) convinced Lennon was a threat? They might well have been. Their understanding of the Boomers and the counterculture had never been very nuanced.
Does that mean they were somehow involved in December 8th? That’s pure speculation, and will always remain so. If there were any evidence of that, it would’ve been destroyed as soon after the murder as possible.
@Nikki – Yes, Sean did say that.
I don’t believe him. I don’t even think he’s mistaken – I just think he’s lying,
Sorry, lying how? Want to make sure I understand.
@Michael I know so little about this that it’s just prompting me to quietly scuttle off and Google the events you’re referencing! I’m not sure if it’s my born-in-the-80s status or my Britishness that’s given me this particular blind spot, but a lot of this more detailed context has simply passed me by, although I know most of the high-level plot points.
I say all this as a blanket “sorry if I get stuff wrong” starting point before asking some dense questions.
In terms of the three things you outline above, is the speculative theory that they’re they linear? So Reagan comes to power with some scores to settle on Nixon’s behalf, but Bush Sr and his links to the intelligence community occupy the VPs office and they use Lennon’s murder as a dry-run for a Reagan assassination? Not sure if I’ve just completely misunderstood that, so apologies!
The established version of the Chapman story makes very little sense to me, for many reasons that are really just about hunches or ‘that doesn’t make much sense’. But there’s also the fact that Jack Douglas – who appears to be relatively credible as a source on the last year of Lennon’s life – has spoken about having destroyed a tape very shortly after John died where he, John, had been talking about something ‘disturbing’ that Douglas didn’t think should ever get out into the public domain. He also states in a couple of interviews that John was predicting his own demise. Of course, that could have been John’s paranoia / anxiety / reliance on drugs and astrologers talking, but also, maybe not. Could John have realistically known anything about the Reagan/Bush stuff?
@Nikki, all this is utter murk and should be taken as such. A story. Not the truth.
I was trying to make the general point that the American rightwing came to power in 1980 pissed off about the Sixties and the hippies, and determined to settle scores. This is undeniably true, and they were ruthless amoral people. So it’s not so impossible that they’d look at John Lennon and see an enemy–even if I don’t think he was one. I think he would’ve loved the stock market going up. (Especially if his portfolio was bigger than Paul’s.)
The dry-run thing was something I came up with as I was writing, but if you were writing it as a story, it would be a nice (horrible) touch.
The thing to keep in mind with stuff like this is that–as we saw with Trump–it’s very “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Compartmentalized. Not written down. So it’s not “Reagan/Bush” doing ANYTHING. It’s somebody hearing something the boss says over a couple of scotches; so he makes a phone call to some minor guy somewhere no one would ever look; and then that minor guy does a thing, or calls a guy, or dusts off a file and sets it into motion.
Or: Chapman was just a crazy asshole. That’s what I mainly think. But there’s enough hinky stuff that I feel it’s worth acknowledging the hinks.
On the subject of conservatives in the 1960s through 1980s, I can’t recommend the documentary series “The Reagans” strongly enough (it’s on Showtime). It’s a fascinating and disturbing look at how we got the Republican Party we have now.
@Michael – Because everything points to the involvement of a Satantic cult and the art world and not the CIA, and that can’t be easy for Sean to reconcile.
What do we know about Chapman?:
1. He spent six months in Lebanon in the early 70’s, allegedly at a military training camp.
2. In 1977, he was admitted to hospital in Hawaii with a mental illness.
3. In 1978, he went on a round the world trip in a Westerly direction.
4. He married his travel agent, who was a Satanist.
5. He was a part time security guard, who had been unemployed for most of the 70’s. He had no family wealth.
6. Despite this, he allegedly sold two paintings – one a Salvador Dali and one a Norman Rockwell – to finance his trip to New York to kill John.
6. Six months prior to shooting John he allegedly met KENNETH ANGER in Hawaii, gave him six bullets and said, ‘These are for John Lennon.’
7. Both Anger and Chapman have confirmed the above.
8. Kenneth Anger was interviewed hanging around outside the Dakota the day after John was shot.
None of that suggests to me that the CIA were involved. It does however point to a connection between Chapman and the Process Church/Church of Satan/whatever the hell it called itself.
@Elizabeth: As I wrote earlier in the thread, during that period intelligence services used eccentric religions to do things. In return, those eccentric religions would not be prosecuted for the crimes they were very obviously committing.
I’m really trying very hard not to get into a whole bunch of horrible shit here, folks. Talk about it if you must, but know there is no solace in it.
@Nikki – Why do you think Lennon was predicting his own demise? Do you think he was psychic? Realistically, is there credible evidence to suggest he was?
There’s none, right? And yet, like you say, he predicted his own demise. In interview after interview, he talked about being shot.
What do you think all that means? That he had premonitions? Because I don’t believe that.
Just to Devil’s Advocate this, Lennon was obsessed with assassinations, as were many many people of his era. He may well have thought, “If you’re really big, they shoot you. And I’m really big, so…”
@Michael – Well, I suppose it’s possible that the CIA approached the Church of Satan and asked them if they knew a madman who could handle a gun and could be programmed to assassinate John Lennon.
On the other hand, I really struggle to understand why they would require him to go on a round the world trip in a Westerly direction, or provide him with a Norman Rockwell painting as a plausible means of financing his trip to New York.
I mean, what? A Norman Rockwell painting? Who would think of such a thing? Someone with very little understanding of the value of money in the real world for sure.
Thanks @Michael for your reply. I appreciate you responding on it as I know it takes a toll. I do understand that it’s speculation/’a story’ I think there’s something in it, even if it’s just that it makes slightly more sense than the official one, or at least offers something to fill in some pretty big holes.
I agree that it’s difficult territory with little solace available down the rabbit hole, though. It’s not something I want to spend hours pursuing. It’s enough, for me at least, to acknowledge that there’s probably a bit more going on.
On the plus side, this particular comment thread now has a bit of everything: conspiracy theory, heroin procurement in the 60s, McLennon and hamsters. So, you win some, etc…
@Nikki wrote: “He also states in a couple of interviews that John was predicting his own demise.”
If he did, he wasn’t sure of the date. He got a haircut on the day of his murder, which made me want to cry when I read it.
@Michelle – yes, I know exactly what you mean. That’s just a lovely, very interesting counterpoint to the rest of the discussion here really. Who killed him, why they did it and what he knew are all questions worth asking and they provide ways for us to probe our understanding of not just Lennon’s death but also how the world might be operating beneath the surface of things. Keeps us all on our toes! 🙂 But I think it can also sometimes be easy to forget that whatever else John might have been, he was also just a person wandering around, wearing throwback clothes, making music, signing autographs and getting his hair cut for a photoshoot and then he was just…not. Regardless of why he was killed, that’s just a very sad thing.
Remember they had that incident at some concert in middle America where a firecracker went off, Paul, George and Ringo immediately looked at John expecting him to drop, fearing that was a gunshot. This was in the midst of the Bigger than Jesus backlash
He also supposedly thought that he will die a violent death because he was a violent person, though I don’t think there’s a direct quote attributed to him.
He had every right to be worried about assassination, though when he was out an about anywhere he was approachable, never seemed to have bodyguards. Maybe that’s the way it was with celebs in the 70’s..
@Dave, New Showbiz celebs were very accessible in the 60s and 70s, that was part of the difference. Old Showbiz was movie stars, teen heartthrobs, all manicured and managed, with a huge gulf between them and their fans. New Showbiz was “they’re just like you.”
It seems that the post from October 2020 on why a mudshark story has not surfaced ties in well with this discussion as it makes us think, even if reluctantly, of what was going on in the background.
Not to be prurient for prurient’s sake obviously as the readership here, quite commendably, cares not a whit about who was doing the Wild Thing with whom back then other than, to rightfully acknowledge and note for the historical record, that they were not like us and were living in a different universe.
I have been quite surprised however, from that historical pov, that something big never surfaced–whether it was a salacious revelation or an uncovering that organized crime was standing in the background (or center court when it comes to Klein et al) skimming off money where it could.
Granted the effort to try to uncover this is probably not worth the emotional investiture (great Nietzsche quote btw) to wallow around in the muck of what was reputedly done, but also that separating fact from fiction is well nigh impossible. Is anyone going to provide a DNA test for a 60 year old paternity allegation? No, of course not.
Yet as the Michaels (both of them in this thread) have brought to light, the entertainment industry and the colossal money sloshing around with acts such as the Beatles had to have been a draw as strong as a ten ton electro-magnet to the unsavory crowd. Throw in gambling debts of unknown amounts (perhaps rather significant from what we can guess) and other such plot lines and one has an elephant in the room.
The point was well made in the mudshark post about the dark side that possibly/probably stood in the wings to “make the proper arrangements” when it came to the lads when they were on tour. On one hand I am amazed at how efficient machine must have been–almost flawless in the Beatles case. On the other hand, I am surprised that it could function as well as it needed to for even the best of the street sweepers stumble and that 100 dollar bill is perceived as a bribe, or it gets poorly routed, or a photographer is a few days later going over the negatives he/she shot, and so on. In other words, when one goes down the path of spiking stories then one better be a master craftsman as there is always the risk of leakage–particularly if it were part of the English entourage trying to arrange things in the U.S. where many cultural and linguistic aspects could have been hurdles.
I guess what I am saying is that we all want, with one eye, to read the unvarnished history of the story. With the other eye however, most of us don’t want to follow that path too far as it might reveal a side that we would rather not see too much of.
Yes, @Neal, I think that’s right. And I will also add that if everybody (for example, Fleet Street) knows that there is more money to be made by playing along, they play along. Until they don’t.
I remember reading a long time ago, in the ’80s sometime, a retrospective or a compilation of interviews of Paul McCartney done by Rolling Stone in which he said, out of the blue and seemingly with dismay, “John’s been hanging out with mafia connections.” I wish I knew what issue of RS that was (maybe a book?) or by whom he was being interviewed (Paul Gambaccini possibly?), but the interviewer did some searching and concluded that it was someone that John knew in the music business who had ties with someone in the mob. The interviewer’s reaction to what Paul said was basically, “Hyperbole much?” The only other thing I’m certain of is that Paul said this about the time he made London Town (1978). Looking back, it might be Morris Levy he was referring to, but I think John was well past all that lawsuit business by then. I did a search for this on the net but to no avail.
That’s fascinating. Wish my RS CD colllextion still worked!
The Beatles story, at least the conventional version, is notable for its LACK of mob types.
interviews of Paul McCartney done by Rolling Stone in which he said, out of the blue and seemingly with dismay, “John’s been hanging out with mafia connections.”
.
Oh my god that is the most Paul thing I have ever heard. He works so hard to guard his tongue and not rock boats but sometimes whatever Anxiety he’s currently Fixating On just pops out, appropos of nothing and dripping with impropriety. And it’s like…hey my guy, my pal, you okay there? Didja forget which plane of reality you’re supposed to be inhabiting at the moment?
.
God bless him.
So, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, what makes this all any different from McLennon, or Paul is dead? They all feel like attempts to find an explanation for the seemingly unexplainable, that the best entertainment phenomenon of the 20th century fell apart for no good reason (and because so many can’t see or don’t want to accept that John was mentally ill, tried to self-medicate throughout his adult life, and made many poor decisions as a result).
@Garry, what are you specifically advocating, Mr. Devil?
The post surmises that The Beatles and Brian Epstein almost surely rubbed shoulders with really serious underworld figures, which is hardly an outlandish suggestion–I’d say it was a certainty. And yet, this never is spoken about as part of The Beatles’ story. Seltaeb/Stramsact was a mistake by a terrible businessman–but does Brian really strike you as a TERRIBLE businessman? Not me. So what’s up? Was someone muscling him? I thought it might be an interesting angle to find out new information, and spur new discussion.
And it was! To write this comment, I typed “The Beatles and the Krays” into Google. First is our post, and then right under that is an article from their supposed publicist saying that the Krays put a voodoo curse on Brian after he wouldn’t let them take over the Beatles. (The occult, again.) And right under that is an article from an Indian website saying EXACTLY what I had surmised in the post. (The Indian press is crazy, but it’s quoting something else.) And underneath THAT I stumbled upon this neat Beatles blog that comes to some of the same conclusions as I did. (Believe it or not, I don’t really read a lot of Beatles blogs.)
So: an interesting, newish way to look at the Fabs. An interesting rabbit hole to drop down. But you ask, how different is this from McLennon, or Paul is Dead? To me, it is very different.
Paul is Dead is absurd on the face of it, because “Paul” continued to write great, exquisitely McCartney-like songs after the original Paul died. So…we should be happy the original Paul died in a car crash? Speaking as a parodist, I find it impossible that a different person wrote Paul’s catalogue after November 1966, and the suggestion that there was some sort of secret Brill Building behind “Paul”–which has continued undetected until this day–is nutty. Measure ears all you want, “William Campbell” has been touring, and making new perfectly Paul-like music for 55 years, or roughly ten times longer than the original Paul did it. If this guy’s an impostor, he’s gotten ripped off!
The idea that an amazing, world-changing musician constantly in the public eye could die, and be replaced with another equally great musician, both of whom look exactly like each other, with no one inside or out of the group missing a beat, and everything existing in total secrecy is not believable. Even a really talented Paul-like musician like Emmit Rhodes could not have done that. It would be like replacing child Mozart with another equally talented musician that looked just like him at 24.
I have no problem with McLennon–I wrote the post–but two things: The first is, so what? We knew John and Paul loved each other. Maybe they had sex, maybe they didn’t, I can’t see that it matters much. A lovers’ spat might explain some of the intensity of the breakup, and how things seemed to take a sudden turn in India, but that’s not necessary for the story to be told. The second is, “did you see that look he gave him?” That’s 100% interpretation, usually by a person born in a vastly different time and place, often of a different gender, and with no real desire to test anything, no forensic interest. It’s a binary conversation, either you see the look or you don’t–there’s not much to discuss in that, yet McLennon folks are determined to discuss it, which is to vent their feelings about it, which is fine. To a point.
To me, thinking about the Beatles and the Krays really isn’t about the Beatles or the Krays–it’s about how organized crime is woven throughout our society, and how it thrives on concepts of sin (like gambling) and unjust laws (like, for example, those in the UK against homosexuality). Furthermore, if we take as read that the death of Brian Epstein was a huge, huge part of the Beatles story, then the pressures on him, who he associated with, and certainly the circumstances of his death are central parts of the Beatles story as well.
In our culture, we tend to lump everything together–thinking there was a conspiracy to shoot JFK is often mentioned in the same breath as a belief in UFOs or Bigfoot. But the former is wholly within the realm of the natural and possible; it has a human cause, is the kind of thing people have done innumerable times in the past–and, if true, would change profoundly the way we look at the history of the 60s and American government since then. The latter two are outside the realm of what we believe possible, are non-human, and don’t necessarily have much bearing on anything. They are “fun to think about” but not really necessary. The JFK stuff–like the Krays–isn’t fun to think about, but may be necessary to preserve a well-ordered and just society. Murder, extortion, blackmail, outré sexual behavior…these are common as dirt. Possibly robotic space aliens using wormholes to travel faster than light so they can come here to carve up cows and probe people’s butts: very uncommon. Still possible, but not likely.
@Michael wrote: “A lovers’ spat might explain some of the intensity of the breakup…”
Or it might explain the breakup itself, which is central to the story, is it not? Why the Beatles broke up is a question fans and historians have pondered since 1970. The real reason would be anything but immaterial, whatever that reason was. John’s heroin use doesn’t really tell us anything about society, if all he was doing was self-medicating, other than the fact that hard drugs are readily available to the rich and famous. So what? And yet that is deemed important to the story.
And if there was a shred of evidence for an ongoing sexual relationship between John and Paul, I’d trumpet it, for many reasons. But to me it’s just a BIT more likely than PID.I think it’s possible john made some discoveries about himself during his marathon mediation sessions, and made a pass at paul, and felt humiliated and rejected and furious and determined to show his heterosexuality and dominance in the group via Yoko. But an ongoing sexual relationship? A Boston marriage?
Look, I’m not sure if you’ve ever met men (kidding) but I can say AS a man that if I wanted to jump my bandmate’s bones, or had jumped them, or WAS jumping them on the reg—which is what McLennon postulates—there would be NO DOUBT. You could see it from space. Especially when I was in my 20’s.
But you know who communicates in subtle glances, touches of the arm, lyrics that can be taken this way or that way? WOMEN.
Whether the gamification of courtship is feminine nature or nuture I haven’t a clue, but to this guy McLennon looks like a bunch of female fans projecting. Which is fine, but just because it’s sexual that doesn’t mean it’s worthy of serious attention. It’s not really that different from guys thinking, “If John knew me, we’d be buds and make each other laugh.” Its such common fan behavior it’s practically a growth stage. But that doesn’t mean John and Paul were lovers; it means they are screens, and to fans coming along fifty years later, with the very different sexual mores caused by the internet, it’s utterly predictable that they would project upon John and Paul the sexual flexibility of some young men now, and the desires of many young women now. Because a feminized John and Paul are a heck of a lot less scary than a John and Paul who were getting into brawls with robbers and gangsters. I get WHY fans do it; but there’s just nothing there to suggest it’s true. So can we please consider it discussed and move on, until there’s actually some tangible proof to talk about?
@Michael – I hate to sidetrack such an interesting thread, but again, I think it would be useful to have a definition of ‘McLennon’.
If, like you say, the word is a connotation for a type of ‘Boston marriage’, then I agree with you – no way.
However, it seems extremely plausible to me that John and Paul experimented with sex, the same way they experimented with everything else:
1. Because 15 year old Paul would likely have done anything to impress 17 year old John.
2. Because Pauline Sutcliffe did everything except spell out that Paul/John/Stuart was a love triangle, and I believe her.
3. Because all the artists in Swinging London were experimenting with their sexuality, alongside drugs and Satanism, and it seems highly unlikely that John and Paul abstained.
4. Because it makes sense that Yoko would tell Philip Norman that John was in love with Paul precisely because she knows Paul would prefer to keep that quiet. For whatever reason, she seems to derive the most pleasure in life by getting one over on Paul and putting him in his place. That’s why I think she said it.
All the above seem obvious to me, but are they evidence of ‘McLennon’? Who knows? It depends what it means.
Yeah, for those reasons and others, I’d be shocked if a dalliance didn’t happen. But a relationship? Highly, highly unlikely based on what we know. And I think we know an awful lot.
@Michael – Well, if you consider that their songwriting partnership was the relationship (after all, they compared it to a marriage), it would seem remiss to discuss the disintegration of that relationship without also considering to what extent those dalliances poisoned it.
That’s what McLennon means to me, and it’s why I think you shouldn’t discourage comments about it on here.
I do agree with you that a lot of the discussion about McLennon is fantasy and projection. But at the same time, it’s a fact that John’s personal disintegration was linked to the disintegration of his relationship with Paul – whatever that was. I don’t think you should discourage comments about that. You should set boundaries for sure, but it would be a shame to ban all discussion about something that seems so relevant to everything else.
Well, see, this is why I don’t ban it. But I don’t think it can be decided, so it’s basically conspiracy theory looking to prove a conspiracy that is a difference merely of degree. Did John and Paul love each other? Yes, we know they did. Was it emotionally intense? Yes, we know this; as you say, they called it a marriage. So the only fact at issue is: did they have sex? And I really don’t think that’s very important, compared to the first two things. But that’s endlessly what is discussed–the strongly asserted emotional content of glances, lyrics, etc; the recasting of the Beatles story as some kind of excruciating fan-signal Regency love affair, or romance novel of doomed love.
Fine for them; but after 800 comments on one post, and innumerable ones on others, @Nancy and I are bored with the topic.
@Elizabeth: “Because it makes sense that Yoko would tell Philip Norman that John was in love with Paul precisely because she knows Paul would prefer to keep that quiet. For whatever reason, she seems to derive the most pleasure in life by getting one over on Paul and putting him in his place. That’s why I think she said it.”
Yoko also once remarked, “I felt I knew Stuart because hardly a day went by that John did not speak about him.”
I don’t believe her for a second. Why would she say that, if not true? It’s as if she knew that Stuart had been a sore spot for Paul in Hamburg.
The McLennon community is full of crap a lot of times, so I don’t know if this is true, but it seems that a number of them reported Paul saying that he watches videos of himself and John on YouTube. This has caused much glee among them, because 99% of those videos are McLennon videos; they take that as approval of the sub-fandom on his part. That ‘breathless’ series on John/Paul is weird because they seem to have access to footage, quotes etc. that a lot of people have never seen or heard before, to the point that some commenters wonder if ‘breathless’ is a McCartney family member.
At a time when homosexuality was illegal, it must not have taken long for guys to learn the art of subtlety. Isn’t it a form of heterosexual projecting when you say you would make your PDA so obvious as to leave no doubt if you wanted to jump another guy’s bones, simply because that is true in your experience with women?
Sure, @Michelle, but unlike every McLennon person on this site, I admit when I’m projecting. If y’all would just admit that you’re making John and Paul into what you want them to be, the whole conversation would shift from a fruitless hunt for “evidence” to a very interesting, legitimate, and ultimately rewarding examination of fan psychology.
Also: subtle? As someone who grew up in a gay neighborhood in the 70s, and then lived in the West Village 20 years later, gay men are not usually super-SUBTLE about expressing either attraction or affection towards other men, especially in gay-mediated spaces. And before you say, “Well, they were in public,” then we’d have lots of examples of John and Paul macking on each other in private, or quasi-private, gay-mediated settings. Which we don’t. Not one story, much less one photograph.
For McLennon to be fact, it depends on perfect male sexual restraint, even under the influence of drugs and alcohol, even as teenagers in sex-saturated Hamburg. That’s absurd. So don’t argue it as fact; ponder it as fan desire. But not here, at least not for a while–Nancy and I are sick of it, just as sick as if we’d spent the last two years talking about the Krays.
No more discussion about whether or not John and Paul had sex; only discussion about why YOU, the commenter, could possibly give a shit.
I’m sicker of the “McLennon” subject than you are, Michael. Change my mind 🙂
Oh I’m plenty sick of it, @Nancy, I just like to talk. 🙂
@Michelle, someone put a lot of work in these videos and dug deep to find less known stuff, but all the footage used and the quotes come from sources available to anybody.
Wow, so much food for thought! Big thanks to all the contributors who have some savvy in these matters. I have no instincts or sense of perspective around issues of organized crime, and am still struggling to grasp such…HashtagUnrelatable motives in people. My viewpoint on the hard drugs pipeline is growing up in a hurry; goodbye “rich people like drugs, somewhat shady but mostly normalish people make a nice buck supplying them”, hello “extremely shady people deliberately prey on rich people’s susceptibility to drugs in order to gain influence/access/power in wayyy more disturbing forms than mere cash”.
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I’m super disappointed to contemplate these possibilities about Groovy Bob in particular, for whom I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot. As a counter to the accusation of him unduly pressuring Paul to try heroin, I do recall a story from Paul about telling Robert he’d tried heroin already and didn’t like it, and Robert replying “Oh all right, I won’t offer it to you again.” Typical McCartneyan whitewashing you might say, but he seemed genuinely warmed by this gentlemanly respect for his boundaries and it was something that endeared Robert to him. So, I hope that was a genuine moment and not some sort of “I’ll win his trust and bide my time” ploy.
Fraser needed McCartney’s money and connections; McCartney was a big client of Fraser. Groovy Bob might have been gentlemanly, but in that case? He was protecting his meal ticket.
Full disclosure: I read the first 50 pages of the Fraser biography and had to stop because I found Fraser an unpleasant, and ultimately rather boring, character.
And Fraser found lots of other people in that milieu who liked heroin! John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and Brian Jones and Keith Richards and their various SOs…no need to pressure McCartney.
I find virtually all the Beatles sychophants, hangers on and periphal figures boring, to be honest.
Not me! I find them all fascinating, especially Yoko. There is such a biography to be written about her, but sadly I don’t think one ever will. And Brian, too, of course–another person who managed to be in the public eye while remaining mostly a cipher.
I didn’t mean wives, girlfriends or 5th Beatles! Or Martha whom I consider the only non-human 5th Beatle. 🙂 Just people like Tony Bramwell who seems to inflate his own importance in the Beatles story. Or Donovan who thinks he taught the Beatles everything they know. Or Barry Miles, who nearly made Paul’s authorized biography a snorefest with a chapter discussing his own experience in the art world, like anyone cares. I’m not sure if Neil Aspinal, Derek Taylor or Mal Evans ever wrote a book, but if they didn’t I commend them.
@Elizabeth I don’t think the CIA would bother sending Chapman on a trip around the world in a Westerly direction or give him a collectable piece of art to sell as a cover story for how he financed his trip.
@Michael B: And wouldn’t they have to use mind control to get Chapman to be a hit man? What’s in it for him? No amount of money in the world would want me to spend the rest of my life in prison. Of course, mind control is part of this particular conspiracy theory.
@Michelle, “mind control” is a sloppy shorthand for what might’ve been at play here, and there’s no doubt it was at play here, just how it came about. Did MDC alter his state, or did someone else? Normal people in normal mindstates don’t quit their job to go kill strangers, they don’t kill rockstars they used to love, and they don’t kill people because they’re “phonies.” They don’t have fantasies of elves telling them to do stuff, and they don’t get obsessed with YA novels. Mark David Chapman was in an altered mindstate when he stalked and shot Lennon. That’s simply not debatable. What is very debatable is whether he did it to himself, or whether someone did it for/to him. That’s a legitimate question; to my mind it needs to be asked in any case like this.
The first question is: are “zombie assassins” possible? It’s unclear, but I suspect yes. Too much money has been spent on too many programs for too long, for NO progress to be made. (For the sake of this comment, “zombie assassin” means someone who can be convinced to kill someone via hypnosis or some other alteration, but have no conscious memory of having done so, or any associations they might have.) If it can be done, it would be done, because it’s simply very useful as a tool of power.
What you’re referring to as “mindcontrol” has been studied quite obsessively by governments since the 1920s, beginning with the Soviets. By the Show Trials of the 1930s, it was evident something was up, because people were quite sincerely confessing left and right to crimes they couldn’t possibly have committed. Then certainly by the Korean War, where POWs were showing similar peculiar, altered, automatic behavior. “Brainwashing” became a cultural trope…because it clearly exists. Some people are more suggestible than others, and it requires a lot of time and control of environment to change someone’s behavior. But there are good reasons why you can’t broadcast hypnosis on TV; it works.
Inspired by the Soviet militarization of the techniques, from 1953 to at least 1972 when the vast majority of the records were destroyed, the West also had big “mind control” programs. How big? Most of the records went up the smokestack, but in 1953, the budget for MK-ULTRA was authorized up to 6% of the entire budget of the CIA. We have no other figures, but that suggests it was a large priority, at least for some time.
I have read numerous books on the subject, preparing for my Beatle book; it is an unpleasant topic. The best is probably “The Search for the Real Manchurian Candidate,” by John Marks. Marks concludes that they never were able to make a robot assassin here in the West, but I think he’s too optimistic in this regard. Sirhan Sirhan definitely checks the boxes; as does Chapman; as does Hinckley. People with no history of violence don’t just trance themselves up and kill a public figure for no clear reason, and then revert to non-violent behavior for the rest of their lives. That’s bizarre, and the timing of the violence as well as (even in the case of Lennon) its unquestionable political impact, should give any rational person pause.
@Michael said: “People with no history of violence don’t just trance themselves up and kill a public figure for no clear reason.”
I don’t believe Chapman was in a trance at all. You’d be surprised what a religious fanatic will do if a person says something that they consider blasphemous. I’m thinking of the story of the Muslim teenager from Chechnya who beheaded a teacher for showing cartoons mocking Mohammad in the name of free speech. I’m guessing he had no prior record. Paul told a story about how he thought the band was going to get killed by a livid little blond boy outside their vehicle in the South after John’s “more popular than Jesus” comment. Chapman was a born again Christian, at least during the time that John made his infamous remark, and admitted being furious about it. Add deeply held religious beliefs with disillusionment and you have a potentially dangerous mix.
@Michelle, I wish that explanation made any kind of sense to me, but it doesn’t, and the older I get and more I read about stuff, the less it does. But I do deeply and sincerely hope that was exactly what happened. A crazy person and a senseless unpredictable tragedy. Could be!
Chapman’s born-again phase had subsided earlier in the 70’s. By his own account, he prayed to Satan to be able to shoot Lennon. One might also add that he had sought out a Satanist in Kenneth Anger shortly before the murder, for reasons which remain elusive. (How a relative hick like Chapman was even aware of Anger in 1980 is a question in itself; as is his knowing that Anger was acquainted with Lennon.) So I don’t think at all that he approached the murder with the mindset of a righteous, offended Christian.
Did it subside? He’s born again now too, and so is his wife. They both still sounded it in the movie Chapter 57 when he was talking to her on the phone from New York. She knew about his plans, convinced him to come home but didn’t say a word to the authorities when he returned to New York. I really can’t stand her. She still visits him in prison. Anyway, John’s “radical” phase subsided earlier in the ’70s too. Why is his Jesus remark any less plausible a motive than the CIA putting a hit on John for his domesticity in 1980? Or how about believing Chapman when he said he felt like a nobody and killed John because he was one of the most famous men in the world?
One bit of info that MIGHT support a conspiracy theory is that, even though John had been his favorite Beatle, he apparently was more of a fan of Todd Rundgren. Some think he may not have been the “obsessed” fan he was described as in the media. It’s possible that it wasn’t just one thing that motivated him. Maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back was John shredding Rundgren in an open letter to Melody Maker for dissing the Beatles. What, people expect anything other than a silly motive for a senseless killing? Also, I’m late in responding to something Michael wrote but this has to be the first time I’ve seen Salinger’s book being called a YA novel. LOL
Edit: Chapter 27
@Michael G.: if we’re going down this road, it’s worth pointing out that someone needn’t be currently, actively working for the CIA/MI6 in the scenarios your comment suggests. One could be an ex-employee of an intel agency – perhaps after at least some “housecleaning” was done in the mid-70s – who knows about these types of techniques, and has connections to others in that world, etc. Someone like that is useful to organized criminals, as well, because the skills – identifying and/or training killers, collecting and deploying blackmail, etc. – are useful to organized criminals as well. I.e., what you and Elizabeth are saying isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive. IF – and it’s a big if, obviously – Chapman wasn’t simply a lone nut, it doesn’t follow that The Government had John Lennon killed. But it would seem that the theories about how Chapman would have been “programmed,” etc., would require people being involved who knew how to do things that were developed and investigated within government intelligence agencies.
If you told me, “Lennon’s death wasn’t the act of a lone nut,” I wouldn’t say “the CIA had him killed.” If the CIA had wanted to kill him, they could have done so in 1972 when he was calling for violent revolution, and making himself very, very public in New York, and they didn’t. With the exception of a barely-reported plan he had to participate in a march for something–I don’t even remember what–there’s nothing about John Lennon in 1980 that’s political. “But he was always a political figure! He could have started speaking out! They didn’t have a nuanced view of him!” All true, except that we know the government was actively surveilling him in the first half of the Seventies. If he wasn’t judged to be an assassination-worthy threat then (and this is all assuming the government was actively shooting down people whom “it” deemed to be such significant threats), it seems like unfounded speculation to suppose someone with enough authority ordered this carried out in 1980. Is it possible? Sure, but no more possible than that Chapman was a lone nut, in my opinion.
But I think there’s another option, and while it also depends on supposition, I think there’s at least as much circumstantial evidence to ask about it as the “CIA did it” hypothesis. And it has to do with the underworld we’re talking about here. As Annie pointed out, we’ve got (possibly) McCartney saying in the late Seventies that “John’s hanging out with mafia types.” Does that mean John was hanging out with the real life Corleones? No. But let’s review some things we know about the Lennon-Onos in the late Seventies: they were collecting art — a classic vehicle for money laundering. They were insanely rich, insanely gullible, insanely superstitious rubes who had an inflated belief in their own cleverness — making them perfect marks. Yoko has admitted she was addicted to heroin, which as we’ve established in this thread means she or someone acting on her behalf was regularly transacting with organized criminals (or fronts for them). They were surrounded by weird people and leechers like Sam Green – who somehow managed to get himself written into John’s *will* as Sean’s guardian in the event John and Yoko both died. (Huh? Not John’s lawyer? Not a relative of Yoko’s, or John’s? Not even Elliot fucking Mintz? A guy who’d already been the beneficiary of another paranoid narcissistic wealthy woman who was murdered under weird circumstances? (See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1034556/I-wasnt-blame-heiress-murder-says-art-expert-depicted-screen-incest-threesome.html) And they signed with David Geffen, who’s had shady rumors around him his entire career, and who paid Lennon a $1 million advance of Double Fantasy, which it didn’t look like he was going to recoup that quickly since the album wasn’t selling particularly well and John was kinda washed up, but he also took out a $1 million life insurance policy on John just in case something happened, and darned if it didn’t, just a few weeks after the album came out, and then having the rights to Double Fantasy turned out to be flipping great, since it, and the rest of Lennon’s catalogue, sold like hotcakes for a while. And somehow, John had spent the last few weeks doing a press blitz in which he aggressively pushed the “we’re content and happy like never before” angle, even though he might have spent the last five years suffering from depression and struggling with addiction, and even though his and Ono’s marriage was, by the accounts of people who were there, quite moribund by 1980 – in fact, there’d even been rumblings of divorce – but after he died, all those interviews about how happy he was ensured that his death, already tragic, was *even more tragic,* which generated *even more money.* It wouldn’t be the first celebrity who was worth more dead than alive. And with all of his statements over the years about being a martyr, and being like Jesus Christ, and his (era-appropriate) interest in assassinations, it wouldn’t have been *that* hard to come up with a plot other than the “let’s force-feed him a bunch of downers and alcohol” thing that’s alleged about other celebrity deaths.
Again, to be absolutely clear, this is all speculation, and I offer it as a thought experiment.
Oh, and, Yoko was into Santeria and other occult stuff (as were plenty of other rich ‘artists’ from the Sixties and Seventies), which meant she hired more creepy people like her tarot card reader, John Green, to guide her in that spiritual journey. Who was he, this person who could guide a rich, gullible woman through the occult? Whom did he know? What about her numerologists and other advisers? What financial interests did those people have? Has that ever been disclosed? Were they all ethical? Or did they spot a very rich, very gullible couple, etc. etc.? Chapman was involved in occult stuff, right? And as has been indicated in this thread, both the criminal and intelligence worlds used the “occult” as a means to their own ends?
@MichaelB: “And they signed with David Geffen, who’s had shady rumors around him his entire career.”
Another member of the Tribe!
@Michael B – Absolutely brilliant post and spot on. I’m not a detective, but if I was and I was investigating this case, I would start with Sam Green. Because he was the one with the motive. Not only did he have form for targeting the rich and gullible, he actually stood to get control of the fortune if it all came off.
Sam Green organised the trip to Egypt in 1979, right? Which is very strange because Kenneth Anger has an obsession with Egyptology, as did his role model, Aleister Crowley:
https://hero-magazine.com/article/171885/kenneth-anger-cosmologically-magick-rituals-and-aleister-crowley/
Just what was that trip to Egypt really about?
@Michael B, I find it amusing that you discuss some of this stuff, including the divorce talk and Elliot Mintz, because this last week a notorious anonymous celebrity gossip website posted this from someone:
.
” This well-known publicist to the stars is dying, and he is quite talkative when he is on his painkillers:
“Of course it wasn’t planned, we had never heard of (famous assassin). I’m just saying, plans were in place for this (famous widow) to live without (A++ famous musician) anyway. They BOTH were sick of each other and had each secretly hired divorce lawyers. He blamed her for the lackluster response to his latest release, she blamed him for, well, everything. (Famous killer) just fixed it so that she could move (boy-toy) in that much easier.”
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(Note, I don’t frequent this website, but was directed there by fandom talk and speculation that the speaker is Elliot Mintz. From what I can tell, apparently the website will out the names if/when the information becomes public knowledge. Take all with a giant hunk of salt, entertainment purposes only, etc.)
Of course they didn’t know (famous assassin). They wouldn’t know (famous assassin). Any more than they would know a plumber hired by the Dakota to fix the guest bathroom.
If anything sinister happened, it would never have involved anyone we know sitting in a room in front of a corkboard, photos and yarn. Do you see what I’m getting at? I still highly doubt anything sinister happened, but if we’re “going there,” I’m trying to nudge this conversation in a more sophisticated direction. You’re not looking in the right places.
@Kristy- Crazy Days and Nights? The DataLounge?
@Kristy – If that gossip is true, I would say that Mintz wants it on record that it was nothing to do with him.
He’s probably anticipating a slew of tell-all books when Yoko is no longer here to stop them.
@Michelle – Crazy Days and Nights. I’m not even sure what you’d call Datalounge in the realm of gossip — an LGBT+ chatroom where they sometimes discuss celebrities?
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Though CD&N is home of a reader-submitted item (as opposed to one composed by the resident “entertainment lawyer”) from six years or so ago that was so McLennon that the JohnheartPaul community accused it of being fanfiction.
@Kristy, I highly doubt they’ll be many tell-all books. I mean, I hope there will be, but I’m the kind of person who thinks it’s kinda sweet that Marlon Brando had sex with Richard Pryor. (Have fun, fellas.) My guess is there’s just not that big a market anymore that the subset of Beatlefans wanting “the true story” is sufficient. One, maybe?
What they should be worried about is a “Behind the Candelabra.”
“the JohnheartPaul community accused it of being fanfiction”
That is truly *chef’s kiss*
@Kristy- Ha. DataLounge is an anonymous site where people sometimes post “blind items” about celebrities, so I thought maybe that could be what you were referencing. But I’m not surprised it is Crazy Days & Nights. Even though I’m straight, I find DataLounge to be quite entertaining with often hilarious posts. Incidentally, someone started a thread there called ‘The Beatles are Bi’ which took on a life of its own, much like the John/Paul thread on this blog. It ended up being 4 or 5 parts, even though there was much poo poohing of the idea. That had to be one of its longest running threads.
@Michael B – No, I don’t either.
Fascinating post, Michael. I can’t say I know a thing about this, but I know a bit more now. It’s really interesting how so much of this stuff still goes on, right under our noses–and that the Beatles knew about this stuff, too. Was there any way to be a popular musician and not be involved in shady deals?
“Spanish Tony” is a hilarious nickname.
if I ever get a hamster, I’m going to name it “Spanish Tony”.
You’d really need to get a couple more hamsters and name them “Magic Alex” and “Groovy Bob.”
Lucky for me they’re cheap, right?
@Erin – Of course, there was also Jack the Hat McVitie, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mad Axeman Mitchell and Brown Bread Fred.
Honourable men – apart from the murders, protection rackets, armed robberies, assaults, extortion, etc, etc. Still, they were good sons who loved their mothers.
@Michael
Thanks for the article. I read the missing chapter and what do you think about it mentioning Tara’s death? It would be beyond traumatic and I think that’s why Paul doesn’t really mention him.
There could be many reasons why John was murdered. I watched a recent documentary on John Lennon and I thought it was strange that he had to wait on his driver. I would think his driver would’ve been there as soon as he and Yoko left the interview. I also thought it was suspicious that there was a lack of security at the Dakotas that night.
Also, why did it occur to them to get out of their limo on 72nd street, when it was customary for them to have their limo enter the more secure courtyard of the Dakota?
Excellent question! And why did they put their bodyguards on leave, scheduled for reinstatement on December 9?
And what happened to the limo driver? He apparently disappeared into thin air never to be heard of again.
@Michelle If he was predicting it, he got the date wrong – but it happened very close to December 9, and nine was John’s favorite number (or whatever the numerology term for that is). In fact, it was December 9 in England at the time it occurred. Only worth mentioning because of their weird preoccupation with numerology.
@Michelle, regarding your David Geffen comment – my remarks did not bring up Geffen’s ethnicity or religion, and I respectfully ask that you leave it out of any discussion here. I will ask Michael G. and Nancy to moderate any comments, including the one to which I am referring, that in any way connect the discussion we are having to anti-Semitism, or anti-any other nationality or ethnic identity. Thanks.
In response to Michael B’s point here:
Going forward, let’s all refrain from making general statements about groups of people based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., even jokingly. Thanks.
@Michael G – “they wouldn’t be in front of a corkboard.” Someone, whoever it was, would say, “God, it would be so much easier if…” And then other people would go from there. The person who thought it would be easier if…would only know the bare minimum that he (or she) needed to know, and at several removes from what was being planned. It’s like Trump saying he didn’t plan January 6 because he didn’t know all of the weird losers who stormed the Capitol.
This is a comment Fred Seaman wrote on rec.music.beatles years ago. It backs up the sentiment that [famous musician] was perceived as a problem which was “fixed” (inadvertently or…otherwise) by [famous assassin.]
“Yoko was upset when she left the hospital. I believe she viewed J’s bloodied corpse, which must have freaked her out. But by the time she got back to the Dakota she had regained her composure. Some have argued that her businesslike demeanor was perhaps a means of coping. Maybe, but I don’t think so, especially in light of the obvious act she put on for the detectives & media. The moment she was among her intimates (about ten people: staff members, several lawyers, Geffen…) the tears instantly dried up. Now, this in itself is not necessarily sinister. Those who know Y understand that she had shut off a part of herself (the part that felt affection towards JL) many years before J’s death. She didn’t love him anymore. He had become a nuisance in her life. She saw him as a needy child who demanded constant attention, reassurance, etc. Her behavior in private left no doubt whatsoever that J’s death was a good thing for her. The prevailing sentiment was: The King is dead; long live the Queen… The question of Y’s possible involvement in J’s death is a thorny one.
Many (if not most) of the people on the staff & in Y’s inner circle assumed that Y & SH had recruited MDC (many still believe it). Even average fans thought it. I remember how surprised I was when an acquaintance who was a recording engineer told me (this was about a week
after J’s death) that many of his friends in the music industry believed that Y had arranged to have J shot. Even the police quickly zeroed in on Y & SH as suspects in a possible conspiracy. A few days after J’s death I was interrogated by one of the detectives investigating the murder. I
was asked some very pointed questions about Y’s relationship with SH & her plans to divorce J the previous summer. Toward the end of our meeting the detective asked me point blank if I though Y & SH were involved in J’s assassination (I waffled, as i didn’t think it would be prudent to openly admit my suspicions). In any event, the police did mount an investigation into Y’s possible role in the murder.
Albert Goldman interviewed one of the cops who worked on the case & was told that the cops initially did not believe Chapman was crazy because his behavior after his arrest was extremely rational. They assumed he was a hired killer. And Y had the best motive for hiring him. Indeed, the police were stunned by the speed with which Y managed to probate the will. They believed that she knew ahead of time that J would be killed on Dec.8 & that her lawyers had prepared the legal work in advance. There were other things that could be viewed as circumstantial evidence (eg MDC’s round the world trip: Y liked to send her associates on such trips with the route determined by her directionalist; If memory serves, J embarked on such trips twice, as did John Green & others…) However, the investigation was shut down after MDC pled guilty & it was clear that there would not be a trial. The results of the investigation (several file drawers full) were sealed & placed into storage. By now they’ve probably been destroyed…”
I can attest to one part of this: people thought “conspiracy” from the night of.
If you’d lived through the assassinations of the 60s, especially if you were young, it was the natural assumption. And, perhaps cruelly, Yoko’s rocky relationship with the fans, and her position as the inheritor of John’s estate made her feature in some of these conspiracy theories.
Additionally, MDC’s behavior (and eventual motive) reminded people of Sirhan Sirhan. All this was spoken of immediately, and in the following weeks/months/years.
But of course, the only thing everybody knew was that this guy we all loved and cared for was dead. The rest was, and remains, total speculation. For most, the conventional story was most comforting; for a few, the alternative theory was.
Again, what’s in it for Mark? Why would he be willing to go to prison for life for Yoko? Then again, some of the “circumstantial evidence” does make you wonder WTF. Like when he said in an interview with Larry King (hard to sit through) that Yoko nodded at him as she walked past through the Dakota archway, well ahead of John. I’m sure others have heard that. Larry asked, “Did you nod back?” and he said no. Why didn’t Larry ask him why the heck she would nod at some strange man standing in the shadows so late at night? Just very odd. Maybe if she said, “Oh, hi” or something, I can understand. He also said that John asked him after signing his record earlier in the day, “Is that all you want?” Chapman was taken aback by this and took this to mean that John could sense something was not right with this guy. Larry thought THAT was strange.
@Michelle, if one follows the theory–and I’m not saying I do–then Chapman isn’t acting with a normal person’s volition. He’s running through a bunch of tasks he’s been conditioned to do, and when that routine is over, he stops. The conditioning may end with the shooting, or it may extend.
He might have been conditioned, or he might’ve done it to himself.
I know it seems crazy, but at base, it’s what you mentioned in your earlier post: it’s convincing a person to do something, because it’s the right and moral thing to do. “You must fly these planes into the World Trade Center”–those guys surely had lots of conditioning, via “prayer” and probably starvation and forced lack of sleep. And repetition and camaraderie.
I’m no expert on any of this, but it seems that if you can control a person’s environment, withhold food and sleep, etc etc etc, they can become susceptible; some more than others.
In the case of RFK, Sirhan Sirhan says he “woke up” after the shooting, when Rosie Greer and Rafer Johnson were holding him down against the steam table. He was still pulling the trigger over and over, long after someone had disabled the gun. He was completely confused. He doesn’t remember shooting Kennedy, a person that he never expressed much of a feeling towards before June 5, 1968. (In the case of RFK, there’s some thought that he didn’t shoot Kennedy, but provided confusion for another person to do so.) For a motive, there was a newspaper clipping about Palestine in Sirhan’s wallet.
Sirhan seems to have been a pretty normal, happy guy until he suffered a head injury from falling off a horse. Then he began to act erratic–angry–keep a diary, etc. Was this a neurological change? Perhaps. Or had someone started to work on him? Who knows.
The only real hope of figuring out what’s going on with one of these guys is to catch someone at the scene who initiates the behavior. (If you’ve seen “Manchurian Candidate,” that would be the person who tells Raymond to play solitaire.) In the case of RFK, there seems to be two figures that Sirhan was seen talking with right before the shooting, a swarthy young man, and the famous “girl in the polka dot dress.”
I never heard of that bit with nodding; I don’t think Yoko had any idea what was about to happen. If anything untoward was happening, I think it was a lot more subtle than that.
To me, what is odd about Chapman is how he doesn’t run. A normal person shooting anyone would be adrenalized like crazy, but MDC just sits there, calmly waiting for the police to arrive, NOT going over to the 72nd St. subway station right across the street, or into Central Park. It’s not impossible that with luck he could’ve gotten away. If he’d hidden a disguise in the bushes, even better odds. But he sat there, quietly, waiting to be arrested. That is peculiar behavior, and it feels “automatic” to me. But whether that’s something he did to himself, or not, we will never know.
Yes, good point about conditioning. It does prove effective. As for Chapman, not attempting to flee makes sense if infamy was what he was going for.
No, no, no — you’re not understanding. When I say “conditioning,” I’m talking about something very intense and systematic. A changing of personality. Like I say, I don’t know about it, but if you want a mental image of sorts, think of the movie “clockwork orange.” Burgess spent time at Fort Bliss in the 50s and saw some conditioning experiments…so they say.
@Michael – But all extremist religions and cults condition their followers. It’s how young kids turn into suicide bombers, or how the Manson ‘family’ were compelled to commit murder.
People who are drawn into these organisations are always vulnerable, and then, like you say, their personalities change as they become radicalised.
Chapman had a history of mental illness. He was also linked to Kenneth Anger, who was linked to the Process Church/Church of Satan, which was also linked to the Manson Murders.
I don’t think any of these things are coincidences. I especially don’t think it was a coincidence that Kenneth Anger was hanging around outside the Dakota the day after John was killed.
Does the Process Church/Church of Satan have links to the CIA? I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t know how relevant it is. I don’t think John’s murder was political. It was more like the world’s most tragic happening – and exactly how he would have wanted it given the choice.
“I don’t think John’s murder was political. It was more like the world’s most tragic happening – and exactly how he would have wanted it given the choice.”
Huh? Given the choice I think John would have wanted to live.
Call me conventional, but I think individuals should be held accountable for their own actions. Manson family? Have you seen interviews with Susan Atkins? Sadie was a perfect name for her. She was a freakin’ born sadist. What about Tex Watson? Oh yeah, he would have been an upstanding, law abiding citizen were it not for his brain being programmed.
@Michelle, I agree that individuals should be held responsible for their own actions. Nobody is arguing that MDC should be released from prison.
But your own analogy is instructive. Charlie Manson didn’t kill *anybody*–he messed with their heads, then told them “go do this.” Should he not be investigated, prosecuted, held to account? Of course.
We’re discussing whether there were people behind Chapman, and that’s a reasonable question to ask. Because the murder was not fully investigated in 1980/81, the answer is likely unknowable.
It’s relevant because conditioning someone is HARD. It is something that took a lot of time to develop, decades.
Conditioning does happen “in the wild,” but religious fanatics are difficult to control—-you can’t “aim” them, as it were. And they don’t become quiet afterwards, with no clue as to who convinced them to blow up their lives, and why. That’s a clue towards the kind of conditioning “tech” I’m talking about—-they don’t talk. Also: apolitical consciousness; neither Sirhan or Chapman had any typical reason for their hatred. Could they have randomly picked their victims through a disorganized natural process? Yes, but that’s how 99.99% of “naturally crazy” people with irrational hatreds do not end up successful.
This may be mere coincidence, but is no Manson Family before there is MK ULTRA. There are no Sirhans and no Chapman’s and no Hinckleys—-and now, after all those ex-contractors are likely dead, along with most of their test subjects—-we don’t see those kind of murders disfiguring the American political scene.
Is it possible for individuals to stumble upon certain techniques? Sure—-there were cults before 1965 or so. But with the specific groups you’re talking about, there’s a link to intelligence-related groups…so the techniques would be accessible. And certainly by 1975, the informational floodgates are open. In 1968, deGrimston’s connections to intelligence matter; in 1975, they would not.
I see what you’re saying, that The Church of Satan is all over this case. But that strikes me similar to the JFK theories that it was a Masonic ritual—-okay perhaps, but the more important clue is, who pulled the Secret Service off the limo on Nov 22, and only Nov 22?
Where was the money coming from? Where was it going? If Kenneth Anger shorted American Airlines the day before 9/11, okay. But if he was doing some ritual, that still doesn’t explain why the fighter jets didn’t scramble like usual.
In cases like this, who fired the gun is usually window-dressing. Interesting, but not the key. The story might involve the people you mention, but the question is: who wrote the book? Who caused it to be published? There was no philosophical reason for any Satanist to bear ill-will towards Lennon; the opposite in fact. There could be some weird beliefs at play, but once again, anybody can tell any story. Who wrote the book? Who caused it to be published?
@Michael – When you say think about who ‘wrote the book’, do you mean, who ordered the hit?
To answer that, you’d have to ask the most obvious question, which is, who stood to gain the most?
Like you say, most of this looks like window dressing.
That might not be the final answer, but it would be the logical first place to look. “Cui bono.”
Actually, I have a bit more to say (naturally!). If you were looking for a group of people to help you do antisocial things, a “Satanist” group in the 60s/70s would be a useful tool, because it would transform asks for antisocial behavior into an in-group acts of devotion. “Go rob that bank! Go knock the ice cream cone out of that little girl’s hands! HAIL SATAN!”
Satanism in those days seems to have been–and I’m not a member, nor have I researched it–for many a credo of defiance or negation aimed at Judeo-Christian authority. Rather than what it seems to be now, which is an actual faith (cf. Satanic Temple of Missouri and abortion).
@Michelle – Is there really any need for you to be so aggressively rude?
I appreciate that this discussion is controversial, but please don’t try to close it down because you don’t like it.
@Michael – So who did stand to gain the most?:
1. Sam Green, who would have gained control of the money had Yoko and John both died.
2. David Geffen, who had taken out an insurance policy on John.
3. Yoko, for obvious reasons.
4. John himself, who was obsessed with how he would be remembered and whose death turned him into the most tragic and legendary rock star of all time.
These are all good guesses; people the cops would’ve talked to. Also, if John was sick…?
The double-suicide theory where Yoko screws over Sam Green is kinda delicious, not gonna lie. 🙂
@Matt Have you read the Albert Goldman book?
Yes, Michael, I have.
The issues with it are obvious, but it’s also very exhaustively researched. Reading that one, and Fred Seaman’s book, in conjunction made me think that Goldman learned more than was published.
I agree. Goldman and his team conducted over 1000 interviews, and at a time when people’s memories were relatively fresh. The prose may be purple, but I don’t really doubt his raw data (which now resides at Columbia University, by the way.) As for Goldman learning more than was published, I also got that sense, and I will say, there is a passage where he strongly insinuates but just stops short (for obvious reasons) of saying that he thinks Yoko was involved with Lennon’s murder. I am also sure Seaman could have said more if he didn’t fear being held at gun point by goons again or being cripplingly litigated. Incidentally, he was posting on rec.music.beatles quite a bit around the turn of the century, and made some interesting comments. If you search “[email protected]” there you can still find some of his old posts.
Oh, for sure Goldman was sitting on stuff; it’s just the nature of having a book like that vetted by a big house. That portion felt to me like something that was re-written under the advice of lawyers.
I would not normally comment info from a source I cannot name, but I feel that it is relevant in response to this comment. Someone who is reliably reported to have been very close to John once shared with me a tidbit of info that, frankly, deserves to be quoted from our chat (bracketed insertions are my own for clarity):
“The thing that really disturbs me most is the implications that Yoko had spoken to [Chapman] before that day. [A Dakota resident] said they could’ve sworn they saw Yoko talking to him and he was asking if they (her and John) were hiring. Allegedly, Yoko told him that he’d have to ask John himself, she was leaving those decisions up to him. My question is…. since fucking when? Even if she did hire people John liked, she had to know their star sign and talk to the directional guy and just about every other thing under the sun short of asking the Pope for a recommendation, so, what the fuck would make her tell him to ask John and then act like the final decision was his? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, she was just freaked out by a random street person or annoyed to be approached by another smarmy fan hanging round, waiting to see and talk to her famous husband, and fobbed him off; seeing the guy a second time, and a third even, should have sounded an alarm, especially if she was disturbed by him. She supposedly acted on such ‘deep vibes’ from people…. I mean, what the fuck???? I don’t know. That just weirded me out when I heard it… like really badly. “
I wonder if Paul suspects Yoko of hiring Chapman and “Lavatory Lil” is about her:
If you saw that she was coming, you could get up off the track.
But it isn’t easy when she hits you in the back.
That’s it for Lavatory Lil…
I swear he sings “Fuck no, Yoko” at one point.
@Michelle – Paul knows. Obviously.
What do you think Heather Mills was referring to when she went off on her rant about her ‘secret’ that people weren’t ready for because they didn’t want to know the ‘truth’? She said she’d had threats from an ‘underground movement’. Yeah – I bet she had too.
She might be a bit rough around the edges, but it doesn’t mean she’s stupid.
Just to add another curious tidbit to the Satanic angle, Giuliano in ‘Lennon in America’ claims that ‘someone left a black cross with a satanic motif with the doorman [at the Dakota], only to come back days later asking to have the amulet returned, saying it belonged to a relative’ and that ‘this was not the first such incident.’
@Matt, I thought I was the only person who had found those old Fred Seaman posts. I definitely get the sense that Goldman was uncharacteristically insinuating where he’s usually not afraid to speculate that John Lennon, for example, visited underage male Thai prostitutes. So something’s up in those discussions of the book. What really raised my eyebrows are the insinuations in the Introduction and in the sections about his conversations with Seaman in Bermuda and Jack Douglas on the last day of sessions in the control room.
@Michael B
If you don’t mind sharing, what were the insinuations?
@Kir, I don’t want to get too far into it for a couple reasons – mainly because it’s quite dark, and second because this isn’t my site – so please forgive me if my response is a bit laconic. At bottom, I had the impression that Goldman thought that John had at least some idea of what was going to happen. There are a number of explanations for why that be, and as others have noted, the chapters are edited in such a way that it’s not clear why Goldman thought so (if I’m reading him correctly). The one explanation that doesn’t hold water is the one that gets hinted at every so often (see, e.g., Yoko in Rolling Stone’s commemorative issue in 2010) – which is that John was somehow psychic. Even if you believe in people’s abilities to predict that sort of thing – I don’t – there’s no evidence before December 1980 that John was able to.
@Michael B
I understand. All of this is just so sad and dark. I agree, I think he knew he might die, but I don’t think he was psychic. I’ve never liked Yoko because of how she treated Julian and Paul, but it’s hard for me to believe that she would have him killed. She wanted to divorce him. I can see someone in her camp doing it, but not her. I’ll see if I can find that Rolling Stone issue.
@kir – I found it here: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/john-lennons-last-days-a-remembrance-by-yoko-ono-62533/.
@ Michael B – Thanks! I read it. The reply button was missing, so I had to reply to myself.
I noticed that she tends to change the John and Yoko ballad based on certain circumstances. I would love to believe she is as nice and innocent as she makes herself out to be, but I know that’s not the case. I could see that she tried to imply he had a sixth sense. I just hope he didn’t tell her he’d make soup out of her and drink it. That’s disturbing and not romantic in any way.
She really tried to deify him throughout the years. I think the Ballad of John and Yoko myth is ending, especially with how John and Yoko are viewed nowadays. Plus, people have access to more info and society has changed greatly since the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
Michael B— what in the world did I just read. (Having just started re-reading the Double Fantasy section of Goldman, I’m struck by the way she is telling the exact same information— with completely different motivations and outcomes. It’s almost like an exact rebuttal of that information, even down to the discussion of 3/4 time vs 4/4 time on Yes I’m Your Angel, saying John insisted on using 4/4 time, when Goldman has John saying it was a good thing she was using 3/4 time or she’d be sued. She was sued, because it was a ripoff of Makin’ Whoopee.) Anyway, what.
@Kir: Wow, you’re brand new to the Beatles, just found out that John and Paul knew each other, and you already are fluent with such memes as The Ballad of John and Yoko to describe a certain narrative as it pertains to their lives. I never heard it described as “The Ballad” until I came here, and I’ve been a Beatles fan for five decades. Sadly, it seems that new generations of Beatle fans are, in fact, anti-John and Yoko fans.
@Michelle–
“The Ballad of John and Yoko” isn’t something we cooked up here to crack on poor Jock and Yono. It refers to the narrative that Lennon and Ono (or, if you prefer, “Lenono”) purposely created, maintained, and constantly promoted. That they were geniuses; always victims; put-upon lovers; that they were one of History’s great romances; that in the face of Great Obstacles, they were creating some new ideal of marriage, parenting, and artistic partnership. It’s fitting to ask, “Looking back, it any of that true?” In fact, it’s weird NOT to ask it, especially if you’re old enough, as you and I are, to have had long relationships and even marriages, and perhaps even children. I look at John Lennon the husband in a different way since I’ve been a husband, and Yoko Ono the partner since I’ve been a partner.
After May 1968, John Lennon’s life shrank to the size of one relationship: his marriage to Yoko Ono. So if you’re going to talk about John after ’68, you gotta talk about Yoko, and you gotta talk about their marriage. Because THEY talked about it. Incessantly.
Since you’ve been a Beatles fan for four decades (me too), you surely remember there were many non-racist, non-sexist fans who thought John and Yoko’s relationship was creepy from the jump. This isn’t some new phenomenon. And just as it’s fair to ask people who don’t like JohnandYoko, “Be honest–are you being racist or sexist?” it’s also fair to ask JohnandYoko fans, “Can’t people find them annoying, insincere, dated, full of themselves? Why are *you* invested in people admiring *them*?”
The answer might be great. “Well, as a feminist John and Yoko’s vision of marriage as a partnership between equals…” Or “As an artist, I feel that they demonstrate that you can be married and not lose your artistic drive…” Or whatever. But it’s always, “You don’t like Yoko as a person.” I don’t have any opinion about Yoko as a person; how could I? I’ve never met her. A friend told me she was very nice. I’m sure she is. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t talk about “The Ballad.”
Most of the commentary on “The Ballad” on HD revolves around the fact that it seems to be largely bullshit, and yet how many Lennon fans resist that. I’m not criticizing J&Y — I don’t think any marriage, much less one between two complicated, strongwilled people, could live up to John’s obsessive P.R. But John and Yoko’s really doesn’t, and that needs to be said–largely because there are a lot of JohnandYoko fans who simply cannot admit that John’s clearly artistically and personally diminished after 1968; or acknowledge that the so-called “Lost Weekend” was at least partially a very creative, successful and seemingly happy time for John; or insist that the version of events put forth in J&Y’s 1980 interviews is THE TRUTH when we now know it’s partially true at best, and perhaps really false. Rather than asking why we should comment, ask why did John Lennon and Yoko Ono constantly make their marriage a topic of conversation? Why were they so insistent that a bunch of strangers know about, and then agree with, their ideas on marriage, parenting, and family? It’s weird, man. I can understand one interview, but literally everything John Lennon does after May 1968 should, according to him, be judged in light of his partnership with Yoko Ono. I know of no other person, famous or not, who acts like that.
And why should Beatles/Lennon fans be “John-and-Yoko fans”? If what you like is The Beatles, and the music they created, what does that have to do with John Lennon’s marriage? Or his wife’s very different art? Or John and Yoko’s activities in politics, or as parents, or owners of real estate? The Beatles and what they did, and the impact they had/have on the world, is completely different from JohnandYoko and what they did, and the impact they had/have on the world.
The conflict here isn’t people hatin’ on JohnandYoko, it’s that JohnandYoko is a totally different thing from The Beatles, and John Lennon, for his own fucked-up reasons, made loving JohnandYoko first a loyalty test for Paul, George, and Ringo, and then for all Beatle fans. That’s…more than a little nuts. And absolutely at the heart of a blog about The Beatles.
@Michelle- I’m sorry for just now responding to this message. I’m not brand new to the Beatles. I knew them, but if someone had asked me to name anyone from the group, I would’ve only be able to name Paul. I discovered Paul when I was a kid, because of his collab with MJ.
I knew about John Lennon through his activism, his song Imagine, and his death. I just never connected him with Paul or the Beatles, because I didn’t know much about them and I wasn’t interested in learning more about them at the time. I only had a few songs that I liked from them and one of the songs was on a commercial I saw as a child.
I watched a documentary this past December on John. It was on tv and I decided to check it out. That’s when I knew he was part of the Beatles. I enjoyed the documentary, so I decided to learn more about him and the Beatles. I discovered more about his partnership with Paul as well.When I want to learn more about a topic, I get really involved in it. As a side note, I’ve heard of the term McLennon in passing because of someone saying that the shippers were just as weird as Larry stans. So in a way, I have heard about John and Paul, but didn’t stop to find out what McLennon stood for.
When I first heard about John, I didn’t have a negative opinion of him. I actually liked him because he spoke out against wrongdoing. As I found out more about his personality, my opinion of him changed.
I learned about the Ballad of John and Yoko from somewhere else, not here. This blog has actually helped me think a little more highly of John and in someways Yoko. I’m not anti Yoko. I actually kind of like her, but I dislike some of her actions, especially her treatment of Julian. That’s my main issue with her. The same goes for John.
I can’t speak for everyone that is part of the younger generation. I can only speak about what I’ve seen. John and Yoko aren’t viewed in such a great light. However, Yoko tends to receive more positive reactions.
One of the–I hesitate to say “advantages”, but there you go–of mind control is how much effort there has been over the years to make people believe it is impossible. The usual line is, “You can’t get anyone to do anything outside their personal moral code,” which seems definitive…until you realize that you can just hypnotize someone into thinking a person is really awful and bad, and must be neutralized for the good of society. Then, any right-thinking person would do it, right? People’s moral codes are situational.
Had Goldman put forth a theory turning upon this, like Fenton Bressler did in his much, much smaller book, I think people would’ve been forced to sue him. And Goldman would’ve found himself in a court case, facing an endless number of well-credentialed experts saying, “This is impossible; it doesn’t exist, and can’t happen.” But leading hypnotists George Estabrooks and William J. Bryan apparently claimed differently…at times. That Bryan link links to an interesting discussion thread for those interested.
Anyway, I would very much like “mind control” to be a fiction; it’s creepy and awful. But I lack the relevant expertise to say whether it is or not, and so must at least entertain it as a possibility.
So when behavioralists tell us that you can’t make a person under hypnosis do anything they wouldn’t do if he or she were not, because our subconscious prevents us from doing so (the same way our subconsious prevents us from revealing secrets when talking in our sleep or rolling out of bed and onto the floor), is not true?
@Michelle, how can that possibly be true? Of course people say things in their sleep that they might not say otherwise, and not only do people roll out of bed, they sleepwalk, have sex, and do all sorts of things while asleep! (For example, the comedian Mike Birbiglia and other RBD sufferers.)
When behaviorists reassure us in this way, I think they probably believe it, and in most cases, it’s true. It requires very specific treatment (isolation? disorientation? sleep deprivation? drugs? all of these?) to override a person’s personality, but it seems to be possible. One, I think they haven’t done it, and two, I think their discipline would come under much scrutiny and control if they emphasized this possibility, so the conventional wisdom is accepted on the topic.
Also, and I think this is important to say, I don’t perceive a massive conspiracy going on among behaviorists or hypnotists or psychological professionals; I think this stuff is very, very specialized and only the handful of people tasked to explore it, know anything about it. In the West, those were people like Bryan and Estabrooks and perhaps Milton Erickson; the people running projects for MK ULTRA/MK SEARCH. In the Soviet bloc, there were probably more, given their earlier start (the 1920s).
@Michael G. and Elizabeth: here’s a thought experiment. John is sick, which is why he looks so frail in photos from 1979 and 1980. Since Elvis died in 1977, he’s also terrified of dying that way — not necessarily on his toilet, full of pills, but as a has-been, a joke, someone past the peak of his cultural power. He’s deeply jealous of McCartney, Dylan, Paul Simon, the Stones – we know that from his audio diaries and interviews – but lacks the psychological or emotional or physical strength to rejoin the game; fame, drugs, and the relationship and support system/lack thereof that he’s chosen and/or…ended up in all make it well-nigh impossible for him to compete and win (and in John’s mind, it is a competition) on that turf again. Yes, he could release another album, but what if it doesn’t do as well as Paul’s? Or Mick’s? And he can’t stand being married to Yoko, and she really can’t stand being married to him. She’s already got affairs going; he doesn’t – not affairs – because he’s too scared of Mother. For the same reason, he’s thought about divorcing her, but he’s too scared: she showed up after his ego broke from 18 months of LSD use and he gave his agency over to her in so many ways. She may be cold, and she may not love him any more, but he’s spent so many years regressed into a state of childlike dependency on Mother, and has staked so much in public on the eternal power and beauty of JohnandYoko’s love, that he can’t seriously go through with getting a divorce. Yoko can, and she’s talked to divorce lawyers, but she wants more than fifty percent, and the lawyers told her that’s not going to happen. She’s done with John, who’s mentally ill, physically abusive, and addicted to drugs. He signed power of attorney over to her, she does all the deals, and Paul McCartney seems to be “beating” him at being the most successful ex-Beatle, which irritates her as much as it does John. She’s got her own coterie of art collectors/lovers who facilitate whatever business it is she’s up to for 20 hours a day in the Dakota. Oh, and John’s terrified of Yoko dying before him; he can’t handle that after Julia/Uncle George/Stu/Brian/maybe Alma Cogan.
Among the “Satanists”/art collectors/drug-deal-facilitators in the Dakota’s employ are people with an intelligence background, or people who know people with such a background. Maybe they’ve ended up in the Dakota orbit because they purport to know about witchcraft, or spells, or numerology. They know people who know people who know people who are part of other religious extremist cults, but in fact come from intelligence backgrounds. It’s possible, they say, to hypnotize someone to do this or that. (Perhaps this was even put to the test in 1975, when John “worked with” a hypnotist at the Dakota to stop smoking, emerged in a daze after three days, broke up with May, and didn’t know what year it was when he spoke to Rolling Stone a few weeks later, or how exactly he’d ended up back in the Dakota.) Such a person in the Dakota’s employ makes it known he could facilitate things. John could go talk up a storm in the press about how happy he is, how happy the Lennons are. He could get a Beatle haircut again so that the photos remind the public of how he was when they used to really love him. If anything happened to him, he’d be a martyr. With all the peace stuff, he’d be in the JFK/RFK/MLK category, not Elvis or Jimi Hendrix or Keith Moon. He’d definitely beat Paul. His back catalogue would sell like crazy; it’d earn a lot more money for the Estate, and for David Geffen, who’s maybe getting…impatient that his investment in Double Fantasy is not panning out very well, and perhaps this would also satiate any other “art collectors” or real estate speculators or heroin dealers with whom business has been done, all those business deals. Oh, and what if John thought Yoko would be coming too, and Sam Green, who has great numbers and a perfect astrological sign and was an Egyptian warlock in a past life, will be taking care of Sean?
@Elizabeth, didn’t you say in a past thread that there was a British DJ who told him that Paul said John was supposed to go to London on December 9, 1980, to work together? Am I mis-remembering that allegation?
@Michael B – Yes, it was Richard Skinner who said that, as I recall.
Everyone said Skinner was a liar because Paul had never talked about it. Well, obviously. If December 8th was planned, there was never going to be a reunion with Paul. But it may have been the ultimate act of revenge to tease him with the prospect of it before snatching it away in a manner designed to mess with his head forever.
You guys are suggested that John planned his own murder?
@Michelle – My own feeling, based on the will alone, is that the plan was for both to die, but she backed out.
@Michael – Yes, and not only is John half-starved and zonked out on God knows what, he’s also completely isolated. So even if he somehow finds the strength to pack his bags and walk out of the Dakota, what comes next? He has nowhere to go, and no one to call. Yoko has control of his finances. All his ‘friends’ are on the payroll and they all work for her. Even MAY PANG worked for her and reported back about everything.
John was stuck and had very few options.
I don’t know how far they had to look to find the extremist cult – everything seems to point back to Roman Polanski, Kenneth Anger and the Process Church/Church of Satan. Is it really a coincidence that Sharon Tate was also taken out by brainwashed, drugged up cult members? Who put the hit out on her really? What were Manson’s links to the Church of Satan? And why the hell were John and Yoko living at the Dakota?
@Elizabeth It would have taken the type of strength John had in 1957-1965. I get the sense he was going to try, but you’re absolutely right, from even a purely practical perspective it was a serious challenge if Yoko didn’t want to cooperate. He would have had to reunite the Beatles, I think, to give him that psychic protection he needed. He’d never just been John Lennon without someone else protecting him.
Does anyone know whether the Lennons were millionaires in real life or only on paper in the late seventies? Didn’t they have money/cash flow issues?
Maury Terry, who investigated the Son of Sam killings, found that New York in the late 70s was a hive of cult activity, and connected dots with Manson, the Process Church, and wealthy members of the entertainment business. Somewhat ironically, Bob Gruen took a series of photos of John at Untermeyer Park in Yonkers, 1975, which turned out to be ground zero for the Sam related cults a few years later. Between all the numerologists, geomancers, and soothsayers that Yoko courted (not to mention John Green and his ties to Santería; or Kenneth Anger, professed friend to the Lennons who is always in the right place at the wrong time), it isn’t that much of a stretch to imagine Yoko having cult ties, even if they were a few degrees removed from herself directly.
As for why they were living at the Dakota, May Pang claims in her book that Yoko took credit for that, that Yoko had found the apartment herself. Now, in John Green’s book, he claims joint credit with Yoko for having concocted the plan (involving the “smoking cure;” the deterrent voodoo herbs given to May; and Yoko’s miraculous pregnancy, intended to play on Lennon’s guilt over the treatment of his first son and keep him from leaving a second time) to lure him back to the Dakota and make sure he stayed there.
Polanski is another strange factor, because he is there at the Indica when John and Yoko meet; films his infamous film around the Lennons’ future residence to be; then the Manson stuff follows, obviously; and in 1973, he becomes the object of Lennon’s drunken, furious rage, when Lennon screams that everything is Polanski’s fault. Something is going on with Polanski that we don’t know about.
Ironically, after reading Bugliosi’s book about the case in the late 70’s, Lennon is said to have written “HELTER SKELTER” on one of the office walls of the Dakota, before it was hidden from view with a filing cabinet.
As for Manson, when you think about it, between people like Derek Taylor, Terry Melcher, Kenneth Anger, Polanski, John Phillips, etc, there aren’t as many degrees of separation between him and the Beatles as people like to think. I’m not saying there is anything to connect them directly, but there IS a fair bit of overlap between the people known to each other in this tale. And there IS a lot of overlap between the activity of the Process Church in London (who had sought to recruit the Beatles) and the Process Church in LA (who had peripheral ties to Manson, and were courting various people in the showbiz scene.) Also note that Manson dispatched several people to London at one point for apparent investigations into the Process and Scientology.
Lastly, the emergence of “Paul is Dead” on a Detroit radio station, the SAME day as Manson’s arrest at Barker ranch is very odd timing indeed. If “Paul is Dead” accomplished one thing, it was that anything outlandish leveled at the Beatles from thereon was automatically thrown into the crazy bin, along with nuts like, say, Charles Manson.
I’m digesting the rest of this comment, but my first thought is that the location of those photos wouldn’t have been accidental. My second thought is that (again, continuing down the path of thought experiments), if I were an intelligence agency who wanted to deal with John Lennon for some reason, I’d try to get him using heroin and involved with anti-establishment groups that give broad, rebellious cover to antisocial activities that jaded, oversexed, bored rock musicians like to get up to anyway, and then get him separated from his band and then England.
Lennon is said to have written “HELTER SKELTER” on one of the office walls of the Dakota, before it was hidden from view with a filing cabinet.
I heard about that. Paul mentioned it, actually. Except John had written ‘HELTER SKELTER by John Lennon and Paul McCartney” and the Dakota staff conspired to cover up just the ‘and Paul McCartney’.
@Michelle
Do you happen to know when Paul mentioned this?
I was just being facetious, Kir! Trying to lighten up a dark topic, which I personally think is fiction. Paul has talked about his name being cut off on Beatles songbooks and such, when it’s not Lennon/McCartney but spelled out with their full names. Not sure if that is true or he’s just paranoid it could happen when the credit is written that way. Which is why he wants his name to come first on the songs he wrote for the Beatles. It’s a topic he brings up quite a bit.
@Michelle
Oh ok. That did make me smile a little. You’re right, this is a very dark topic. I believe he and Yoko were connected to a lot of sinister people, but I don’t think he or Yoko planned his murder.
Paul mentioned that it happened before. I believe it was a magazine or some type of song list. He stated that they removed his name because it couldn’t fit.
Re: Yoko and possible cult connections. There is also this to add, from “Sinister Forces, Book Two” by Peter Levenda:
“At that time, I was friendly with Herman Slater, the proprietor of the store, and had known him since his days when he ran the Warlock Shop in Brooklyn Heights where I lived. As the fame and notoriety of his establishment grew -being covered excessively in the overseas press as well as by local newspapers and television shows – he began to attract an equally notorious clientele. The Process would hang out at The Warlock Shop, as well as the odd Satanist and witches of various denominations. The shop is alluded to several times in Maury Terry’s ‘The Ultimate Evil’ as a hangout for people who knew more about the Son of Sam murders than they were telling. And, amidst all of that publicity, would occasionally arrive John and Yoko Lennon.”
@Matt – This is really fascinating stuff.
Have you come across the article at the link below which puts Anger at the crime scene a few hours after John was killed?:
https://www.courant.com/hc-xpm-2010-11-28-hc-john-lennon-killing-20101128-story,amp.html
Putting that together with the alleged meeting in Hawaii where Chapman gave him six bullets ‘for John Lennon’, I’m shocked that this guy hasn’t been hauled in for police questioning.
Regarding Polanski, I think it’s extremely interesting that he posed for Life magazine in the blood-soaked house where Sharon Tate was killed, making sure the blood was prominently displayed, just as Yoko would later put a photograph of John’s blood-soaked glasses on her album cover. I don’t know what sort of sick, satantic significance that has, but I’d be absolutely amazed if there wasn’t a link.
I didn’t know that the PID story broke on the day of Manson’s arrest, but it makes sense. It had to have come from the inside, right? What with the clues on the album covers and the backward messages in the songs. I always thought the Beatles were behind the whole thing. And yes, it’s the perfect means of obfuscation – accuse anyone who asks too many questions of being another crazy conspiracy theorist.
My own theory about John’s lost weekend is that he was trying to escape, but his separation from Yoko was so stage managed by her that he couldn’t pull it off. Paul was his best hope at that point, I think, but Yoko even contrived to get him to send John back. His ranting about Polanski at that time is interesting, because it suggests that either:
1. He blamed Polanski for the situation he was in (perhaps because it was the murder of Sharon Tate that kicked it all off); or
2) He blamed Polanski for what lay in store for him (perhaps whatever was planned had to happen at the Dakota – where Aleister Crawley had allegedly lived).
I wonder how long it all took to plan?
“Have you come across the article at the link below which puts Anger at the crime scene a few hours after John was killed?”
Half the city of New York was at the crime scene a few hours after John was killed.
True enough, Michelle.
I think, absent a really strong motive, the Satanist angle is window-dressing, or a “means-to,” not a “reason-for”. Kenneth Anger in particular is not the most reliable of sources, and he’s made a long career of being outrageous.
@Elizabeth
I saw that article about Anger, and it seems like simply too much of a coincidence that he was around Chapman in Hawaii, and then again in the whereabouts of the Dakota at the time of the murder. The fact that he omits Chapman’s gift of bullets from his recollection is also very suspicious to me.
In regard to Polanski’s Life photo, and Ono’s putting the bloodied glasses on her album, there is another story that ties in:
Someone who worked at the coroner’s office in 1980 claimed that people came into the morgue, played around with Lennon’s corpse, and videotaped the proceedings.
What I immediately think when I hear this is that to get access to that body, you have to be a fairly powerful person with a lot of clout -especially given Yoko’s assertion that she was cremating him to stop grave tamperers; and that second, video cameras were not cheap or common in 1980, and that this was not the activity of lowly, perverse morgue attendants who were very unlikely to have film equipment hanging around on the chance that a famous cadaver arrived.
The comment is down this page, under ‘Ken from Brooklyn’
https://findadeath.com/john-lennon/
Obviously, I can’t vouch for whether this is true or not. We do know at least that one postmortem photo made it to the National Enquirer, so at the least I would say that it is not inconceivable.
Regarding Lennon’s Lost Weekend, I find that a very sad story, because by the end of 1974, when the violence and drunken binges had subsided, and he had grown more antipathetic toward Yoko, he was actually starting to resemble a semi-functional, independent human being again; and mending bridges with people like McCartney and Julian. After the “smoking cure,” he went back to being the Zombified, infantile Lennon who couldn’t tie his own shoes without asking Yoko if it was all right. Yoko’s determination to bring him back to the Dakota, and specifically the Dakota -as opposed to a million other places they could live (when they did start buying up other real estate later on, Yoko always found something wrong with it) is troubling, and seems to go beyond merely needing Lennon as meal ticket. She could have had that anywhere. That she stayed there for decades after he was shot at the gates, without batting an eye, speaks to her fixation with the place.
I had never heard that Crowley lived there (he has a close amalgam in Rosemary’s Baby though). Is there a source for this?
@Matt – I’ve come across a few sources linking Crowley to the Dakota. The Wikipedia entry for the building, which said Crowley lived there, has been taken down, but there are these articles and a number of others out there:
https://evangelicalfocus.com/between-the-lines/3905/polanski-half-a-century-ago-rosemary-baby-was-born
https://takenewyorktours.com/haunted-buildings-in-new-york/
I don’t know how reliable they are.
The stuff about the morgue is horrible, but I can believe it. These people were beyond sick.
@Michelle
“Half the city of New York was at the crime scene a few hours after John was killed.”
But not many of them were gifted bullets intended for John Lennon by his killer in Hawaii beforehand.
I’m not sure what it means, but it is an ominous curiosity that has not been satisfactorily explained by either party.
All I know is that Anger always seems to be linked either explicitly or peripherally to a lot of untoward events. He’s like a Luciferian Forrest Gump.
Wow! I hadn’t read this piece until today.
Very interesting, but kind of creepy and depressing.
I guess I’m in the “ignorance is bliss” camp. I mean, I acknowledge that there were nefarious people around the Beatles, but when it starts getting into Satanism and Charles Manson and Sharon Tate, I’m out.
Maybe the last 4 years living in the conspiracy theory Trump regime has exhausted me.
Still, very interesting Michael.
@Tamsin – Actually, I think that’s a shame. Obviously, this stuff is extremely unpleasant to think about, but after 40 years, some scrutiny of these events is long overdue. Why should we allow ourselves to be manipulated into never criticising Yoko because she’s a Japanese woman? Or never mentioning Chapman’s name? What is that even about? Don’t think too deeply about what happened to John, that’s what.
No, this might be forbidden territory for the likes of Lewisohn (and the precise reason why he will never write the definitive book), but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be discussed here. And you have every right to contribute – provided of course you have the stomach for it.
I was expressing my opinion. I don’t feel “manipulated into never criticizing Yoko”. I think you are projecting there.
You seem to be very passionate about this topic and that’s fine. I’m not.
@Michael Gerber
Do you know if anyone has proposed writing a modern biography of Yoko? Someone who could apply the rigorous methodologies that a serious biographer would/should?
I have to be frank in saying that I am not sure it would be something on my reading list, but it is certainly merited for many of the reasons I am discovering that you and other discuss on this blog. We have all tucked into many a biography of odious persons and, while we do not enjoy the subject per se, we appreciate a historian and/or writer bringing new scholarship and disciplined interpretations to light.
Or are those with the chops to do it right simply deterred by the nearly impenetrable wall that she has so effectively built over the decades and consider it a no-go area? Are they deterred by a lack of possible subjects available for an interview or what documents are extant? In other words, is it even worth a writer’s investigate of time and effort to try it?
I realize this question does not directly pertain to the subject of this post, but reading through the comments makes me realize just what an overarching figure she played in every single aspect of JL’s life starting in the late 60’s–including any involvement, however many degrees separated, with individuals of, shall we say, less than upstanding and honorable character.
Geoffrey Giuliano was touting a biography of Ono a decade ago called ‘Black Widow,’ but it never materialized.
http://geoffrey-giuliano.blogspot.com/2009/09/black-widow-yoko-ono-unauthorized.html
The most thorough research to date about Yoko’s life still seems to be what appeared in Goldman’s book, and that probably had more to do with her combative PR response in the late 80’s than actually being offended on Lennon’s behalf.
I am sure her penchant for litigation; her powerful media influence as Lennon’s wealthy widow; and the sycophantic, tight-lipped nature of would-be interview subjects have all been deterrents to prospective authors and publishers over the years.
To respond to the last part of your comment, here is what Yoko told May Pang, and I think it summarizes her influence on JL pretty well:
“I did primal therapy with him. I watched him go back to his childhood. I know his deepest fears.”
Isn’t that disquieting?
@Matt, it’s very disquieting. If you wanted to get John to abandon his home country and son, or start advocating violent revolution (sure to get him a spotlight on the US government’s radar), or taking heroin, or come back to New York and break up with May Pang, or not record music for five years, or give him half the space on his comeback album, or adopt a certain pose in his 1980 interviews, or sign over POA, or agree to a suicide pact you’re planning to back out of, what could be more useful?
Well, first of all, @Neal, I find Yoko’s public demeanor to be overbearing, her care of John questionable, and her music not to my taste (I like her art), but I would not refer to her as “odious.” Not from what I know for sure about her.
As to your question, I think it’s fairly simple: publishers do not believe there is a big market for a Yoko Ono biography, and that — plus her likely noncooperation, and perhaps even litigation against it — has been enough to keep any project from being funded. I’m sure it’s been pitched. And she has now lived long enough that, upon her death, I suspect there will be a good-sized obit in The Times, and perhaps a small-press or academic press biography, praiseworthy enough to sop up the 25,000 sales there. But a big, well-funded, investigative biography? Too many sources are dead, and too few people would buy it. Yoko fans aren’t interested, and people do not buy books to hate-read, not at today’s prices.
Unless Yoko gets an A.J. Weberman, I think we’re out of luck. 🙂
@Michael Gerber
Good catch on my use of the word odious. As I re-read my post I admit that my wording was rather poor and that it looks as if I were labeling Yoko as odious–something I did not mean to do.
I was just mulling over that biographers tackle the stories of individuals that they might not find likeable as a person but worthy, nonetheless, of research and exploration. I was curious if there were authors who, for whatever reason, might harbor an animus toward the personality of Yoko, but still harbor an interest in writing about her. Your reply gives me a good answer that a thousand page bio of her is not on the horizon.
As a newbie here I apologize for my carelessness there and don’t want to get off on the wrong foot by appearing to parrot the age-old anti Yoko tropes which, fortunately, don’t have a home here.
In fact, one of the impressive aspects of this blog is that you all seem to rigorously put aside feelings of like/dislike/Fandom and conjectures in order to explore the actual history, for better or worse, of these figures and their narratives. That is indeed a pleasant discovery for anyone who wishes to explore the facts.
@Neal, I’m glad you’ve arrived! See post for a reply.
I’ve been reading Hey Dullblog as a lurker for a few months, but never felt moved to post until now. John, and the sadness of his later life, has been much on my mind this past year.
Paul said something in Many Years From Now that has always stuck with me and disturbed me. He’s talking about his relationship with John in the later years:
“I would ring him when I went to New York and he would say, ‘Yeah, what d’you want?’ ‘I just thought we might meet?’ ‘Yeah, what the fuck d’you want, man?’ I used actually to have some very frightening phone calls. Thank God they’re not in my life any more. I went through a period where I would be so nervous to ring him and so insecure in myself that I actually felt like I was in the wrong. It was all very acrimonious and bitter.” (page 588)
I remember reading the book when it first came out and being stopped short by that line about “frightening phone calls.” I assumed, of course, that Paul was referring to calls he was getting from John. Rereading it now, I don’t believe that’s what he meant. Paul was getting phone calls so disturbing that he’s still upset by them decades later, and he seems to be strongly hinting that the calls were NOT from John. He also seems strangely reluctant to say more about them. Reading about the crowd that John and (especially) Yoko involved themselves with in America, I think I finally have an idea of what Paul may have been talking about.
@J.D.
That’s interesting. I think there’s a lot of stuff Paul knows that he’s not willing to share at the moment.
One question I have about non barking dogs is: where the heck were Paul’s dog silencers when he was getting busted for pot every few years like clockwork???
Apart from Japan, those were minor drug offenses. Not necessary to squash.