Corn Flakes With John Lennon

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Corn flakes with John Lennon

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/corn_flakes_with_john_lennon_PL2unLOHlBZdYx8H2aDQGJ

Rock idols dished to only one man

By LARRY GETLEN
October 11, 2009

Journalist Robert Hilburn was invited for a special audience with
Yoko Ono the day of John Lennon's funeral, and to Courtney Love's
home just before Kurt Cobain's. He has guilted Bob Dylan and Bruce
Springsteen into changing set lists, and caused Michael Jackson and
Elvis Presley to feel personally betrayed by his negative reviews.

Hilburn, the longtime music critic for the Los Angeles Times, tells
all these stories and more in this new memoir, which presents some
fascinating, intimate rock 'n' roll moments, and pries into the minds
of legends to show us how the music got made.

Hilburn lived a very un-rock and roll lifestyle, as he didn't smoke,
drink, or take drugs. His bond with these idols, then, stemmed from a
shared dedication to music, causing them to reveal things to him that
few else could have uncovered.

Years after writing the review that ignited Elton John's career,
John, at the height of his fame, confessed to the writer that he had
attempted suicide.

Talking to Lennon at the Dakota in 1980 for the Beatle's first
newspaper interview in five years, Lennon revealed how much he missed
Paul McCartney, a shock considering the pair's public bitterness.

And just after "Thriller" sailed up the charts, Michael Jackson
explained how he "couldn't imagine not living at home with his
mother," saying that on his own, he'd die from loneliness.

"I sit in my room sometimes and just cry," Jackson told him, later
adding, "I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just
hoping to find someone to talk to."

During Lennon's "lost weekend" in the early seventies, Hilburn
witnessed him drunkenly chase Phil Spector around a recording studio
with "a gob of cake." Hilburn also spent many late nights at
Spector's 40-room mansion, and heard the producer seriously declare,
"nobody leaves here until Smith & Wesson says so."

Hilburn also saw Jackson ­ after the singer tried to convince Hilburn
that he and Brooke Shields were romantically serious ­ blow off the
actress to instead have pillow fights with "half-dozen five- and
six-year-olds" in a bedroom several feet away.

When U2's Bono, whom Hilburn championed from the beginning, climbed a
balcony rail at an early show and dropped into the arms of waiting
fans, Hilburn wrote that a band that good didn't need a sideshow ­
"especially a potentially dangerous one."

Bono called him the next day. "I am going to heed what you say," Bono
told him. "The music is enough, and I realize that." That attitude is
Hilburn's as well, and it shines through on every page.
--

Corn Flakes with John Lennon
And Other Tales From a Rock 'n' Roll Life
by Robert Hilburn
Rodale

--------

In My Life:
Robert Hilburn's 'Corn Flakes With John Lennon'

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-hilburn-lennon11-2009oct11,0,7359748.story

October 11, 2009

Robert Hilburn was pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times for 35
years, from the psychedelic era to the emergence of the iPod. He
witnessed many of rock 'n' roll's seminal moments and interviewed
virtually every major pop figure of the period. All of this is
chronicled in his memoir, "Corn Flakes with John Lennon (and Other
Tales From a Rock 'n' Roll Life)," to be published this month. In
this abridged excerpt, Hilburn explores his relationship with Lennon
after the Beatles' breakup and explains the book's title. Additional
excerpts will appear Monday and Tuesday in Calendar.
--

John Lennon raced into Yoko Ono's home office in the mammoth old
Dakota building with a copy of Donna Summer's new single, "The
Wanderer." "Listen!" he shouted to us as he put the 45 on the record
player. "She's doing Elvis!" I didn't know what he was talking about
at first. The arrangement felt more like rock than the singer's usual
electro-disco approach, but the opening vocal sure sounded like Donna
Summer to me. Midway through the song, however, her voice shifted
into the playful, hiccuping style Elvis had used on so many of his
early recordings.

"See! See!" John shouted, pointing at the speakers.

The record was John's way of saying hello again after five years. I
had spent time with him in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, during the
period he later referred to as his "lost weekend" -- months when he
was estranged from Yoko and spent many a night in notorious drinking
bouts with his buddies Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr. John got so
boisterous one night that he was thrown out of the Troubadour, one of
the city's landmark music clubs. He invited me to dinner a few times,
and I later found out it was when he had an important business
meeting the next morning and didn't want to wake up with a hangover.
I got the nod over Harry and Ringo because I didn't drink anything
stronger than diet soda. We would eat at a chic Chinese restaurant
and then return to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Those
hours would race by because we loved talking about our favorite rock
hero, Elvis, which brings us back to "The Wanderer."

I've experienced hundreds of memorable concert and interview moments,
so it's hard to rank them in any favorite order, but my final hours
with John in New York are certainly on the short list. It was just
weeks before his death in December of 1980, and his playing the
Summer record was an endearing greeting -- and one that was typical
of John. Of the hundreds of musicians I've met, John was among the
most down-to-earth.
--

As soon as I started working at the Los Angeles Times, people warned
me not to get too close to artists because it could make it difficult
to review their work and you can never really tell if the
"friendship" is genuine. Even so, I felt there was much value in
getting to know some of the most important artists beyond what you
can glean in the hour or so you have to interview them. The
relationship with Lennon -- and it never approached anything like a
daily or even weekly tie -- came about naturally. I liked him and
enjoyed his company.

John came to town in late 1973 to record an oldies album with Phil
Spector and to promote his new solo album, "Mind Games," which he had
produced himself. I interviewed him at the Bel-Air home of record
producer Lou Adler, a chief force behind the Monterey Pop festival.
May Pang, who introduced herself as John's personal assistant,
answered the door and took me to the patio where John was waiting. He
was wearing jeans and a sweater vest over his shirt and he walked
toward me enthusiastically. "Well, hello at last," he said with a warm smile.

"Phil tells me you're a big Elvis fan," he said.

We ended up spending so much time talking about Elvis and other
favorites from the 1950s that I was afraid we weren't going to get to
the Beatles and his solo career. I was particularly interested in his
thoughts on his "Plastic Ono Band" album (from 1970); the songs
struck me as being so personal.

"I always took the songs personally, whether it was 'In My Life' or
'Help,' " he said. "To me, I always wrote about myself. Very few of
the completely Lennon songs weren't in the first person. I'm a
first-person journalist. I find it hard, though I occasionally do it,
to write about, you know, 'Freddie went up the mountain and Freddie
came back.' And even that is really about you."

John said he actually preferred "Plastic Ono Band" to its follow-up,
"Imagine," even though the latter sold more copies and got generally
better reviews. "I was a bit surprised by the reaction to 'Mother,' "
he said, referring to "Plastic Ono Band" by his own title for it. "I
thought, 'Can't they see how nice it is?' " So, John said, he went
back into the studio and wrote new songs about many of the same
themes, only this time he put on some strings and other production
touches that made the message more accessible. That's why, he said,
he privately called the "Imagine" album "Mother With Chocolate."

The interview didn't run in The Times until the album "Mind Games"
was actually in the stores several weeks later. In the meantime, Phil
invited me to one of the sessions for the oldies project. They had
been going on for some weeks and the word was that they were pretty
raucous, even drunken affairs. On the night I stopped by the studio,
the liquor flowed freely. John, a gob of cake in his hand, chased
Phil around the control booth while those around them danced to
John's just-recorded version of an early Elvis recording, "Just Because."

But John wasn't all playfulness. He had sharp words for one of the
studio employees and insulted a record company guest. This wild John
was a lot different from the charming guy I had met at Adler's house,
and I hoped the rude, drunken behavior was an aberration. But I kept
hearing reports, including one about Phil firing a pistol one night
and others about a tipsy John out on the town with his buddies and
how he sometimes drank as much as a bottle of vodka a day. The first
time I saw him this way away from the studio was at the Troubadour,
where I was reviewing the opening of R&B singer Ann Peebles, who had
a hit single, "I Can't Stand the Rain."

I didn't know John was in the club until he was in the middle of a
big commotion. He was so drunk that he had wrapped a Kotex sanitary
napkin around his head. When one of the waitresses tried to quiet
him, he shouted, "Don't you know who I am?" Her answer was repeated
the next day in all the record company offices and later in lots of
magazine articles: "To me, you're just some ass -- with a Kotex on
his head." A bouncer escorted John and his party out onto Santa
Monica Boulevard.

Eventually, John returned to New York with May and spent weeks trying
unsuccessfully to get Phil to give him the sessions' master tapes so
he could finish the album himself. By then, I was beginning to hear
reports about a strain between John and Yoko Ono and the suggestion
that his relationship with May was more than simply professional.
John was in a terrific mood when he returned from New York a few
months later. He was only supposed to be in town for a few days, but
the trip was extended and May phoned one day to say that John would
like me to join him for dinner. When I got to the hotel, I figured
he'd have a limo waiting downstairs. But John, wearing blue jeans and
a black T-shirt, suggested that I drive, and we were soon off to a
nearby Chinese restaurant, where we spent a couple of hours talking
about Elvis, naturally.

Back at the hotel, Around 11:30, John turned on Johnny Carson's TV
show and ordered corn flakes and cream from room service. He turned
the sound down on the TV and stirred the corn flakes and cream with
his spoon in an almost ritualistic fashion before taking a bite.

I didn't think much of it until the same thing happened the next time
we returned to the hotel after dinner. This time I asked what was up
with the corn flakes.

He smiled.

As a child in Liverpool during World War II, he explained, you could
never get cream, so it was a special treat. He took another bite and
gave an exaggerated sigh to underscore just how sweet it tasted.

The mention of Liverpool made John nostalgic. I already knew a little
about John's early days, but it was fascinating hearing him tell the
story. John was born in 1940 -- a year after me -- and he was raised
by his Aunt Mimi after his parents broke up when he was about 5. His
mother, Julia, started seeing another man who had children of his own
and didn't want another one around. John loved Mimi dearly, but he
also longed for his mother, who lived only a few miles away.

During his teens, just around the time he had formed the Quarrymen
skiffle group, he said he had begun seeing more of his mother and had
gotten the feeling she was trying to make up for all the years of her
absence from his life. She was especially excited about the band, and
John treasured their time together. But his mother was hit and killed
by a motorist while walking to a bus stop. His mother had been taken
from him twice. He was 17.

John had thought that rock 'n' roll fame would make everything right
in his life, but even after his success he continued to search for
someone or something to make his world seem complete. That was the
theme of the "Plastic Ono Band" album. The very first song, "Mother,"
started with him screaming, "Mother, you had me, but I never had you
/ I wanted you, but you didn't want me." It continued, "Father, you
left me, but I never left you / I needed you, but you didn't need me."

He found that missing foundation in Yoko, which is why she became
more important to him than even the Beatles. In "God," a later song
on the record, he again screams, "I don't believe in Elvis. I don't
believe in Zimmerman [ Bob Dylan]. I don't believe in Beatles. I just
believe in me. Yoko and me. That's reality."

As he spoke, I could understand why John felt so adrift. Until that
night, I had assumed he had separated from Yoko and was involved in a
new relationship with May, but he said that Yoko had pretty much
demanded a break in their relationship. He was clearly still in love
with her. Without her, he had no shield against the pressures of the
rock 'n' roll world and his own depression.
--

In the fall of 1980, John and Yoko were finishing up their new album,
"Double Fantasy," and I headed to New York for John's first newspaper
interview in five years. This was when John raced into Yoko's office
at the Dakota with a copy of Donna Summer's "The Wanderer."

He had returned to New York after the "lost weekend" period and spent
the next five years rebuilding his life with Yoko and helping to
raise their son, Sean. On this day, he looked nice and trim in jeans,
a jean jacket and a white T-shirt. He was maybe 25 pounds slimmer
than the last time I'd seen him. "It's Mother's macrobiotic diet," he
said later about his weight, employing his nickname for Yoko. "She
makes sure I stay on it."

By the time we headed to the recording studio, it was nearly dark. As
the limo pulled up to the studio's dimly lit entrance, I could see
the outlines of a couple dozen fans in the shadows. They raced toward
the car as soon as the driver opened John's door. Flashbulbs went off
with blinding speed. Without a bodyguard, John was helpless, and I
later asked if he didn't worry about his safety. "They don't mean any
harm," he replied. "Besides, what can you do? You can't spend all
your life hiding from people. You've got to get out and live some, don't you?"

Inside the studio, I heard several tracks from "Double Fantasy,"
which was John's most revealing album since "Imagine." I could see he
was happy to be back in the studio, and he looked forward to making
more music with Yoko. Some critics branded the gentle, relaxed tone
of the collection too soft. They missed the old Lennon bite. To me,
however, the collection was a marvelous reflection of John's mood,
and Grammy voters were right when they named it album of the year.

The Dakota is one of New York's most famous residential addresses.
Built in 1884, it has spacious rooms and high ceilings; John and
Yoko's living room had the formal but graceful feel of a museum with
its Egyptian art, including a sarcophagus that dominated one side of
the room. From one window of the seventh-floor apartment, I could see
across Central Park and much of the city's spectacular skyline. For
the preceding five years, that scene had been John's primary view of the world.

I spent hours at the apartment and the studio talking to John about
the changes since Los Angeles. He felt at peace for one of the few
times in his life. He was deeply in love with Yoko and thrilled to be
a father again. He also spoke with affection about the Beatles days
and how much he still looked forward to seeing Paul. That surprised
me because of the sarcastic barbs he'd launched in interviews and the
biting lyrics he'd written about Paul since the breakup of the band.
"Aw, don't believe all that," he said, smiling. "Paul is like a
brother. We've gotten way past all that." He also spoke fondly of
Ringo but more distantly about George. He felt slighted by some
things in George's autobiography, "I, Me, Mine," especially George's
failure to give John credit for helping him learn guitar techniques.

Mostly, we talked about the "house husband" period that was just
ending, a time of emotional drying out, a chance to reset priorities.

He had decided in 1975 to shut down his career to work on his
strained marriage with Yoko and to spend time with Sean, who was born
that October. He also wanted to escape the pressures and expectations
of the rock 'n' roll world. Despite his highly acclaimed solo works
of the early 1970s, John found it difficult to deal with the ghost of
his Fab Four association.

"When I wrote 'the dream is over' [in 'God' in 1970], I was trying to
say to the Beatles thing, 'Get off my back.' I was also trying to
tell the other people to stop looking at me because I wasn't going to
do it for them anymore because I didn't even know what the hell I was
doing in my own life," he told me that first day. "What I realized
during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I
had made the physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there was
still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me. It
was like this invisible ghost. During the five years, it sort of went
away. I finally started writing like I was even before the Beatles
were the Beatles. I got rid of all that self-consciousness about
telling myself, 'You can't do that. That song's not good enough.
Remember, you're the guy who wrote "A Day in the Life." Try again.' "

John wasn't a recluse for those five years. He and the family
traveled to Japan and elsewhere. He also went out regularly in New
York, but he stayed away from the music business and the media. He
said he had begun writing again the previous summer, during a
vacation with Sean in Bermuda. Excited about the new material, he had
called Yoko, who had remained in New York to take care of some
business matters, and he played her a tape on the phone. She then
wrote reply songs, which she played back to him a few days later.
With the songs forming a dialogue, the Lennons went into a recording
studio in New York in the autumn to record an album.

In the limo on the way to the studio, John continued to talk about
Yoko, saying she served as an artistic catalyst -- questioning,
discussing, challenging. He called their musical relationship a
partnership, noting that she wrote and sang half the songs on the
album. But what about the commercial consequences? There had been so
much anti-Yoko feeling because of the breakup of the Beatles. Would
his fans accept Yoko as a musical partner?

This time, Yoko spoke up. "I have two concerns in this album," she
said. "First, I hope that it reminds people of John's talent. Second,
I hope the fact that I am working with him enhances the man-woman
dialogue. At the same time, I don't want the situation to become
negative because my songs are too far-out or anything. That's hurting
the chances of the album reaching as many people as possible. That
wouldn't be fair to John. So in selecting my songs, I was conscious
about the ones that are not too -- shall we say -- offbeat. This
album is like our first hello. When you say hello, you don't want to
complicate things. Maybe in the second or third album, we can experiment more."

John smiled at her words and said, "Yes, this is just starting over.
We're going to move forward in the next album. It's going to be even
better, so people better get ready."

As she leaned on his arm in the back of the limo, they seemed very
comfortable. It was nighttime and everything felt quiet and safe in
the car. "It's not really so unusual, you know," Yoko said,
mentioning the literary couple Robert and Elizabeth Browning. "Ah,"
John said. He started quoting one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
most famous lines: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Yoko
talked about how Robert and Elizabeth had inspired each other. I said
that might be a good angle for a story: "John and Yoko, the Robert
and Elizabeth Browning of rock." We all smiled.

On that second day, he took me to Sean's playroom, where he kept one
of his prized possessions, a vintage jukebox. Plugging it in, he
punched one Elvis Presley record after another and bopped around playfully.

As Elvis sang "Don't Be Cruel" in the background, John recalled his
first and only meeting with our mutual rock hero. It was a story he
relished sharing as much as he did his Beatles memories.

"It was probably 1965 and we had a break in L.A. during a tour. We
went up to his house and we were terrified. I can't remember the
first moment I saw him, but he looked great. We started singing some
of his songs. That's what we always did when we met Chuck Berry or
Carl Perkins or any of them."

I asked if Elvis had known how big the Beatles were and if he had
felt any hint of competition.

"Are you kidding?" John replied with a laugh. "He knew damn well who
we were -- from the word 'go.' He was terrified of us and the English
movement because we were a threat to him. I heard he was so paranoid
all afternoon that he kept practicing things to say to us, asking the
guys around him if we were any good. It was like Ali wondering if he
could handle Frazier. To us, he was a god. We'd like to beat his
record and become the champion, but we would always give him credit.
It always hurts and infuriates me when Mick Jagger puts Elvis down.
Maybe he's jealous because Elvis was the original body man in rock
and it's too near to Mick's game for him to admit that Elvis'
movements were at least as good as his and that maybe Elvis could
sing a damn sight better than he could."

John's favorite time with the Beatles surprised me -- the early days.
Hamburg, Liverpool, the dance halls. I'd thought he'd say it was when
the band had conquered America. "Naw," he said with a wave of a hand.
"We were already blasé. We had the show down. We were already past
our peak as performers. It was like Vegas -- what we did on stage, I
mean. We shook our head on this number and . . . well, you know the rest."

We had never spoken all that much about the Beatles, and John seemed
to be amused by my sudden display of interest. He even laughed when I
told him the reason I wanted to be Elvis was because of all the
screaming girls. Was it the same with him in the Beatles? "That was
one of the main reasons you go on stage, because the guy in the band
gets the girls," he said with a broad grin. "There's an old joke, but
it's true: Sometimes you'd get this girl after the show and you'd be
in bed and she'd ask you which one you are. I'd say, 'Which one do
you like?' If she said, 'George,' I'd say, 'I'm George.' "

This was so much fun that it didn't even seem like an interview. I
was just a fan, asking him to name things like his favorite Beatles
albums ("Rubber Soul," "Revolver," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band," and the White Album) and what tracks he'd put on a Beatles
greatest hits package ("I'd favor my own tracks, of course. I'd go
with 'Walrus,' 'Strawberry Fields,' 'Come Together,' 'Revolution,'
'In My Life,' 'Hard Day's Night,' 'Help' -- stuff like that and some
of the early tracks like 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and 'Day Tripper.' ").

John was so into reminiscing that he even came up with a question:
What would have happened if the band hadn't broken up in 1970?

In answering it, he said, "We would have probably gone down the tubes
and then been resurrected like everything else. I always thought it
was best to go out when you're flying high. The popularity was always
ebbing and flowing. That's what people forget. It was only during the
initial rush that people thought everything we did was right. After
that, it was up or down depending on the single or the album or
whatever. We could split up in 1970 because we were on top. In fact,
it was probably the best thing that ever happened to the Beatles
myth. I read this book about Mick where he said after the breakup,
'At last, we're No. 1.' What he didn't realize was that when we
split, we created a much bigger thing than if we had stayed. He could
never catch up with that."

I told John I couldn't imagine, as a fan, how hard it must have been
for him to simply walk away from music.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life -- not make
music," he said. "Not because I had this love for music or because I
was so creative and I couldn't bear not to be creative, but because I
felt that I didn't exist unless my name was in the gossip columns of
Rolling Stone or the Daily News or whatever. Then, it dawned on me
that I do still exist."

We had such a good time over the three days that John invited me to
his and Sean's birthday party at Tavern on the Green. I knew what the
perfect birthday present for John was. I had mentioned in the studio
that there was a great new Elvis photo book by Alfred Wertheimer, who
had spent a couple of weeks with Elvis around the time of "Hound Dog"
in 1956. John hadn't seen it.

The party was scheduled for noon, and I left the hotel around 11,
thinking I'd pick up a copy of the book at a bookstore. But I had to
go to a half-dozen stores before finally finding one, and the party
was over by the time I got to the restaurant. I headed back to the
Dakota. I didn't want to bother John, so I left the book with the doorman.

At the bookstore, I also picked up a copy of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's poetry in case I wanted to quote more from the poem John
had mentioned. He had said he wished he could put those feelings into
a song, because it would be the perfect love song. During the flight
back, the final lines struck me. In them, Barrett Browning says, "If
God choose, I shall but love thee better after death."

I flashed on that final line two months later when I heard the news.
--

Excerpted from "Corn Flakes with John Lennon (And Other Tales From a
Rock 'n' Roll Life)," by Robert Hilburn.

.