Chapter 7 3 страница

While Starkey's venture was little more than a plaything, Dark Horse shaped up to become a more significant force in the music business. To consolidate its identity, Harrison recorded an album of the same name. More surprisingly, he announced a lengthy concert tour of North America, starting on 2 November 1974. Unfortunately, his record was still unfinished when rehearsals began, and by the time of the final sessions his voice was 'dark hoarse', as critics soon noted.

Harrison's enthusiasm for the venture began to fade at the opening press conference, where he was besieged with questions about a Beatles reunion. It didn't take long for his patience to crack as badly as his voice. Soon he was admitting, 'The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles in 1963. In retrospect, the biggest break since then was getting out of them. ' He added determinedly, 'People are afraid of change. You can't live in the past. ' But you can talk about it, endlessly, and the reporters continued to prod the same wound. Eventually the scar tissue gave way, and Harrison's true feelings erupted: 'It's all a fantasy, putting the Beatles back together. If we ever do that, it's because everybody is broke. ' Then he focused on one of his colleagues: 'I'd rather have Willie Weeks [from his 1974 band] on bass than Paul McCartney. . . Having played with other musicians, I don't think the Beatles were that good. . . Paul is a fine bass player, but he's a bit overpowering at times. I'd join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn't join a band with Paul. That's not personal, but from a musical point of view. ' As Starkey noted a few days later, 'How can we get together if George won't play with Paul? ' Having survived vitriolic press criticism from Lennon, McCartney took Harrison's comments on the chin. 'I think the others are great. I'd always stick up for them. I don't agree with George. I don't think the Beatles weren't any good. I think they were great. '

Harrison's comments aroused the same sense of shock as Lennon's earlier admission, 'I don't believe in Beatles. ' The furore heightened the already formidable pressure on the guitarist to justify himself. Sadly, his Dark Horse album had the same ragged quality as Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats but little of the psychological drama. 'After I split up from Pattie, ' Harrison admitted later, 'I went on a bit of a bender to make up for all the years I'd been married. I wasn't ready to join AA or anything – I don't think I was that far gone – but I could put back a bottle of brandy occasionally, plus all the other naughty things that fly around. I just went on a binge until it got to the point where I had no voice and almost no body at times. ' That was exactly how the record sounded, with 'Simply Shady' offering the clearest portrait of an artist in distress. His seasonal single 'Ding Dong' was so banal that few people noticed the accompanying video, in which he mockingly donned his Beatles suits from 1963 and 1967, before posing naked apart from a strategically placed guitar and a pair of Himalayan boots.

As with Richard Starkey's Goodnight Vienna, sales of Dark Horse owed more to habit than enthusiasm, and it soon faded from the charts. It didn't help that Harrison's early concerts received disapproving reviews. After the first-night audience in Vancouver became restless while Ravi Shankar's musicians were playing, Harrison told them that he was prepared to die for Indian music, but not for rock 'n' roll. The ravaged condition of his voice was impossible to disguise, and when he ventured into his back catalogue, he altered lyrics that were almost regarded as holy writ. The key line of John Lennon's 1965 song 'In My Life' now ran, 'In my life, I love God more. ' Another Beatles classic became 'While My Guitar Gently Smiles', and he cheapened his most famous composition by singing, 'Something in the way she moves it. ' The whole exercise

was tinged with typically sly humour – 'Bring your lawyers and I'll bring Klein', he quipped on 'Sue Me Sue You Blues' – but the audiences had come to relive the past, not satirise it. 'They wanted a Beatle tour, ' Harrison believed. As keyboardist Billy Preston recalled, 'George didn't want to do " Something" at all. I knew he was gonna have to do it. So he started rebelling against it by doing it in a different way. ' After the Vancouver show Harrison complained, 'Why do they want to see if there is a Beatle George? I don't say I'm Beatle George. The image of my choice is not Beatle George. If they want to do that they can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Whether you like me or not, this is what I am. I didn't force you or anybody at gunpoint to come to see me. And I don't care if nobody comes to see me, nobody ever buys another record of me. I don't give a shit, it doesn't matter to me. ' And there were still 44 shows to go.

Asked later what he had gained from the tour, he replied, 'I learned that I should make sure that I have plenty of rest. ' Despite the sense of purpose he experienced when the band kicked in and the music took over, he felt increasingly estranged from his fans. One night he watched after the show as the crew 'were bulldozing all the rubble left by the audience. There were mountains of empty bottles of gin and bourbon and tequila and brassieres and shoes and coats and trash. I mean, it was unbelievable. I'd go on out there, and you'd just get stoned, there was so much reefer going about. And I just thought, Do I actually have anything in common with these people? '

Four weeks in, when Harrison had reached Atlanta, attention was distracted from his failing voice by events in New York City. Lennon had promised that in the unlikely event his latest single reached No. 1, he would join Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden. His surprise appearance on 28 November 1974 comprised just three songs – two of them, it was noted, taken from the Beatles' catalogue, including 'I Saw Her Standing There', written 'by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul'. Elton John was arguably pop's hottest property, but he was happy to be upstaged by his hero. 'Even [Lennon] was overwhelmed, ' a critic reported. 'You could see it. He tried to continue chewing his gum in regular jaw patterns, and he pulled funny faces, even lounged against the piano in an attitude of mock-relaxation – but that deafening cry, a vocal anthem for old heroes, as you might say, and him the biggest hero of them all, had him swallowing hard. ' As Lennon recalled, 'They were all screaming like Beatlemania. ' Backstage, he was visited by Yoko Ono, and according to the myth they constructed in his final months, 'We got together that night. ' But in fact he went home with May Pang, with whom he was planning to buy a house in the New York suburbs.

In mid-December Lennon and Pang met Harrison and his new companion Olivia Arias at the Plaza Hotel in New York, before attending Harrison's show the following night. They agreed that when the tour reached Madison Square Garden that weekend, Lennon would make another cameo appearance alongside his former bandmate. '[George] was pretty weird, ' Lennon recalled, 'because he was in the middle of that tour, and we hadn't communicated for a while. I was a bit nervous about going on stage, but I agreed to because it would have been mean of me not to go on with George after I'd gone on with Elton. '

First they had to take care of business. After more than three years of negotiations, and cripplingly large lawyers' bills, the representatives of the four Beatles had finally concocted a separation document that would mark the formal dissolution of their legal partnership and allow the official receiver to divide up the royalties accrued since spring 1971. As Harrison, McCartney and Lennon were all in New York, it was arranged that they should sign in each other's presence on the morning of Harrison's first concert in the city. 'We had all arrived for the big dissolution meeting in the Plaza Hotel, ' McCartney recalled. 'There were green baize tables with millions of documents laid out for us to sign. . . and John wouldn't show up! He wouldn't come from across the park! George got on the phone and yelled, " Take those fucking shades off and come over here, you! " John still wouldn't come over. He had a balloon delivered with a sign saying, " Listen to this balloon. " It was all quite far out. '

'I didn't sign it because my astrologer told me it wasn't the right day, ' Lennon explained. 'The numbers weren't right, the planets weren't right, and John wasn't coming, ' Linda McCartney sneered. 'Had we known there was some guy flipping cards on his bed to help him make his decision, we would all have gone over there. George blew his top, but it didn't change anything. ' As Lennon recalled, 'Somehow or other I was informed that I needn't bother to go to George's show. I was quite relieved in the end, because there wasn't any time for rehearsal and I didn't want it to be a case of just John jumping up and playing a few chords. ' So Lennon stayed home, and his son Julian, who was visiting for the Christmas holidays, went in his place. The following day peace was restored, and Lennon met McCartney at Lee Eastman's law office. Then the McCartneys left town, and Lennon attended the final show of Harrison's tour. Backstage, he and May Pang talked amicably with Harrison, Ono and Neil Aspinall, who had flown over for the signing ritual.

A week later Lennon and Pang took his son to Disneyworld. 'I think [Julian] likes Paul better than me, ' he admitted afterwards. 'I have the funny feeling he wishes Paul was his dad. But he's got me. ' Father and son took a ride on the monorail that crosses the park. 'We went on what must have been the most crowded day of the year, ' he recalled. 'I was sitting along with everyone else, not being recognised, and I heard someone with his back to me say that George Harrison was there today. The guy was leaning on me, and he'd heard that a Beatle was there somewhere. He couldn't see the wood for the trees. ' Lennon was carrying the Beatles' legal documents with him, and May Pang took photos of the moment when he signed. It amused him to think that the saga that had begun nearly twenty years earlier, and that had carried him and his comrades around the world, should end in the cartoon splendour of a theme park. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey were no longer the Beatles: they were no longer tied together by name or by law. They were free to become whatever Beatles could become, perhaps even free from their past.

Chapter 8

I am an artist, and that's what I want to be. Let me make the music!

John Lennon, February 1975

The Beatles' thirteen-year partnership was formally dissolved in the London High Court on 9 January 1975. The lawyers could step aside, and the accountants could take their place. Four

years of earnings had to be calculated, divided and safeguarded from the greedy hands of the taxman. A dividing line was drawn: royalties from everything they had released, together or alone, before October 1974 were divided equally between them. For records issued after that date – including the latest albums by Lennon, Harrison and Starkey – each Beatle only took home the money he had earned.

The four men were still bound together as the joint owners of Apple Corps Ltd, which now entered sedate middle age, with its recording studio closing in May 1975 and all pretence abandoned that it was still an active record company. Most of its staff were given notice; only Neil Aspinall and his accountants remained. It now suited the Beatles to pretend that the idealistic Apple of 1968 had never existed. 'What people don't realise, ' Starkey said, 'is that Apple was never really much more than an extension of [EMI label] Parlophone. ' In that sentence he wrote off the legacy of the 1960s counterculture, the hope that the Beatles could overturn the commercial model of the music industry and the dream of enabling artists to reach the public without tangling with businessmen.

Not that the Beatles had ever achieved that dream. A month later Lennon said hopefully, 'After I deal with this last batch of lawsuits, I ain't gonna have any more. I don't know how they happen. One minute you're talking to someone, the next minute they're suing you. ' He discounted the instinctive greed of the business community and his own equally innate naivety. At heart Lennon still believed that if he wanted something to happen, it would happen, and there would be no consequences. After twelve years swimming in the waters of fame, he was still surprised to find himself getting wet.

His almost preternatural talent for stepping from disaster to catastrophe was demonstrated by the sorry saga of his Rock 'n' Roll album. The entire saga was pockmarked with good intentions. In 1969 Lennon had been asked to pen a campaign song for radical activist Timothy Leary. Instead, he took the idea and the title, and turned it into his last major contribution to the Beatles, 'Come Together'. Its lyrical spark was a couplet by Chuck Berry, which Lennon borrowed quite consciously, considering it an artistic homage in the tradition of Yoko Ono's Fluxus group rather than an act of theft. But music publishers find it easier to calculate money than gestures, and Lennon was sued for plagiarism. There followed the chaos of the Phil Spector project, Lennon's failure to include three Big Seven Music songs on Walls andBridges, and the hurried sessions in October 1974 with which he appeared to have fulfilled his obligations.

Despite his history of throwing himself into the arms of saviours and being disappointed when they let him slip to the floor, Lennon continued to assume that anyone whose company he enjoyed was automatically a friend. Had Allen Klein been on hand, Lennon would never have slipped into his latest quagmire; Klein knew a villain when he saw one. But when Lennon encountered Morris Levy, who now owned Big Sky Music, he was entranced. Like many Britons brought up on American thrillers, he had a soft spot for anyone who reminded him of Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. Levy fitted the bill: he was a classic music business gangster, with a history of exploiting young talent and ensuring that copyrights always ended up in his pocket. He had great stories of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, and Lennon was a sucker for anybody who could spin a tale. When Lennon and Levy met to discuss the settlement of the Big Seven case, the musician was thrilled to be in the presence of a character rather than a bureaucrat.

So it was inevitable that when Levy offered Lennon the use of his farm in upstate New York as a rehearsal studio for his Rock 'n' Roll sessions, Lennon would accept; and when Levy said that the best way of selling records in the mid-1970s was via TV advertising and mail order, Lennon agreed to give it a try. He never thought of alerting EMI or Apple; after all, he wasn't a contract lawyer. He simply handed Levy a rough cut of the Rock 'n' Roll album as proof that he had satisfied the Big Seven deal, and then waited for nothing to happen. But Levy took Lennon at his word and worried about the legalities later. As far as he was concerned, Lennon wanted him to promote his new album on TV, so he set about the task as if it was still 1955, and Lennon was simply another two-bit kid with a song who thought that royalties lived in English castles.

By late January Levy had thrown together a garish album package and booked TV time. His error was telling Allen Klein what he was doing. Klein was still suing, and being sued by, Lennon; but business and friendship were separate in his mind, and he asked Lennon if he knew about the advertising campaign that Levy was planning. Only then did Lennon tell his record company that he might possibly have handed over his forthcoming album to one of the industry's most notorious outlaws. In Britain it would have been easy to close down Levy's outlets, but in the USA it took time, and meanwhile Levy was able to begin marketing the record, which he retitled Roots. Capitol immediately sent out a cease-and-desist order, and accelerated the schedule for their official release by several weeks, with the result that Rock 'n' Roll appeared without the extensive liner notes that Lennon had written. Ironically, his text included a wry summary of the album's tortuous gestation: 'The behind the scenes story on this long unwinding will be revealed by a congressional committee to investigate psychodrama in the music business, but only after a period of grateful silence. ' And that period was what Lennon now resolved to observe. Finally realising that every time he signed a contract, he opened himself up to litigation, he resolved to free himself from his contractual ties and see what happened next.

The comparison with McCartney was revealing. In sacking the only man who understood the full financial ramifications of his career, Lennon had exposed himself to fate. McCartney, on the other hand, had married into the gods. Like Klein, his father-in-law Lee Eastman was an expert in making money out of music. As early as 1971 he encouraged McCartney to invest his income in something substantial. Already wearied by the Apple saga, McCartney was unwilling to embark on another business adventure, but Eastman suggested that he could combine his passion and his financial interests by investing in music publishing. 'Whose music do you like? ' he asked his son-in-law, and returned a few days later to tell McCartney that Buddy Holly's catalogue of songs – the inspiration for the earliest Lennon/McCartney compositions – was for sale. This was the birth of a formidable publishing empire, which would see MPL (McCartney Productions Limited) Music become a major player in one of the few sectors of the entertainment business that would never go out of fashion. The Eastmans expanded MPL's catalogue with great shrewdness, creating a reservoir of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley standards, material which had already proven its staying power and would continue to generate income long after most solo albums by ex-Beatles had been forgotten. ^*32 Best of all, MPL Music owed nothing to Apple or the other Beatles, and it was guaranteed to provide for McCartney's children and grandchildren. For a family man, nothing could be more attractive.

Yet one thing still eluded him. 'I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again, ' Linda McCartney remembered in 1984. 'The sad thing is that John and Paul both had problems, and they loved each other, and boy, could they have helped each other! If they had only communicated! It frustrates me no end, because I was just some chick from New York when I walked into all of that. God, if I'd known what I know now. . . All I could do was sit there, watching them play these games. '

In January 1975 the McCartneys and Wings, rebuilt as a quintet after the traumas of 1973, travelled to New Orleans. The city had a rich heritage of black music, which McCartney was keen to access. Once he was settled, he phoned John Lennon in New York. Lennon had already agreed to work with David Bowie in California, and for the first time he was prepared to contemplate a reunion with McCartney. Singer Art Garfunkel had recently worked with Paul Simon for the first time in six years. Lennon invited Garfunkel to dinner and told him, 'I'm getting calls from my Paul. And he wants to know if I'm available for the recording. What should I do? ' Garfunkel told him, 'John, I would do it – put all personality aside and go with the fun of the [musical] blend. Make music with somebody you have made a sound with. A great pleasure is the thing to stick with. '

Lennon asked May Pang a similar question: 'What would you think if I started writing with Paul again? ' As she recalled, 'My mouth fell open and I said, " Are you kidding? I think it would be terrific. " ' When Lennon wrote to former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, he told him in his inimitable approximation of typewritten English, 'Bowies cutting 'universe' (Let It Beatle). Am a gonna be there (by reqest of courset). Then possibley down to New Orleons to see the McCartknees. '

It was the perfect moment. Their business quarrels were settled, Lennon had shown himself a master of contemporary soul styles on Walls and Bridges, and McCartney was recording in a haven of rhythm and blues. Moreover, McCartney realised that he was not at a creative peak. 'I reckon I've made some bum records in the last couple of years, ' he had admitted a few weeks earlier. 'I like them, and they're all OK, but the things I've been through in the last few years aren't very conducive to inspiration. ' At the same time he reckoned that Lennon's Walls and Bridges had been 'great, but he can do better. . . I heard [the Beatles] " I Am the Walrus" today, for instance, and that's what I mean. ' Both men had recently proved themselves superior craftsmen, but together they might rekindle the spark that had fired the Beatles.

There was still resentment on both sides. A few months before, Lennon and Richard Starkey had taped radio commercials for each other's albums, the kind of co-operative gesture that Lennon would never have considered with McCartney or Harrison. Between takes, the two men had talked about McCartney's recent success. 'Does Paul know who you are, Ringo? ' Lennon asked sarcastically, before quipping that he would 'swap two Pauls for a George'.

Yet the affection between the two men was genuine, as long as nobody mentioned Apple or Allen Klein. So was Lennon's willingness to consider revisiting the Beatles catalogue. 'I've lost all that negativity about the past, ' he conceded. 'I'd be as happy as Larry to do " Help! ". I've just changed completely in two years. I'd do " Hey Jude" and the whole damn show. '

A key factor in the rapprochement between Lennon and McCartney was the fact that the McCartneys had no history of tension with May Pang. Johnandyoko had the power to make McCartney feel insignificant; John and May were simply an old friend and his attractive young partner. But the past was about to claim a stake in the future. Lennon and Pang had now been together for 18 months, and planned to buy a cottage in Montauk on Long Island in early February, but Ono still rang Lennon constantly. As Pang recalled, Ono phoned Lennon at the end of January and 'told him she had a method to help him stop smoking, and that he should come over to the Dakota. I told him I didn't like him going over there, and he said, " Stop it! ". He was yelling at me, " What's your problem? I'll be home by dinner; we'll go have a late dinner, and then we'll make plans to go to New Orleans and see Paul and Linda. " '

In Lennon's account, 'I was just going to visit [Yoko]. I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, I live here, this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me. ' Elsewhere he said simply, 'It fell in place again. It was like I never left. ' Ono's recollection, shortly after her husband's death, was more realistic: 'We sat trembling in each other's presence, not talking and sometimes crying the first times we were together again. ' Lennon said, 'I feel like I went to get a coffee and a newspaper somewhere, and it took a year. '

When he returned that night, Pang said, 'He was a different person about Paul. It wasn't the same. He was saying, " Oh, you know when Paul and Linda used to visit us? Well, I couldn't stand it. " Obviously something had happened on the other side of Central Park. ' Within a day or two he had moved back into the Dakota. 'I was so numb, ' Pang recalled. 'He told me Yoko would still allow me to see him. But it didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking him, " What about our love? " We were just about to buy a house together, but he just shrugged and said, " It'll be all right. " ' Johnandyoko was reborn, and there was no trip to New Orleans. Lennon, it seemed, had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he couldn't have both.

Two weeks later Lennon claimed to be ecstatic. 'This is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with, but I feel like I was running around without my head on. ' He told another reporter, 'I don't wanna put May down. She is a nice girl. But she knew what the scene was. ' He said that he had 'sort of filled in' with Pang, 'so as not to be alone at night'. Ono, by contrast, could never be dismissed as a 'nice girl'. Even Pang realised that 'Yoko dominated John just as he had been dominated by his Aunt Mimi when he grew up. ' She came to understand that 'John felt guilty because he was having so much freedom. ' He needed the boundaries that his relationship to Ono would provide. Lennon was still the boy who had lost his parents and who believed he could only function if somebody else was in control.

By 1980, when Lennon gave his final interviews, his 18-month separation from Ono was described as 'a lost weekend', a period of emotional anguish and creative bankruptcy between two great romantic eras. This revision of history discounted the artistic worth of Walls and Bridges. It asked people to believe that Lennon was more himself in the years ahead, when he produced nothing, than when he was making two coherent albums in the space of a few weeks. And it prolonged the myth that the most productive relationship of Lennon's life was not with Paul McCartney but with Yoko Ono.

What happened at the Dakota in January 1975? Various biographers have suggested that Ono might have drugged Lennon or hypnotised him, or used her esoteric knowledge of witchcraft. But these farfetched rumours underestimate the power of Lennon's psychological drives. More intriguing, in retrospect, is Ono's rationale. Did she choose this moment for a reunion because the numbers were right, or was she afraid that she might lose him forever if he reunited with McCartney? Whose dependence was greater: Lennon's on the woman he called mother, or Ono's on the man who had brought her global recognition? One thing is certain: Lennon and McCartney would have worked together in February 1975 if Lennon had not returned to the Dakota, and history – theirs and ours – might have been very different.

The reunion of Lennon and Ono could have triggered another propulsive era of artistic and political collaborations, but the times had changed and the energy had dissipated. Briefly Lennon threw himself into publicising his Rock 'n' Roll album, letting it be known that he was not blocking a collaboration with the other Beatles. But, he admitted, 'I no longer have the dream of wanting to be the record company. . . the record business is filled with lawsuits and immigration is just one lawsuit. I would like to live life without litigation. ' Morris Levy filed a $73 million lawsuit against him within weeks of his return to the Dakota, and the case would linger for another year before Lennon finally emerged victorious.

'I meself have decided to be or not to be for a coupla years, ' Lennon wrote to Derek Taylor that spring. 'Boredom set in. . . how many back beats are there? I ask meself. ' In March Ono discovered that she was pregnant. 'I was with them when Yoko had her pregnancy confirmed, ' said EMI executive Bob Mercer. 'They were absolutely ecstatic about it and John turned to me and said, 'Well, that shelves the work for some time now. ' He just said that his own feelings were that he didn't want to have his signature on any pieces of paper. He'd had enough of contracts. ' In April Lennon ended a four-year legal battle with Sir Lew Grade and ATV by appearing on a TV tribute to the entrepreneur, accompanied by a band wearing two-faced masks to reflect his genuine feelings. The following month he made a fleeting appearance at a charity radiothon in Philadelphia. Informed that 98 per cent of the American public wanted the Beatles to re-form, he quipped, 'I'd like to meet the 2 per cent. ' As the summer passed, and Ono's pregnancy continued without serious incident, he told a friend, 'I am currently going through one of my 18-month or so retreats – à la Primal Therapy. ' He said that Yoko's condition 'happens to coincide with my natural and instinctive hibernations. At the ripe old age of 34 I find myself going back to the age-old question, What the hell is going on? Why are we here? Followed closely by, Am I doing what I really want to do. . . or simply doing what I'm supposed to do?!?! '

During his process of self-discovery he made strenuous efforts to connect with his family in Britain – cousins, half-sisters, his son. But with the birth of his child imminent he chose to shut the door again. 'As time went by and John's calls ceased, ' recalled his sister Julia Baird, 'we found it impossible to reach him. Every time I tried, I got Yoko. . . She seemed to me to be monitoring his life and equally he seemed to be allowing it. " John is asleep. You don't understand his life. No, I can't wake him up. " . . . Whether or not John ever knew that I was still trying to make contact, I will never know. ' That summer Lennon channelled his creativity into writing a book, telling Derek Taylor, '[I] don't feel like dealing with assholes. ' He added that Linda McCartney was constantly suggesting that he and Paul should work together, but 'I can't really see it myself. '

In October 1975 several events conspired to shape the years ahead. Lennon issued a compilation of his solo singles to complete his recording contract with EMI/Capitol. 'Make me an offer, ' Lennon told Derek Taylor when he was asked about the prospect of signing with Warners, but when Taylor did, Lennon didn't reply. He was equally curt with EMI, when executive Len Wood tried to persuade him to renew his contract: 'Yes, it was a high old time we all had in the 60s. . . but not judging by your " offer" (I could think of a better word for it). Corporate vision, even after all these years, never ceases to amaze me! I am enjoying my family, and uncommitted freedom. ' The US Court of Appeals overturned the government's order for his deportation, stating that his 'four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream'. Two days later, and seven years after the couple's first miscarriage, the Lennons' son Sean was born. 'We might get over there early next year, ' Lennon told his sister in England, but he would never return to his homeland again. Aside from a brief recording session with Richard Starkey the following year, Lennon abandoned music, art and any connection with the Beatles.