Sticky Fingers

Sticky Fingers, by Joe Hagan

No month stated, 2017  Knopf

I remember when this book came out a few years ago; the most notable thing about it was that writer Joe Hagan, who had personally been asked by Rolling Stone honcho Jann Wenner to write the definitive history of the magazine, had turned in a book so displeasing to Wenner that Wenner cut off all ties with Hagan, disavowing the book (and going on to write his own autobiography). Reading the 547-page doorstop that is Sticky Fingers, one can understand Wenner’s displeasure. While the book starts off on relatively sound footing, it soon becomes apparent that Joe Hagan’s goal is to write a modern-day The Lives Of John Lennon (a book that he even references in the text): a malicious attempt at cutting down his subject. But, as with Albert Goldman’s much-detested biography of John Lennon, the subject of Sticky Fingers ultimately comes off as okay – it’s the biographer who comes off like the bad guy. 

Sticky Fingers is at least shorter than Goldman’s epic of a character assassination, but it’s no less vindictive. What’s interesting is that the first half of the book seems relatively even-toned, until the knives come out in the second half. But, at least for this reader, the cumulative effect was that I became sympathetic to Jann Wenner. For, like Goldman in his Lennon bio, it soon becomes clear that, while Joe Hagan has interviewed many people for his book, he has only used their negative comments about Wenner. Just as The Lives Of John Lennon gave the impression that John Lennon was a marginally-talented narcissist who only stumbled into success through luck, so too does Sticky Fingers convey that Jann Wenner is a “star-fucker” and “groupie” who managed to run the definining magazine of his generation only by luck. 

The frustrating thing is that I was looking forward to the book. I’ve long been interested in the very early Rolling Stone, and over the years have picked up several original issues, the majority of the mass market paperback anthologies, and also in 2007 I got the Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover CD-Rom, which features every page of every issue from the first one up through 2007. I also picked up two earlier “unauthorized histories” of Rolling Stone: Robert Sam Anson’s 1981 book Gone Crazy And Back Again, and Robert Draper’s 1990 book Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, neither of which I’ve read. I’ve also picked up – and reviewed here – a few roman a clef novels about Rolling Stone: Rising Higher and Angel Dust. 

All of which is to say I’m very interested in Rolling Stone, at least the first several years of it, though I admit I lose interest once the ‘70s become the ‘80s and beyond. Reading Sticky Fingers, though, never once did I get the impression that Joe Hagan has ever liked Rolling Stone, and nowhere in the book does he capture the magic of flipping through those early issues of the magazine, the newspaper so brittle from the years as to split in half as you turn the page, to find nigh-endless interviews with rock personalities of the day, epic album reviews, psychedelic art, various feature stories, “dope world” communiques, and occasionally even poetry. There is a definite magic to the first ten or so years of Rolling Stone, and it’s clear why readers of the day “grokked” it, but Hagan can’t be bothered to tell us that. Indeed, when he does comment on the magazine, it’s in a derogatory or mocking tone. 

However, it’s to Hagan’s credit that about 85% of the book focuses on the ‘60s and ‘70s. Indeed, the ‘90s and ‘00s only take up a few pages at the very end of the book. This is because the ‘60s and ‘70s were the prime years of the magazine, something everyone acknowledges. And too, Hagan does provide the occasional interesting backstory about some of the more famous stories from the magazine’s golden years, some of which had me accessing my CD-Rom to check them out. But one wonders if this same behind-the-scenes info is also in Anson’s and Draper’s books. 

For the most part, though, Sticky Fingers is a biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner…but, just as Albert Goldman’s Lennon bio was also about Yoko Ono, so too is Sticky Fingers also about co-founder Jane Wenner, aka Jann’s wife. (And a quite attractive wife at that, if you don’t mind a little toxic masculinity with your review.) As I say, it’s pretty incredible how similar Sticky Fingers and The Lives Of John Lennon are. We even start at Wenner’s childhood, with the same focus on Wenner’s mother as there was on Lennon’s mother in that other book – with the caveat that Hagan is much more enamored with Wenner’s mom than I was, as she comes off as the epitome of the self-involved “upper crust” narcissist. I did appreciate Hagan’s subtext (possibly unintentional, though) that Wenner’s mother decided late in life that she was a lesbian, just as Jann Wenner himself came out as gay later in his own life. 

While I have not read those earlier Rolling Stone exposes, one thing I know they both agree on is that Jann Wenner was not the best of bosses, sort of enjoying the high life with rock royalty and leaving his employees to do the brunt of the work. To which I say, “Who gives a shit?” Honestly, this sort of ignorace about the working world baffles me…it’s like these biographers have never had a real job outside of the journalism industry and don’t understand that this is essentially how it works in the corporate world. So yes, there’s a fair bit of bitching from Rolling Stone employees new and old, but again the humorous thing is, no one would know who any of these people are if they hadn’t worked for Rolling Stone in the first place. But then the same sentiment can be extended to Joe Hagan himself – I’d never heard of the guy previous to this book. 

Writing-wise, Hagan does for the most part keep his narrative moving, but the passive-aggressive tone soon becomes wearying. He also writes in that pretentious style favored by modern journalists; back in the ‘90s I remember getting a subscription to Esquire due to a bunch of frequent flyer miles, and I was immediately turned off by the highfalutin, desperately-trying-to-sound important writing style throughout. Unsurprisingly, Joe Hagan writes in that exact style, doling out sentences like, “When Simon and Garfunkel came to San Francisco to play the Community Theater in Berkeley in May 1966, they made a special trip to Berkeley to meet Ralph Gleason, whose collection of Lenny Bruce recordings, bequeathed to him by Bruce himself, was highly prized samizdat.” To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: If you use words like “samizdat,” you might be a pretentious twat. Especially if it’s in a sentence that also has “Simon and Garfunkel” in it! 

As in Goldman’s Lennon-bashery, from the beginning of this epic tale we are to understand that Jann Wenner had no real part in anything that made Rolling Stone great, and any success he enjoyed was either due to someone else’s idea or due to a fluke. So then the origin of Rolling Stone itself is framed as Wenner perhaps ripping off some other underground magazines of the day, then straight-up using the printing plates designed for a defunct paper. Only occasionally will Hagan admit that Wenner might have come up with a good idea on his own, but just as soon as we’re told something positive, Hagan will undercut it with a biting comment – he does this throughout the book, increasingly so as we get a few hundred pages in. Again and again, any time we are told of a good deed Wenner has done, or any time someone else makes a positive comment about him, there will be a single-line sentence that undercuts Wenner. For example: 

Travolta was pleased [with Wenner’s screen test for a featured part in Travolta’s 1985 movie Perfect]. He characterized Wenner’s second screen test “one of the best I’ve ever seen…I’ve never seen a beast like this one on celluloid before.” 

At least that’s what he said in his “actor’s notebook” that Wenner published in Rolling Stone. 

Just like that, throughout the damn book. Speaking of Lennon, Sticky Fingers is even framed around him, opening in 1970 – well after Rolling Stone had become a success – with Jann and Jane Wenner enjoying a brief friendship with John and Yoko. We get the insider scoop that Wenner, despite Lennon’s specific demand, published Lennon’s long interview with the magazine as a book, Lennon Remembers, and Lennon never forgave him for it. Obviously a jerky move, but then again one could see Wenner’s point – the interview would have been the property of the magazine, for Wenner to do with as he pleased. Speaking of which, we get a lot of legal wrangling between Wenner and Mick Jagger over the use of “Rolling Stone,” with Jagger incensed in the early days that it infringed on his band’s name; wranglings which humorously took decades to be worked out between the two men. One wonders how Jagger feels now that this book, too, “rips of” the Stones for its title – but even then, “Sticky Fingers” is a lame title, as it has no real bearing on anything…other than being yet another dig at Jann Wenner, implying that his career has been the result of “sticky finger” thievery and backstabbing. 

Despite being 500+ pages, Sticky Fingers is very shallow in the research department. Again, it’s all written about on the surface level of an Esquire article. We’ll get cursory overviews of some of the more famous pieces that ran in Rolling Stone, maybe a little behind the scenes stuff…but that’s it. There’s no mention whatsoever of more minor figures from the magazine’s early days: no J.R. Young, no Smokestack El Ropo. Not a single mention of either of them – nor any confirmation of my pet theory that early contributor “Elmo Rooney” might have been Steve Martin, who literally portrayed Elmo Rooney in the ultra-weird Rolling Stone 10th Anniversary TV Special. (“Elmo Rooney” was probably really Charles Perry, who was also “Smokestack El Ropo,” but still – it’s a fun idea.) 

One of the things that drew Wenner’s ire upon the publication of this book is Hagan’s strange obsession with Wenner’s sexuality. In a way I can appreciate it, though…I mean Hagan has at least tried to cater to a “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” ethic. But the obsession with Wenner’s latent homosexuality and how it shaped Rolling Stone in its early days – even subconsciously! – gets to be as wearying as the constant single-sentence barbs. Indeed, coupled with Hagan’s other obsession (namely, the insinuation in Keith Richard’s autobiography that Mick Jagger has a small penis – something Hagan refers to several times in this book!), the reader begins to wonder if there’s a little “latency” in Hagan himself. Actually this might explain the increasingly vicious tone the book appropriates toward Wenner. 

On that same note, Hagan is really, really bothered that Rolling Stone was essentially “by white men for white men.” Of course, the white population of the United States was around 90% in 1970, but who cares about such trivialities – I mean Jann Wenner should’ve catered at least a little to the nascent albino trans population, for crying out loud! How dare he go for the majority of the population? I mean what was he, a businessman or something?? But boy, we do get a lot of today’s mandatory white male-bashing; Hagan most seems to be bothered by Joe Eszterhas, who wrote for Rolling Stone in the early ‘70s before heading to Hollywood. Hagan has it that Eszterhas was not only a chauvinist but that he also plain made up most of his stories. To which I say big woop; this is no different than what writers were doing over at the Men’s Adventure Magazines of the day. Kudos to Eszterhas for pulling it off in a more “respectable” periodical. Hagan also mentions that Eszterhas liked to carry around a buck knife, which he’d lay down on the table when in heated discussions in the editorial room – a WTF? note that made me laugh out loud. I think I’m gonna start doing that at the office. 

Hagan is so focused on his white male-bashing that he misses the forest for the trees. For, despite being “by white men for white men,” there were indeed women and “people of color” (in the modern parlance) at Rolling Stone, even in the earliest days. Chief among them would be Robin Green, the first female reporter, and Ben Fong-Torres, a Chinese journalist who was one of the main contributors for years and years. So hey, right there – opportunities for Hagan to expound upon “muh diversity.” 

But in another laugh-out-loud miss on Hagan’s part, we’re told that Robin Green was Jann Wenner’s “resident assassin,” the reporter Wenner would send when he wanted a hit piece on someone, and not really good for much else. And Fong-Torres was even worse, notorious for snooping through the personal belongings of his subjects and also publishing personal material in his stories – like stuff taken directly from a private notebook he spied in someone’s house. And it’s humorous – no doubt unintentionally so – that Hagan does essentially the very same thing in this book! According to Rolling Stone veteran Greil Marcus, Hagan took a particular story Marcus had given him about Jann Wenner and distorted it to make Wenner look bad; Marcus further declared Sticky Fingers to be a “vile” book. 

Anyway, while there was some precious “muh diversity” at Rolling Stone, even in the beginning, apparently Green and Fong-Torres weren’t the best representatives…or something. It just made me laugh, particularly given how incensed Hagan was at Jann Wenner’s race-and-gender faux pas in 2023, more on which anon. 

Despite all attempts to make him appear spineless and craven, Wenner still comes off in a positive light…in particular in a flap in the Rolling Stone offices after the publication of the Altamont special, in 1970. This was, in Hagan’s dramatic telling, a watershed moment in the paper’s origin, as the radical leftists in Wenner’s employ demanded that their boss trounce Mick Jagger for his part in the debacle and death at that festival…pushing Wenner to defy his “groupie” image and go after Mick Jagger himself. Wenner did so…after which, in typical fashion, the radical leftists wanted more: they wanted Rolling Stone to become overtly political, and essentially staged a coup. In a move modern-day executives at Disney and Boeing and etc should learn from, Wenner stood his ground and kicked the radical fuckers out. And Rolling Stone went on to its greatest success in the ‘70s, while those fired radicals faded into the woodwork. Certainly there is a lesson there, but Joe Hagan misses it…perhaps intentionally so. 

Otherwise the mistakes are for the most part minor, like when Hagan tells us that “the first Steve Miller Band album” was Sailor, when in reality it was Children Of The Future. Since stuff like this is admitedly outside the scope of the book, it’s forgiveable. But the goofs about Rolling Stone are a bit harder to swallow, given that this is supposed to be the “definitive story” – I mean, like on page 414 we get a scant few paragraphs on Tom Wolfe’s serialized Bonfire Of The Vanities, which ran for 27 installments in the mid-1980s in Rolling Stone. Not even broaching the plot or telling us much at all about the story or its reception, Hagan informs us that the protagonist is “a Wall Street trader,” Hagan unsurprisingly using the character as an opportunity to take yet another swipe at Wenner, lending the impression that Wolfe was serving up a veiled parody of his editor. There’s only one problem. In the original Rolling Stone serialization, protagonist Sherman McCoy was a writer. It was in the heavily-revised hardcover edition of the novel, published in 1987, that Tom Wolfe changed the protagonist to a Wall Street trader. Hagan has gotten this detail wrong. Which makes one wonder how much else in Sticky Fingers he’s gotten wrong. 

The appearance of Hunter Thompson at Rolling Stone after the Altamont issue was another factor that took the paper to its success, and Hagan writes of the increasingly fractious relationship between Thompson and Wenner. But otherwise there isn’t much here about Hunter Thompson that’s revelatory; I mean he comes on strong, burns out quick, and is soon a shell of his former self. At least this is how he’s presented here; Hagan has it that none of Thompson’s work after the mid-‘70s is worth the paper it was printed on. We do at least get another dig at Joe Eszterhas here, this time from Eszterhas himself (who likely regretted talking to Hagan, given how Hagan made Eszterhas come off in the book), who claims he tried to emulate Hunter Thompson. This is clear just from reading Eszterhas’s pieces, in particular one of his last stories, the infamous “King Of The Goons” hit-piece on Evel Kneivel. 

There’s no denying Rolling Stone lost much of what made it special as the ‘70s wore on, and by the point in Haggan’s narrative where the magazine becane a slick and moved to New York my interest had waned – as had Joe Hagan’s. The ‘80s-‘00s are for the most part rushed through in a few hundred pages, or should I say I skimmed through a lot of it. I’ve never had time for Bruce Springsteen or Bono, and Jann Wenner was a big fan of both, hence there’s a lot of stuff about the two of them which I skipped. That said, the cover of “Blinded By The Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band is one of my favorite songs ever. I couldn’t care less what the Springsteen original sounds like.  Otherwise we just get a litany against Wenner for all the things Hagan accuses him of missing as the century neared its end...like his reluctance to feature rap in the magazine, or how he missed out on the importance of MTV.  Yawn. 

As mentioned as the book goes on the knives increasingly come out, and we get a lot of stuff about Jann Wenner lying to people, or enjoying the high life while his poor employees must scrimp and save, or how he’d take credit for articles others worked on. Again, yawn. (Which rhymes with “Jann!”) We also get too much on Wenner’s sex life, with the curious tidbit that it’s his affairs with men that Joe Hagan most focuses on. (Hmmmm….) On the female front it sounds like the guy did pretty good for himself – I was especially impressed by his involvement with none other than Mary Microgram of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, a book I read 30 years ago and keep meaning to read again. Aka Denise Kaufman, she was also in the all-female group Ace Of Cups, which was a favorite of Jimi Hendrix. 

But the absolute nadir of Sticky Fingers is the Afterword, in which Joe Hagan essentially pats himself on the back for not turning in the hagiography Jann Wenner apparently expected. And how does Hagan know Wenner expected such a thing? Why – because Wenner would take Hagan to concerts! And Wenner gave him Rolling Stone merchandise…a-and he even gave him the complete mono vinyl set of the Beatles discography as gifts! And Wenner showed Hagan photos of rockstars from Wenner’s personal collection! I mean, the craven bastard!! No wonder Joe Hagan felt justified in sharpening his knives and cutting that fucker up good! Seriously though, this last part is just unbelievable in its lack of self-perception; totally unaware of the ill-will he is engendering in his reader, Hagan basically congratulates himself on the great job he’s done with this book – and he’s also eager to tell us how Jann Wenner stopped talking to him after Wenner read the manuscript, shortly before it went to press. For Hagan stipulated that Wenner would not be able to make any edits to the book – cue another round of self-congratulations for this incredibly wise decision. 

Ah, but if you thought the knives were out in Sticky Fingers, just check out this hit piece from the September 2023 Vanity Fair. So in September of 2023 Jann Wenner published a new book titled The Masters, focused on seven rockers who in Wenner’s estimation were “masters” of the art – and Wenner had the absolute fucking gall to only write about white men. The horror!! In an interview with the pathetic New York Times Wenner further stated that “performers of color” were outside his area of focus, and further – gasp! – he said that female performers weren’t articulte enough in the rock field, or somesuch. 

There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the virtue-signalling world of modern journalism. Joe Hagan’s glee at finally getting to really dig into Jann Wenner is almost palpable in this Vanity Fair piece. 

The thing is…well, first of all, Jann Wenner has every right to say what he wants, and if I wore a hat I’d take it off for him, just for how he demonstrated the courage of his convictions. A rare sight indeed in today’s emasculated era. But Jann Wenner has the right to say what he wants because of the little fact that we live in the United States, and we have freedom of speech here. The PC Thugs of Hagan’s industry think they are arbiters of what is “permissible” speech. FUCK THEM. Jann Wenner is free to say whatever he wants, even if it ruffles feathers. If he is guilty of anything it is apologizing for his comments. Curiously, for a bunch of so-called “liberal” types who “just want to breathe,” these modern-day progressives are like sharks with blood in the water when they detect any weakness in their enemies. The woke battlefield is littered with the corpses of famous personalities who have said something “wrong,” apologized for it – and then been cancelled. Jann Wenner is just the latest example. If there is one lesson from any of this, it is never to apologize to the foaming-mouth radicals, and only to fight back. Sadly, only a very few understand this. Jann Wenner himself once understood this…like when he fired those in-house radicals in 1970. 

But the other thing is, Wenner really isn’t in bad company. I’m not sure if he’s been cancelled yet (which could be easy because he’s dead and not around to defend himself), but in 1948 the poet Robert Graves in his book The White Goddess put forward the notion that women could not be poets, that only men could truly write poetry; women, in Graves’s philosopy, were instead the muses who inspired poets. Thus in Graves’s estimation the only poets with a “voice” were men. This, essentially, is the same proposition Jann Wenner has put forward about rock music. And I can’t say I disagree with him. Obviously there are exceptions – glaring exceptions at that – but for the most part rock music is the product of white males. Sure, rock originated from rhythm and blues played by black musicians in the early 20th Century…just as much as it originated from the country music played by white musicians in that same era. But what it came to be – what most people think of when they think of “rock” – was mainly the work of white males in the 1960s and 1970s. Sort of like how Buddhism began in India…I mean, do you think of a person from India when you think of a Buddhist? 

And besides, all this race and gender identity politics bullshit is a modern obsession. Back in the glory days of rock, the musicians didn’t make a big deal out of being white, or being male, and nor did the listeners. Hell, if you listen to the Freeform Progressive Rock Radio of the era, you’ll notice that there was just as much soul and blues played as there was rock. But we live in an era of race obsession, no matter how absurd, thus Jann Wenner’s comments struck such a nerve. 

But then I could have just linked to Greil Marcus’s superbly-argued defense of Wenner.

Personally I think Wenner shouldn’t have backed down…and in fact his “faux pas” was another indication of how he has an innate sense of knowing the direction things are going. Fortunately, we are currently seeing pushback against race and identity-focused ideologies, particularly against companies that espouse these ideologies. As it turns out, most Americans don’t like being told how to think; Hagan’s industry is crumbling as a result of people cancelling their subscriptions to these woke propaganda outlets. In my mind, Jann Wenner’s only mistake was that he didn’t retain control of Rolling Stone and take the tone of the magazine into more of a populist direction. After all, the underground of today is the right. The left has become the establishment. In the ‘60s the FBI targeted hippies; today the FBI targets grandmothers who took selfies at the Capitol. And curiously a lot of those former hippies are now Trump supporters. Even I know a few people my age whose parents were hippies back in the ‘60s but who are now MAGA Republicans…and I hardly know anyone, so you have to wonder how many of them there really are out there. Rolling Stone, just as it had once before, could have become the voice of this new underground. 

If you think that sounds crazy, just remember that Donald Trump was himself once a Democrat. 

I bring up the dreaded topic of Trump because Joe Hagan himself does, in the closing pages of Sticky Fingers. We are told that Wenner was “interested” in Trump’s 2016 candidacy – cue more hue and cry from Hagan, who again displays his coastal ignorance by telling us that those dim-witted Trump supporters only vote for Trump because he’s famous. (FYI, they aren’t voting for him because he’s “famous.”) In Hagan’s mind, Donald Trump is the epitome of the fame-obsessed narcissism Jann Wenner has long been enamored with; there follows the most superficial appraisement of Trump that…well, it gives one an indication of why most Americans are so ill-informed, if they’re getting their “news” from people like this writer. 

This book upset me so much that I actually looked online for a way to contact Jann Wenner somehow, to let him know Sticky Fingers was just a stupid hatchet job and “nothing to get hung up about.” It’s just a vicious screed that ultimately makes the writer look like the bad guy, without showing any true understanding of its subject – again, the similarities to Goldman’s Lennon bio are many and profound. And no doubt the fates of both books will be similar. Hagan seems to have a premonition of how his own book will be treated by history: toward the end of Sticky Fingers he mentions how upset Jann Wenner was with Goldman’s The Lives Of John Lennon when it was published in 1988, commissioning a rebuttal in the pages of Rolling Stone…yet Hagan notes it was all for naught, as Goldman’s book was “destined to be forgotten.”  Surely the same fate has already befallen Sticky Fingers. 

My only regret in reviewing Sticky Fingers is that I’m giving the book any visibility. So I guess I read it so you don’t have to. But if you do get the urge to read it, try getting it from your library – or maybe order a cheap remaindered copy on abebooks.com. Checking there now, it seems there are a ton of such copies available for a pittance. Which is about all this “vile” book is worth.

Angel Dust

Angel Dust, by Lindsay Maracotta

January, 1979  Jove Books

Well friends, somehow I’ve managed to discover yet another obscure paperback original rock novel from the ‘70s. This one promised much, too, following the trash template of the era: a roman a clef about the famous personages of the era, opening in 1974 and then flashing back to 1964, detailing the torid year-by-year events of the age of rock. I mean I was in trash heaven when I saw that the back cover was like so many of the trashy bestseller paperbacks of the era, listing off the characters and noting their kinky proclivities.

But man, first of all, let’s take a look at this uncredited photo cover…and try to figure out what the hell is going on. So I get the guy with the guitar and microphone is supposed to be a rock star up on the stage, but what are the women doing below him? Are they in rock rapture, or are they bending their heads back in cultlike supplication? I guess both things are the same, but still. Then if you look at the back cover, you’ll note the cover is a wraparound, with more “bent back in supplication” heads below the rocker – but the perspective just seems off. Are these “bent heads” people standing or lying on the ground? 

This however isn’t even the big question. TAKE A LOOK AT THE ROCK STAR’S FACE. Here’s a closeup – don’t look if you don’t want nightmares! 

I think I speak for us all when I ask, “What the fuck??” I’ve spent altogether too much time trying to puzzle out what exactly this guy’s expression represents…this insane leering sneer. What is this, “Tim Curry as Mick Jagger?” I mean has the cover photographer ever seen a rock star? Or perhaps the goal here was to mimic (or mock) a shock rocker of the day, like Alice Cooper or something. The only problem is, there’s no shock rocker in Angel Dust, so perhaps this bizarre and lame (but for those very same reasons, friggin’ great) cover is why the book is so obscure. 

And speaking of which, the title of the book, “Angel Dust,” has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the novel. Perhaps it is a play on the underworld name for PCP, but if so that is not made clear in the narrative itself. While several characters do get hooked on drugs, it’s the same heroin and speed that is common in rock novels. Also, there’s a bit of a morality tale at play, as the drugs are part and parcel of the various downward spirals the large cast of characters go through as the sixties become the seventies. But then, another theme here is that essentially everyone involved in the rock biz is a self-involved narcissist hell-bent on destroying themselves. Well…so what if they are? I mean the last thing I want is a self-respecting and well-behaved rock star… 

No, the main issue with Angel Dust is that Lindsay Maracotta, to borrow a phrase Kirkus used in their review of contemporary rock novel Rising Higher, “hasn’t even bothered to be inventive” with her story. Basically Angel Dust takes all the topical points of ‘60s rock and filters them through a bland prism of characters who are analogs of real rockers. Bob Dylan going electric, Altamont, the Rolling Stones becoming increasingly “evil” and decadent, Yoko Ono and John Lennon breaking up The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix dying young…hell, even the Redlands bust: all of these and more are here in Angel Dust, only the, uh, names have been changed to protect the (not so) innocent. 

Not only that, but like so many of these contemporary rock novels – ie Triple Platinum, Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, or the aforementioned Rising Higher – actual rock stuff is scant at best. Indeed, the entire “rock” theme could be replaced by any other theme, and the essence of the novel would be the same. By which I mean, this could just as easily have been a novel about movie stars, or hell even opera singers or something. Angel Dust is more of a tepid soap opera than a “rock novel,” having even less to do with the business than those previously-mentioned books. Maracotta spends hardly any time at all on the creative process of the music, or the recording of the albums; other than a handful of too-brief scenes, we rarely see these famous rockers creating or performing. Rather, the focus is on their mundane soap operatic lives, with the caveat that the novel rarely attains the trashy level one might hope for. 

Not surprisingly, given that the author is a woman, the main characters are women, all of them analogs of real women in the rock scene. The male characters – ie the famous rock stars – mostly exist on the periphery, and come off as callous pricks. There’s even a Paul McCartney analog who is a self-involved cad who demands his women to be subservient. The Hendrix analog is a heroin junkie who constantly needs to be told how great he is and walks over women with scorn; a far cry from what the real Jimi Hendrix appeared to be like. To make things easier, I’ll just follow that back cover format and tell you who the characters of Angel Dust are clearly intended to be: 

Jim Destry: The “smouldering eyes” line on the back cover had me hoping Destry was going to be a Jim Morrison analog, as in the 1970 rock novel Cold Iron. But unfortunately, Destry is in fact…Bob Dylan. (Dylan, by the way, was the inspiration for a surprisingly sleazy paperback original in 1970, The Golden Groove.) 

Meredith Fairchild: This is the closest we get to a main character in Angel Dust. A beautiful American gal from a wealthy family who becomes a rock photographer and ultimately marries a member of the most famous rock group of the day, The Shades. Meredith Fairchild is, of course, Linda Eastman. 

Bryan Revere: The guy Meredith marries, the best-looking member of The Shades who all the girls go crazy for – Paul McCartney. 

Morgan Meeker: Lead singer of “the second best band in England,” the Marked Cards, Morgan is the stand-in for Mick Jagger. 

Christina de la Inglesia: This is the Bianca Perez-Mora Macias to Morgan Meeker’s Mick Jagger. 

Averill Sloane: This is the only original character in the novel, a manipulative mastermind in the mold of Jango Beck, from the contemporary rock novel Passing Through The Flame. 

Humorously, the back cover doesn’t even mention some of the more important characters in the novel. Here they are, as well as less-important characters who are based on famous rockers: 

Tom Sampling: This is the John Lennon analog, the lead singer of The Shades, who becomes increasingly gaunt and politically aware as the sixties progress. 

Monica Choy: The Yoko Ono to Tom Sampling’s John Lennon…only she’s Chinese! Otherwise this is Yoko in all but name, or at least the Yoko of the tabloids of the day – a self-involved social-climber with delusions of her own importance, who latches onto famous men. 

Lazarus “Laz” Allen: The Hendrix analog, but a far cry from the real thing; he barely appears in the novel. 

Bill McHale: Aka Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone; upstart publisher of rock magazine Tumbling Dice, though accused by his subordinates of being domineering and not possessing any writing talent of his own; he started the mag to be around rock royalty. 

Sabina: Foul-mouthed and fat-bottomed lead singer of The Psychedelic Invention, “the high priests of acid rock.” Aka Janis Joplin, who was the basis for a much superior rock novel also published in 1979, The Rose. 

Josie James: One of the more curious misses on the back cover, as Josie is a fairly important character, a Joni Mitchell-style folk singer who must sell her soul to become famous – and, this being a trash novel, can only find true happiness in the sack with other women. Her parts reminded me very much of another contemporary rock novel, The Scene. 

Sonny Lanahan: A hot-tempered businessman who fights Averill Sloane for control of various groups – no doubt supposed to be Allan Klein. 

So there are a lot of characters afoot, but Maracotta does a fairly good job juggling them. The only problem is Angel Dust is constructed a little strangely. It runs to 395 pages of small print, but Tom Sampling and Bryan Revere – ie the John and Paul analogs – aren’t introduced until page 295…and practically the rest of the novel revolves around them! What makes it worse is that the majority of this is just John-Paul rivalry stuff (the two aren’t introduced until 1969, long after their group, The Shades, has been a tight unit), with slightly more soapy recreations of the real-life fights between the two. Also, Angel Dust opens in 1974, giving the impression that all the “rock world” stuff was long in the past…but as the novel progresses, Maracotta takes us from 1964 to 1970, before finally returning to that opening 1974 sequence…meaning that the opening is really just four years later! 

The “1974” opening has Jim Destry about to make his long-awaited return concert in Madison Square Garden, and Meredith Fairchild has come here to relive “the old times” or whatever. We learn here she’s married to a “Bryan,” a guy who has a rivalry with a “Tom,” but it won’t be for like 290 pages until we even find out who these guys are. Meredith also runs into old friend Josie James, there to open for Destry and now an angry, hard-edged bitchy type, a far cry from the willowy and idealistic girl Meredith once knew… 

From there we flash back to 1964, and Maracotta actually spends most of the narrative here in the early days of the age of rock. But despite her Cliff’s Notes take on rock, Maracotta still pulls some anachronistic blunders…most particularly with Tumbling Dice magazine. A newspaper-style underground rag devoted to rock and the youth movement and what not, running out of San Francisco…four years before Rolling Stone. And hell, eight years before the Rolling Stones would even release the song “Tumbling Dice!” I mean this Bill McHale guy might’ve been a hack, but he sure did have a knack for seeing the future. 

One unique thing Maracotta brings to the tale is that this group of characters is essentially the main movers of rock; hardly any other musicians are mentioned, though in true roman a clef style we will have super-brief references to real groups, like the Beatles or the Stones or Dylan…or at one point even Rolling Stone is mentioned as a competitor magazine. But clearly this is an alternate reality where those groups are not nearly as famous as The Shades, Jim Destry, or the Marked Cards. Otherwise what Maracotta adds is they all have shared history, beginning in 1964: Jim Destry is in love with Josie James, two folkies in New York, and Chinese-American artist Monica Choy makes her way through basically all of the guys here, until finally scoring her biggest coup in Tom Sampling. But man, if you’ve ever wanted to read some Yoko Ono-Bob Dylan slash fiction, you’ll find it here in Angel Dust. 

Well, sort of. It’s my sad duty to report that the novel is incredibly timid in the sleaze and trash fronts. Most all of the sex occurs off-page and what we do get is tepid stuff along the lines of, “His strokes were quick and hard.” I mean, is this dude screwing or swimming? Also, what with Lindsay Maracotta being a woman and all, there’s zero in the way of the customary female exploitation one might demand from their trashy paperback cash-in fiction. But that’s another curious thing. A not-so-subtle theme at play here is that none of these studly rock gods can satisfy their women in bed! Not only that, but they’re all closet homosexuals; multiple times Bryan is accused of being in love with Tom, and vice versa. On the female front, all the women are latent lesbians; Meredith’s first time is with Morgan Meeker, the Jagger analog, and she finds herself unsatisfied afterward. Despite which, we get the unforgettable line, “Meredith felt a sharp pain as [Morgan] thrust deeper in her body, which increased as the full length of his cock penetrated her.” The Marked Cards, baby! Meredith with also be unsatisfied with Bryan Revere…her only true orgasm in the novel occurs in a lesbian fling in 1969 with Josie James. Hell, even Laz Allen can’t keep her happy – though as mentioned the Laz here is a cad. Jimi clearly made his way through a ton of women, but per the bios of him I’ve read he didn’t go out of his way to brag and boast about it, or flaunt it in the faces of other women. 

The unwieldy construction runs through the book; Meredith is mostly the main character, using her father’s connections to get a gig as a photographer for Tumbling Dice. She’s there for when Jim Destry is still unknown, getting some of his first pictures, and also some of the Marked Cards’s first show in the US. From there we hopscotch through the sixties, with Morgan and the Marked Cards becoming increasingly brutish and decadent, the drugs becoming increasingly commonplace, and an eventual spreading of malaise and boredom through the rock elite. Curiously, Woodstock is the one real-life incident Maracotta doesn’t rip off, though we do have a pseudo-Altamont in 1969…complete with Jim Destry appearing on stage with the Marked Cards. This, confusingly, will be the first of Destry’s two “return concerts,” this one being after a motorcycle crash he got into a few years before (humorously, right after being heckled onstage for coming out with an electric guitar, Maracotta getting double-bang for her real-life-ripoff buck); Destry’s second “return concert” is the opening one in 1974. 

I’m also sad to report that Lindsay Maracotta is another of those rock novelists who makes the curious decision to hardly ever describe the music. This is such a recurring failing of these novels that it almost makes me wonder if there was an unspoken agreement among all rock novelists in the ‘70s. Indeed, the characters here are rarely if ever shown on stage or in the studio; if they are, Maracotta will hurry through the proceedings and then get back to lots of soap opera-esque dialog. One gets the impression from Angel Dust that being “a famous rock star” entails nothing more than looking the part and doing the right drug; there’s no feeling that any of these characters are musicians capable of selling albums – other, that is, than the occasional bit of expositional dialog where characters will tell Meredith about recording or performing. 

Also, like Passing Through The Flame, midway through the novel becomes focused on the mercenary practices of the businessmen who plundered the rock world, “soiling” the art and whatnot…but again, none of these characters seem very artistic, not even Monica Choy, who is an artist. Otherwise the focus is on the increasing torpor and decadence of the rock world, with Morgan Meeker treating Meredith like shit and Meredith gradually becoming a “groupie” who sleeps her way through sundry rockers (all off page), before ending up with Bryan Revere in 1969. Her fling with Laz Allen is barely mentioned, other than a random bit where Laz screws Meredith in a New York City porno theater – one of the few scenes in the novel that does get fairly explicit. As for Morgan, his descent into sexual sadism is hard to understand, given that he starts the novel as a relatively cheery and thoughtful individual, but my assumption is Maracotta’s intent is that the mysterious death of a friend of his, midway through the novel, pushes him into the path – him and Christina, who also gets off on being beaten around during sex, thus becomes a perfect match for Morgan. Also special mention must be made of the arbitrary bit where Morgan breaks the neck of a pigeon before that Altamont analog concert. 

It's funny though how when the John and Paul stand-ins Tom and Bryan make their belated appearance, it’s like Angel Dust has been about nothing but them since the beginning. What I mean to say is, Destry, Morgan, Josie – all of these characters who were important for the past 290 pages are mostly brushed aside, and the stars of the show are now Bryan and Tom as they bicker and banter. It’s almost embarrassing how Maracotta just lifts real-life incidents without bothering to change them up at all, complete even with Monica bringing a mattress into the studio during the recording of a Shades album so she can be with Tom all the time – and also pushing him into more of a radical political direction. 

Monica is also of course duplicitous and vindictive; above I said that Bill McHale could see the future with Tumbling Dice. The same could be said of Lindsay Maracotta herself. In the 1969 section, Monica is getting her hooks in Tom, and has made herself a rival of Meredith, just as Tom is a rival of Bryan. To get revenge on Bryan and Meredith for the latest bantering session, Monica calls in an anonymous tip to the cops that they’ll find a lot of marijuana at a certain residence – the same residence Bryan and Meredith happen to be renting here in England. In the ensuing bust Bryan is arrested and spends time in jail. Angel Dust was published in January 1979…and exactly one year later Yoko Ono, according to Albert Goldman and Frederic Seaman, called in a tip to some friends in Japan to bust Paul and Linda as they arrived in Tokyo, all because the two threatened to ruin John and Yoko’s “hotel karma” by staying at their favorite Tokyo hotel. Now, who knows if this is what really happened; what’s incredible is that Lindsay Maracotta has here predicted something that mirrors what would become a real-life incident. I mean, imagine if John and Yoko got the “let’s get Paul busted” idea from this very novel! 

The narrative gets more interesting, and more sordid, as the sixties progress. The Redlands bust analog is one of the first instances of this sordid nature, with Maracotta again mixing and matching her Rock Babylon material; whereas it was just the Stones in the Redlands caper, here it’s the Stones analogs the Marked Cards, along with Josie James (the Joni Mitchell analog) and Sabina (the Janis Joplin analog). But we even get the infamous “candy bar” bit, but here it’s an acid-soaring Josie who has a candy bar inserted into her nether regions and the Marked Cards take turns taking bites from it – humorous stuff here with one of the Cards being a closeted gay and disgusted by the whole thing, but going along with it. Curiously, a character Maracotta doesn’t even return to in the novel; only her penchant for perspective-hopping even lets us know who this guy is. 

The Altamont analog isn’t a match for its real-world counterpart, though Maracotta tries to amp it up by having one of the characters shot while on stage…sort of a prefigure of The Armageddon Rag. From there we are thrust back into the opening 1974 section, where we learn that Morgan is truly into his decadent trip, having a three-way with wife Christina and a “glitter rock” star clearly modelled on David Bowie. But curiously even this framework section doesn’t work, because Angel Dust opens and closes on a section titled “1974,” yet a few pages toward the end we’re told it’s 1975! Oh and also, this novel features an insane finale that’s reminiscent of Once Is Not Enough in how it seems to come from a different novel. Since Angel Dust is so obscure and scarce, I’ll describe it, but skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. Basically, Meredith accuses Bryan of wanting to fuck Tom and Bryan storms off in a rage. Meredith, losing her mind, takes a ton of drugs and gives her toddler daughter a sleeping pill (Maracotta intentionally leaves the child’s fate vague). Then Meredith, totally insane now, gets in her car and roars off into the night on what is clearly a death trip – truly a WTF? type of bitch-slap finale. 

But man, if only the entire novel matched the sheer bitch-slappery of that finale. Instead, Angel Dust is strangely dull and lifeless, despite being a sort of “greatest hits” of various ‘60s rock-world hijinks. The characters don’t seem real and are pale reflections of their real-world inspirations. And there is zero feeling for the time and the place; essentially Angel Dust is a “rock novel” for people who are only vaguely aware of rock music. As I said above, the characters here could just as easily have been actors or models or whatever, and the story wouldn’t have been much changed – the focus is on soap opera dynamics between the various characters, nothing more. Still, I was super happy to discover the book – I’m always excited when I discover a new rock novel paperback original – so I can’t complain too much.

The Lives Of John Lennon

The Lives Of John Lennon, by Albert Goldman

July, 1989  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition November 1988)

Well friends, here’s the book that brought the blog to a standstill. Actually to tell the truth, this book alone didn’t bring the blog to a standstill; the Thanksgiving holiday also contributed, as I didn’t get a chance to go online at all last week. But also, this book is nearly 900 pages long, which really throws a kink in a two-reviews-a-week review schedule. I have to say, though, despite the stigma associated with it, I found myself very caught up in Albert Goldman’s notorious The Lives Of John Lennon, often putting aside stuff just to keep reading it. Time’s cover blurb “Compulsively readable” aptly sums it up. The question of course is how trustworthy the book is. 

First of all, a big thanks to a commenter named “Intrigued,” who recently left a comment on my review of Dakota Days suggesting that I read this book. It had been a few years since I’d read any books about John Lennon, and to be honest I wasn’t thinking about reading another, but Intrigued’s comment hit me at the right time and I found myself starting The Lives Of John Lennon a day or two after they left their comment. It’s a book I have thought about reading for many years. As I mentioned in my reply to Intrigued, I first heard of Albert Goldman’s book thanks to a 1988 skit on Saturday Night Live, aired when the original hardcover edition was published; it featured Phil Hartman as Goldman, who had an axe to grind with John Lennon because Goldman had originally been a Beatle – one who played the trombone – and Lennon pushed to have him kicked out of the band. I only saw that skit that one time (and it’s never on Youtube due to NBC’s lawyers), but it must’ve made an impression on me (I was 13 when it aired), as I’ve always remembered it. 

That a biography was actually the subject of a Saturday Night Live skit (with Jon Lovitz as Ringo!!) should be indication of how much of a ripple The Lives Of John Lennon made when it was published. It was quite the news item for a while, mostly because it was condemned as a savage attack on John Lennon, who was no longer around to defend himself from Goldman’s allegations. That was the impression I got, going into the book. But as it turns out, I didn’t think John Lennon came off too badly in Goldman’s book…I mean sure, other than the insinuation that he might’ve accidentally murdered Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe, or that he might’ve also murdered some random British sailor during a mugging going wild in Hamburg…or even that he had a latent homosexuality (indeed, that he was “mostly bisexual”), and not only had a relationship with Beatles manager Brian Epstein but once attempted to rape him. Or hell, how he even would often “rape” female fans who were yanked willy-nilly from the audience for John to slam up against the wall and have his way with to get rid of his pre-stage jitters. Or how he’d kick around his little kid Sean, or claim his other son Julian was gay (while ignoring him most of his life), or how he’d beat on his girlfriend May Pang…or tons of other similar allegations in the book. 

Despite all that (and more!), I don’t think John Lennon came off to poorly in this book. Indeed it is a testament to his character – his true character, I’d say – that you still don’t want to finish this never-ending book because you know that when you do finish it, John Lennon will be dead. But it’s hard to take all of Goldman’s allegations without a big heaping grain of salt; he lists hundreds of sources at the end of the book, people who knew Lennon with whom Goldman (or his “researchers”) talked, but it soon becomes clear that Goldman has parsed the bad stuff and expanded on it. There’s no way in hell those hundreds of sources all said negative things about John Lennon. But then, Goldman had already proved this was his m.o., with the earlier Elvis, which so “displeased” Paul McCartney that he turned down Goldman’s request to be intereviewed for The Lives Of John Lennon. 

That said, Goldman is one helluva good writer. I personally loved his narrative style, alternately informative and bitchy, with a snobbery that comes off as wonderfully un-PC in today’s emasculated world. Minor asides, like calling out the “black bullshit” Lennon spoofs in the lyrics to “Come Together,” or the random, super-incidental note that the written Japanese word (ie, kanji) looks like “chicken scratches.” There’s another part that made me laugh out loud, where Goldman mocks the Black Panther party’s message – certainly dangerous ground for a mainstream writer to approach these days – and follows up a quote of a Black Power speech with, “Can you dig it, man?” And of course, we’re frequently informed of Yoko’s “chattering” in Japanese. 

Otherwise Goldman keeps the story moving; even when John Lennon friggin’ disappears from the narrative for like a hundred-page stretch toward the end, and Yoko becomes the star. In many regards this book could’ve just as easily been titled The Lives Of Yoko Ono, as John Lennon’s story, from roughly 1970 to 1980, is also Yoko Ono’s story. Even when John is off on his so-called “Lost Weekend,” Yoko is still there. In many ways the book is almost an extension of Fred Seaman’s later The Last Days Of John Lennon; Goldman actually makes much use of Seaman’s yet-published book here, with the caveat that Yoko doesn’t come off quite as malicious and malevolent as she does in Seaman’s account. At the same time, she isn’t the easily-confused housewife seen in John Green’s Dakota Days – another source Goldman leans on in The Lives Of John Lennon, though the Green stuff here is better; as Intrigued mentioned in their comment, we actually learn all the stuff about Green’s tarot-reading that Green himself didn’t tell us in Dakota Days. 

Like a fool, I failed to keep notes as I read this 877-page book of small, dense print; I just wanted to get caught up in Goldman’s mad tale, but now the whole thing is a damn blur and I’m having a hard time remembering a lot of it. But I tell you, I enjoyed the hell out of it while I was reading it! For the first 500 or so pages, at least. A couple hundred pages could’ve been easily cut, particularly the section covering the mid-late ‘70s, when John (as Goldman most often refers to Lennon…and I’ll follow suit) disappears. The book is nothing if not exhaustive…though “exhausting” might be the more accurate term. As mentioned Goldman lists a ton of sources at the end of the book, meaning that he could’ve given us the definitive bio of John Lennon, but instead he chose the low road and focused solely on the bad stuff, with the end result that the John Lennon seen here is alternately a self-destructive monster or a self-obsessed narcissist, one who jumps from one “mommy figure” to another without once displaying any backbone. 

Actually the book isn’t that comprehensive in one key area – humorously, we are told hardly anything about the main thing John Lennon is even known for: his music. Goldman brushes off entire albums with acidic wit – actually venomous wit – and even ignores lots of stuff. I mean let alone minor stuff, like the self-titled album by the group Elephant’s Memory that John and Yoko produced (and provided backup vocals on) in 1972, or even bigger stuff, like Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band, on which John played some serious psych-fuzz experimental guitar. (Say what you will about Yoko’s music, but she sure as hell had a knack for getting Lennon to play some serious rock guitar – just check out his last-ever recording, Yoko’s incredible 1980 disco-rock single “Walking On Thin Ice;” it was years before I learned the guitar on it was played by John.) 

But even Beatles albums are dismissed with a sentence or two. Now this I could kind of understand; doubtless Albert Goldman realized that a study of Beatles music was outside the realm of his book, and indeed “only” the first 400 pages of the book are devoted to the Beatles era. But when Goldman does write about John Lennon’s music, often times he proves a very compelling case: like for example how the musical theme of the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice” so often appears in John’s songs. But this book is not music criticism at all; more critical, really, as Goldman certainly isn’t a believer in Grandma’s rule (“if you can’t say anything nice…”). When he mentions a song, it’s usually to piss on it. That said, he does seem to like “I Am The Walrus,” and he also ranks John’s Plastic Ono Band as his best solo LP – but on the other hand, Goldman also dismisses “Imagine” as a shitty song. (Personally I’m not crazy about it either.) 

But even I, definitely no Beatles scholar, could see that much of what Goldberg writes simply is incorrect. For one, he has it that John was suffering heroin withdrawl during the recording of Get Back, making him even worse of a guitar player (Goldman really hammers it in that John Lennon has no talent with the guitar, btw); indeed, so disassociated from the sessions that he might as well not have been there. But reading The Lives Of John Lennon inspired me to finally check out Peter Jackson’s recent Get Back documentary…8 friggin’ hours of the Beatles recording Get Back (don’t get me wrong – it’s awesome, one of the best things I’ve seen in years), and while John does seem a little out of it in Part 1, he’s truly on form in Part 2, once they’ve moved into the new Apple Studios. Five minutes of Get Back is enough to disprove practically everything Goldman claims; John’s rockin’ on the guitar, he’s creating and changing songs on the fly, he’s John Lennon. 

Well anyway. The Lives Of John Lennon starts with this excellently-handled opening sequence of New Journalism (ie nonfiction written as fiction) that takes us into “a day in the life” of John Lennon, circa 1979. He’s in his “tomb” of a room in the Dakota, coming out to enjoy “his favorite time of the day” (breakfast), and soon he’s declaiming on the topic of assassination to Marnie Hair, a Dakota neighbor whose daughter is roughly the same age as John and Yoko’s son Sean – and Marnie Hair was one of Goldman’s main sources for the latter half of the book. But this opening is not picked up on again in the book, sort of existing on its own, and indeed it presents a different, more relatable John Lennon than Goldman will give us in the actual narrative. 

The only problem is, this intro ultimately will undermine Goldman’s dark exegesis that follows. John is not presented as the heroin-ravaged, weak-willed, Yoko-controlled pawn as he will be, later in the book; nor is he shown to be the vindictive, hate-filled prick Goldman will strive to present him as. He’s just a world-famous guy enjoying some down time. Yoko also comes across slightly better here than she will later on; sure, in her intro she’s making her heroin contact and then “retching” in the bathroom after snorting some, but shorly after this there’s a cute bit (sorry, but there’s no other word for it) where she and Marnie Hair are sitting there and patitently listening to John expound on his assassination subject, and Yoko impishly keeps pushing John’s ashtray farther out of his reach, without his noticing. 

So what are we to take from this opening? It’s never picked up on in the ensuing narrative, never mentioned again. When we do get to the shut-in years, hundred and hundreds of pages later, there’s none of this “cute” stuff. What’s funny is, this opening is actually more in-line with what Robert Rosen presented in Nowhere Man – published later, but supposedly written earlier than Goldman’s book, and based directly off of John Lennon’s personal journals. For once again Rosen’s book can be seen as an alternate image to Goldman’s portrait of Lennon, same as it could be for Frederic Seaman’s The Last Days Of John Lennon – but then, Seaman was one of Goldman’s sources. Where Goldman and Seaman present Yoko as this controlling force who is alternately bored with John or trying to cause him trouble, Rosen presents an altogether different side of her. But which one is real? 

Does it really matter? John Lennon has been gone now for longer than he was here. All of this was so long ago, and it’s clear that John Lennon’s legend will persist. People born decades after his death are still listening to his music. My six-year-old was born 37 years after John Lennon’s death; the other day, no doubt inspired by this book, I was playing The White Album for the first time in years, and my kid was playing with his toys and not paying attention, but when “I’m So Tired” came on he got quiet, sat and watched the stereo while the song played, and then finally announced, “I like that song.” Thus it seems clear that Albert Goldman’s attempt to cut John Lennon down could never succeed; his music will always prevail. Now I’ll admit, I did get kind of sick of John and Yoko and their unceasing tide of one obsession after another – the entire middle and latter part of the book becomes, to use the word again, exhausting. I mean these two are like a pair of social influencers before there was any such thing…a reality TV couple before there was reality TV. 

And really, the ‘70s stuff is what Goldman focuses on most in the book…likely because this is when John went out of the public eye, thus Goldman was able to go into a little more shall we say speculative fiction. I mean folks there’s a part, late in the book, where John has to go through Southeast Asia, all as part of Yoko’s latest obsession (traveling westward from the east so as to purify yourself or some other such money-wasting pursuit), and John, travelling on his own, has to stop in Bangkok. Here Goldman cattily informs us that John no doubt enjoyed himself some young boys there, because it’s legal and all; I mean the entire sequence is written as straight-up fiction narrative, John going to cathouses and whatnot. I actually laughed out loud at how brazen it all was. 

For it’s Goldman’s assertion from the start that John Lennon is deeply troubled: filled with rage and hostility, perhaps due to his refusal to accept that he’s “basically bisexual.” To Goldman’s credit, this is a full, comprehensive bio, starting with how John’s parents met, on to how John was troubled even as a toddler, getting kicked out of kindergarten at one point. There’s a heartbreaking scene where he’s forced to choose between living with his mom or living with his dad. His childhood was not pleasant, certainly, but again here one cannot help but feel sorry for little John Lennon, which again makes it odd that Goldman will go on to present the man as a monster – of sorts. I mean like I said before, despite Goldman’s best efforts he still can’t make John Lennon hateable. It’s my understanding that Goldman went into this book as a “fan” of Lennon’s, but then that doesn’t count for much. The guy who killed Lennon was also a “fan.” But it was Goldman’s claim that when he saw the true man behind the music, he lost his fandom. 

But it’s hard to tell Goldman ever was a fan in the first place; reading the book, you get the impression John Lennon was a barely talented twit who only managed to get a few good songs because other people pushed him to it. And also the guy who did all the peace rallies was only doing so to hide his penchant for beating up women. This is another of Goldman’s conceits; that John Lennon was a violent man, headed for a violent end, and his huge fame was only a brief detour before he headed for his inevitable fate. But the thing is, the book is just so well written I couldn’t stop reading it! Goldman doesn’t litter the book with footnotes or asides; it’s written in a gossipy tabloid manner, but with a definite comedic touch. As mentioned a dark one; another goofy conceit Goldman does throughout the book is “subtly” foreshadow John’s violent end, with sentences comparing John’s voice to a “fired bullet” and the like. Or even darker, a bit where psychedelic ’60s-era John has a trick car that plays random messages in the front seat, surprising people John’s asked to sit up there, and he’ll sit in the back and “die” laughing – or, as Goldman puts it, “John died in the back seat.” (John actually died in the back seat of a police car that was speeding him to the hospital.) 

I’m jumping all over the place in my review, no doubt due to not taking any notes as I read this behemoth of a book. Goldman makes the earlies days of the Beatles a more interesting topic than I thought it would be; his theme has it that John is an antisocial punk who finds only brief solace in rock music, soon putting together his own group. Paul McCartney then enters the narrative – and Paul is not as big a presence in the book as you might expect. It’s clear though that Goldman actually respects McCartney, casting him and his actions in good light throughout the book. Even with offhand minor mentions like how Paul will be the only Beatle who reaches out to John’s ex-wife Cynthia after the divorce. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Paul, even though barely into his teens, is already eager to show off his guitar-playing and singing skills, and soon wins his way onto the older Lennon’s group. 

Goldman, doubtless realizing tons of books have been written on this very subject, doesn’t get much into the nitty gritty of the Beatles. His forte is the realm of supposition; it’s the grayer areas he clings to, as he is free to fill in the gaps with his imagination. So we have it that John Lennon himself might have caused the death of original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe, kicking him in the head after one of John’s frequent rages – an admission John supposedly made, himself, to Dakota neighbor Marnie Hair many years later. Then later we have the aforementioned note that John would often “rape” girls moments before going on stage for those big Beatles concerts, to calm his nerves, and also that he likely had a fling going with Beatles manager Brian Epstein. 

The actual music of the Beatles isn’t much dwelt upon, though I have to say I agree with Goldman when he considers Sgt. Pepper’s a little overrated, particularly when compared to Revolver. The former, as Goldman argues (and which is clear from the aural evidence), is mostly the work of Paul, and has his whimsy in full force. But then, Goldman also argues how Lennon and McCartney were such a strong team, one that Lennon turned his back on for no other reason than ego; Goldman also notes how Paul “pursued” John even up until the end of John’s life, trying to write with him again. I found this note particularly resonate, given how even today, over four decades after John Lennon died, Paul is still taking John on tour:

Where The Lives Of John Lennon really comes into its own is in the post-Beatles era. Here is where John’s life became even more hectic and surreal…and, not so coincidentally, this is when Yoko Ono became the main part of his life, instead of the Beatles. It’s essentially one madcap bit after another, and indeed John and Yoko in the ‘70s almost come off like the Rolling Stones in how they corrupt and cast aside anyone who comes into their orbit. It’s chapter after chapter of some new acquaintance or guru or assistant or lawyer or musician or whatever who becomes the greatest friend ever of the Lennons, before ultimately being dismissed for some infraction or other. But it’s all here: the Primal Scream era, the flirtation with radical leftist politics (though as Goldman notes, neither John nor Yoko were very political, given that neither of them had ever bothered to even vote in an election!), the so-called “Lost Weekend” in which John was separated from Yoko, and finally the reconcilliation, followed by five years of being a “recluse” (though as I said before, John Lennon sure as hell traveled a lot for a recluse). 

It's those last five years that Goldman focuses on the most – again, because this is the most shadowy era of John Lennon’s life. What Goldman enthuses in doing is gutting the official narrative and twisting the knife; if the official story is that Yoko “asked” John to leave, the real story is that Yoko kicked him out because she wanted to be “royally laid” by a studio guitarist named Dave Spinoza. If the official story is that Yoko “just happened” to be at Elton John’s big NYC concert a few years later – the concert in which John made a surprise appearance – the real story is that Yoko called John beforehand and demanded specific seats. It’s like this on and on…John’s trip to Bermuda in the late ‘70s was, again, so Yoko could get him out of the Dakota so she could have some adulterous fun…or that “John’s idea” for he and Yoko to trade songs on Double Fantasy was really Yoko’s idea (an idea taken from Seaman’s book, where a lot of the later material here is sourced from). 

The thing is, it’s all gripping reading, despite how self-involved and annoying John and Yoko increasingly become as the book progresses: John losing more and more of his spine, Yoko becoming more of a junk-snorting harpie. There is as ever an element of dark comedy to it all, particularly when John is sent off on global jaunts to appease Yoko’s latest metaphysical obsession. We get the story, recounted in Dakota Days, where Yoko visits a witch in South America, as well as the big family trips to Japan. One that was new to me was that John and Yoko went to Egypt in the late ‘70s, with John walking around the pyramids and claiming he’d “been here before.” Again, there’s just a surreal, almost Spinal Tap vibe to the whole thing…with the caveat that there’s no rock anymore, by this point. Goldman focuses so little on John’s music in The Lives Of John Lennon that you could often forget you’re reading the bio of one of the greatest – if not the greatest – rocker of all time. 

This music blindness is just one of Goldman’s many misses. For example, he tells us unequivocably that John didn’t write any songs once he’d locked himself up in the Dakota. This of course is incorrect; John was always writing and recording stuff on tape. This is how the recent “last Beatles song” even came to be, same as the earlier “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love.” Goldman also misses out on a big, if relatively obscure, moment in the John and Paul story; in Goldman’s book, John and Paul basically don’t see each other again after the split of the Beatles. However they did see each other from time to time, even meeting up in the studio one night, during the recordings for John’s Rock & Roll album; back in the ‘90s there was a bootleg Beatles CD with the unforgettable title A Toot And A Snore In ‘74, documenting this (coke-fueled) recording session (if I’m not mistaken, Stevie Wonder was also present), which was the first and last time John and Paul were in the studio together since the Beatles breakup. Goldman doesn’t mention it. 

Actually, I found the stuff from this period the most interesting in the book otherwise. John’s life becomes even more crazed with the intro of Phil Spector, who “produces” John’s roots-rock album, but meanwhile John and cohorts just become increasingly drunk and stoned in the studio. Goldman has it, though, that the drugs bring out Lennon’s sadistic side, thus there’s lots of stuff about him treating girlfriend May Pang like a sex toy or beating her up and choking her. John Lennon certainly comes off poorly in this regard, and these sections would trigger the sensitive readers of today – and I haven’t even mentioned John’s frequent usage of the n-word. John Lennon’s basically a racist and sexist progenitor of the entire “#metoo” movement – but then, in Goldman’s confused narrative, he’s also kind of a loser, unable to muster the courage to ask women out and thus resorting to brutish means. Or, in one of the book’s more humorous bits, John has no idea what to do around women: there’s a part where his childhood obsession Brigitte Bardot invites him to her hotel room, and an anxious John drops a ton of acid beforehand (this is during the psychedelic Beatles era) and pretends to “meditate” the entire time, not saying a word to the sex goddess. 

To continue with my Stones analogy, of John and Yoko using and casting aside a revolving cast of innocents, May Pang would have to be the biggest victim here. One can’t help but feel sorry for her; young and somewhat innocent, she was essentially “set up” to be John’s mistress (by Yoko herself!), but the affair became more serious than anyone could realize. Indeed, John clearly seemed to fall in love with May, and here in The Lives Of John Lennon we get to see stuff that Rosen (I believe) only alluded to in Nowhere Man; that John continued to carry a torch for May even after returning to Yoko, and would come up with elaborate schemes to be with her while Yoko was out of the city. This is a nice antidote to Seaman’s The Last Days Of John Lennon, which presented John as a cuckolded nitwit, his wife carrying on two affairs and John obvlious to it all. At least in Goldman’s account, John is getting his own side action. It’s also revealed here that the whole May Pang thing was concocted by Yoko because she’d set her sights on that aforementioned guitarist Dave Spinoza, and went to her own elaborate ends to ensnare him, complete with planning a big tour of Japan – which Spinoza backed out of at the last minute! 

One of Goldman’s main conceits is that John Lennon suffered from rage incidents throughout his life, going into fits and swinging and punching at anyone in his path, particularly women. There’s a lot of stuff about people treading on eggshells in his presence and whatnot. Judging from the greasy-haired, rail-thin weakling presented in the Get Back documentary, I personally doubt how much damage Lennon could do (and Goldman makes a huge production over John’s poor physical condition), but then that’s another thing from Seaman’s book I recall – that John was insanely jealous of muscular, fit men and had an irrational hatred of them. This irrational rage, Goldman argues, is why John became such a peace advocate; here Goldman uses John’s own words, from a late interview, of something to the effect that the most violent people are the ones who ultimately go for peace. 

Speaking of John and Yoko’s peace bed-in movement, one source I was bummed Goldman didn’t get in touch with was Len Levinson; as recounted in In The Pulp Fiction Trenches, Len handled the PR for the Toronto bed-in, and became friendly with John – to the point that John even gave Len a sort of impromptu performance on acoustic guitar. John Lennon comes more to life in Len’s short essay than he does in the entirety of Albert Goldman’s book. But then, even if Len had spoken with Goldman, it’s debatable how much of Len’s words would have been accurately used. This contemporary rebuttal by Rolling Stone really lays bare much of Goldman’s truth-stretching; the Rolling Stone piece even puts the majority of Fred Seaman’s book in question, and that book hadn’t even been published yet; particularly telling is Seaman’s uncle – who got Fred Seaman the job with John and Yoko – stating that his nephew hardly had much interraction with John. 

Again, it’s all so hard to tell what is true and what is fiction. Compounding the issue, here is an interview with Seaman, May Pang, and Yoko’s “archivist,” from when Seaman’s book was published; it’s from Joan Rivers’s short-lived show. These are people who served as Goldman’s key sources for the latter days of John Lennon, and it seems clear that in a way all three of them are disgruntled ex-employees. I especially love how Seaman keeps hammering home that he was beaten up by an off-duty cop who was on Yoko’s payroll, and Joan Rivers keeps refusing to pick up on this comment – probably hoping herself to evade any “litigious” action on Yoko’s part! But as mentioned in my review of The Last Days Of John Lennon, Seaman was ultimately sued by Yoko for that book. Albert Goldman, as his supporters often state, was not sued for his book – but then, in that Rolling Stone rebuttal I linked to above, Yoko herself says that she doubts she will sue Goldman. 

At any rate, Albert Goldman died in 1994 – while working on a bio of Jim Morrison, no less – so it’s debatable whether Yoko would’ve indeed taken him to court at some point. After all, she’d waited some years to sue Fred Seaman. What’s interesting is that Goldman seems to support Yoko throughout the book – she was her own creative person (seriously, a lot of the book is about her artwork and performance pieces), but after meeting John she was hated by all Beatledom for “breaking up” the band. But then as the book goes on, Goldman turns Yoko into this heroin-sniffing shrew from hell, sending John and Sean around the world on metaphysical jaunts not so much for spiritual cleansing but to get them out of the house so she can snort more heroin and shack up with two guys who are both, confusingly enough, named “Sam.” I mean it becomes so crazy, with John increasingly so spineless – even giving Yoko full legal authority for him – that it’s almost as if John is being put out of his misery at book’s end. 

That’s another thing. Goldman focuses on John’s killer for a few chapters, giving his history and what he did on the day of the killing. Beatles fans like to purge this guy’s name from the history books, which of course is a futile gesture – he will of course only and ever be remembered for this – but just a word of warning that you have to spend a lot of time in his shoes at the end. Goldman does not try to make him relatable, or to engender any sort of reader sympathy for him; he’s bound and determined to kill someone famous, and John Lennon just happens to be the target he finally settles on. 

No matter what book on John Lennon you read, his last day just comes as a shock. It’s just so senseless and comes out of nowhere, even though you know it’s going to happen; check the Joan Rivers interview above, and you’ll see the three interviewees claim that John himself knew it was going to happen. Goldman of course uses this idea as the impetus for the flurry of work John suddenly did in the studio in a few short months in late 1980 – and also, I’ve forgotten to mention that Goldman is very critical of John’s solo work (that is, when he bothers to mention it), claiming the piano melody of “Imagine” is hamfisted and childish and also noting that John’s solo albums did not sell in the expected numbers. He is of course especially critical of Double Fantasy, but also notes how the album was savaged by critics when first released. 

I’ve kind of just rambled all over the place in this review, but at nearly 900 pages there was a lot to digest in The Lives Of John Lennon. I can only say again that, for most of the book, I was greatly entertained – the writing was good, it was often funny, and I enjoyed the snobby vibe of Goldman’s narrative. The truth of it all I cannot say, but for the most part I treated it like a novel; I mean I didn’t go into the book expecting the real true picture of John Lennon. So for the entertainment value alone I’d say this book was a success. Until around a third of the way through, when as mentioned John sort of disappeared and Yoko and her various schemes and obsessions took center stage. This material just came off as too much and could’ve been cut – and speaking of which, supposedly Albert Goldman had a lot of positive things to say about John Lennon in his original draft, but the publisher cut it out so that the book would maintain the same mean-spirited critical tone throughout. I’m not even sure if that is true, but I recall reading it somewhere. 

I realize now that I am posting a review of a John Lennon book around Thanksgiving, which is fitting on a personal level. (BTW this review was supposed to post last Wednesday, but I wasn’t able to get it up in time due to vacation.) Back in Thanksgiving of 1997 I had one of the very few times in my life when I was depressed – I was 23, relatively new to Dallas, and had no family here, and it was the first Thanksgiving that I’d never gone home. So I went over to the North Dallas Half Price Books the day before Thanksgiving and bought a vinyl copy of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, the original US Apple pressing, for like two bucks. (They were basically giving away records back then – and yes, I still have my copy!) I played that record over and over that Thanksgiving day. It was just one of those albums that resonated so perfectly with how I was feeling at the time…and a record that helped me feel better. It’s also one of those records that when I hear it now, on the rare occasion I play it, it takes me right back to that first time I heard it. So this is just another indication that the true testament of who John Lennon was cannot be found in any book that is written about him – it is in the music he left behind.