The rock star who made John Lennon get sober: “Who’s going to die first?”
It was shocking in 1966 when word got out that The Beatles were maybe smoking marijuana. Here were four young men, entrusted with the sanctity of our children’s future, indulging in something so abhorrent. How on earth, as musicians in the 1960s, could they do such a thing?
The shock was indicative of the limbo in which that generation found itself. Desperately trying to set themselves free from the growing pains of the generation before them and move into something more forward-thinking. The Beatles broke every mould and allowed that to happen, creating music that altered the mind just as easily as the odd joint could.
But then, in the 1970s, when each of the band members had to navigate adult lives in complete independence, for the first time since their meteoric rise to fame, the darkness of substance abuse began to reveal itself for certain members, namely the lead creative, John Lennon.
Like a tortured genius, he was constantly toeing the line between expression, insecurity and innovation. It’s an intensely lonely place to find yourself in, and is only compounded by the litany of sins being a world-conquering rock star can afford you. Rather than meaningfully address them, Lennon hid from them with the most accessible drug of all, alcohol.
“I was trying to hide what I felt in a bottle, and it wasn’t doing me any good,” he explained. “Forget about image, just physically and mentally it was killing me. And I only know how to get out of that kind of situation by drinking. I really tried to drown myself in the bottle and it took an awful lot because I don’t seem strong physically that much, but it just seems to take an amazing lot to put me down.
“And I was with the heaviest drinkers in the industry which is Harry Nilsson and Bobby Keyes and all of them, and we couldn’t pull ourselves out. I think Harry might be still trying, poor bugger. ‘God bless you Harry, wherever you are.’”
Lennon struck up a strong bond with Nilsson, which, despite his anecdote, showed signs of health. When they weren’t drinking and causing mischief, they were fuelling each other’s creativity, with Lennon acting as Nilsson’s producer on his 10th album Pussy Cats. But nevertheless, their relationship was intensely fuelled by their love of debauchery, and thankfully, towards the end of the 1970s, Lennon had begun to clean himself up.
But it wasn’t actually Nilsson himself who inspired that. No, it was the fall of one of their great peers, who didn’t get as far as escaping the clutches of alcoholism.
Lennon explained, “I had to get away from that as well because somebody was going to die, or Keith Moon did. It was Keith, Harry, me and god knows who else around. And it was like, ‘Who’s going to die first?’ Unfortunately Keith was the one. But I got out.”
It’s a tale that only compounds the sadness of what happened when the 1970s drew to a close, and a cleaned-up Lennon planned on getting back to some serious musical work.
