Alone in the dimly lit bedroom she had shared with John Lennon for the previous seven years, Yoko Ono walked soundlessly across the plush white carpet to a large mahogany bureau at the far end of the room. There, carefully turning through the pages of John's old, oversized address book, she stopped, finally, at an entry scrawled haphazardly across the journal's tatty inside back cover. Picking up the telephone she wondered if the number would still be any good. So much time had passed. So many heartaches. And now, the cruelest blow of all.
"Hello." It was a child's voice, faraway, on the other end of the wobbly transatlantic line.
"Who's calling, please?"
"Oh, hi." She struggled to find her normal speaking voice. "Is your daddy at home? It's Yoko."
A few, muffled, anxious moments later, Paul McCartney picked up the line.
"Yoko?" he said, his voice already full of surprise and obvious concern. "What's the matter?"
"It's John." She replied, attempting to control herself. "He's dead. Someone shot him. Can you believe it?"
A world away, standing in the cluttered kitchen of his tiny circular farmhouse in rural Sussex, McCartney looked helplessly towards his wife, Linda, who, minutes before had been busily preparing breakfast for her two youngest children.
"I don't know what to say," he finally answered. "Why? It can't be." And then simply, "No... my God."
Two hours later, just after noon on Tuesday, December.9, 1980, McCartney emerged from his home enroute to a Wings recording session at George Martin's AIR Studios in London, commenting only briefly to reporters assembled outside that he was far too shocked and upset to properly "take it in" at the moment and that John was a great man who would be remembered for his unique contributions to art, music, and peace. With that he drove off with Linda in their silver Volvo station wagon, silently lost in his thoughts for the two-hour-plus drive to London.
His current musical collaborator, Denny Laine, was also shaken by the news. He had arrived early for the session and was quietly remembering his rowdy Moody Blues days hanging out with Lennon when Paul and Linda arrived. McCartney put a call through to Yoko in New York. In the course of their conversation she told him just how fond her husband had been of him despite the many verbal barbs the often caustic Lennon had unleashed upon his former partner in recent years concerning their tempestuous, twenty-four-year relationship. Underneath it all, she said, John had been secretly proud of McCartney's astounding solo success, and had often remarked that, as an amateur talent scout, he really hadn't done too badly in discovering someone of Paul's superlative abilities. Besides, the occasionally crusty Lennon would argue, it's one thing for families to row, quite another to allow anyone else to have a go. To John's mind, anyway, said Yoko, "he and McCartney had always remained brothers। Brawling brothers maybe, but family nonetheless.
Although he appreciated her kind words, especially considering the horrific pain she was herself experiencing, McCartney wasn't easily comforted and sought some measure of solace in his work in the studio. Session musician Paddy Mahoney was on board that afternoon and recalls what he perceived to be a get-on-with-the-job attitude among McCartney and the rest of Wings. "There was a kind of unspoken sadness," he later commented, "like when you lose an old soccer mate. It was subtle and there wasn't any crying or moping about. I don't think it had really sunk in yet."
Outside, the parasitic media were swarming all over each other, frantically trying to capture every drop of emotion they could squeeze out of their unwilling and very vulnerable prey। No Beatle or close family member was immune to their unwelcome scrutiny. With no confirmed sightings of McCartney for several hours straight, the circling British tabloid vultures began ritually feeding off themselves, rushing to phone boxes to call in reports of some of their colleagues' over-zealous efforts to get a peak at his private pain by scaling the wrought-iron fire escape system that clung to the exterior of the four-storey-high private studios. Wisely taking no chances with McCartney's personal safety, his office in Soho Square retained an elite corps of specially trained anti-terrorist bodyguards to help ease back the rapidly swelling crowds, attracted by all the fuss outside AIR and by the creeping awareness that Len-non's death was very much history in the making, one final blaze of publicity in a career filled with wild and outrageous acts.
Going through the motions of another rocking workday up at AIR, McCartney wasn't really fooling anybody, least of all Denny Laine, who at the time was perhaps his closest and most trusted friend. Laine remembers: "The really strange thing was that I went to work that morning somehow knowing Paul would ultimately show up — despite what had happened. Of course, from the point of view of his Liverpool upbringing, the best way to deal with something like that is to keep right on doing what you'd normally do. It helps to take your mind off it — being with friends, I suppose, even though it did occur to me that he might have just as easily rung up and cancelled the session. I remember the first thing he said to me was, "I just don't know what to think." He was obviously physically shaken, and even at the best of times wasn't really too articulate when it came to expressing how he felt about things. After one of the takes Paul and I were just hanging out, leaning up against AIR's huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Oxford Circus, when I happened to notice this dark green truck going by that said LENNON FURNISHINGS or something like that. "Oh God, look at that," I said, and he just sort of broke down, you know? "I'll tell you one thing, man," he said, "I'll never fall out with anyone again in my life for that amount of time and face the possibility of them dying before I get a chance to square it with them."
After that I never consciously mentioned anything about it. If he wanted to talk about it he did, and if he didn't, well, he didn't. Everybody in the world was very hurt by John's death, but especially Paul McCartney.
Making his way to the car following the seven-hour session, McCartney was momentarily cornered by the now deadline-frantic media who later quoted him as saying he hoped that everyone would "rally round Yoko." When pressed by one particularly aggressive microphone to comment on how he felt about Lennon's assassination, he grimaced slightly and, hanging precariously on the edge of tears, tossed off, "It's a drag, man," as he dove into the back of the waiting car. They were four words he would live to regret.
Within twenty-four hours headlines around the world proclaimed the lie that McCartney had remained callously unmoved by his former partner's death, and when questioned, actually came off as being quite flip and even casual about the tragedy. For those who don't yet know it, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Denny Laine recalls: "I don't really understand what it was the media thought they'd got on him, I mean, it was a drag! What else do you say? What do you do, write a bloody book there and then? He might have burst into tears had he gone on, who knows? Of course the real fuckin' drag was having to face some asshole sticking a mike in your face, harassing you for a quote at a time like that. Of course it happens every day on the telly — 'Excuse me Mrs. Blootch, you've just lost your entire family to an escaped loony with a chainsaw. What's running through your mind?' I mean really, you tell me who's being callous? The public's 'right to know' doesn't give anyone license to badger people." In part, to try to quell the uproar set spinning by this avalanche of nasty publicity, McCartney attempted to set the record straight once and for all by issuing the following "official" statement to the world's press:
"I have hidden myself in my work today। But it keeps flashing into my mind. I feel shattered, angry, and very sad. It's just ridiculous. He was pretty rude about me sometimes, but I secretly admired him for it, and I always managed to stay in touch with him. There was no question that we weren't friends — I really loved the guy. I think that what has happened will in years to come make people realize that John was an international statesman. He often looked a loony to many people. He made enemies, but he was fantastic. He was a warm man who cared a lot and with the record "Give Peace a Chance" he helped stop the Vietnam War. He made a lot of sense. "
If this heartfelt statement wasn't enough to curb the media's demand for atonement, McCartney later dedicated an entire issue of MPL's (McCartney Productions Limited) fan club publication, Club Sandwich, to Lennon's memory. It included a beautiful full-color portfolio of Linda's touching photographs of him. There was also, of course, McCartney's soulful panegyric to Lennon, "Here Today," on his masterful, Tug of War album of 1982, as well as the appearance of the McCartneys and Denny Laine on George Harrison's tuneful tribute "All Those Years Ago."
For McCartney the specter of untimely death was nothing new। Throughout his turbulent life he has had to endure the unnatural passing of not only his mother, Mary, but also Beatles bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, Brian Epstein, Wings guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, as well as his close friend, Keith Moon. Although deeply moved, he was generally quite stoic. Ironically, it took the tragic death of a stranger to emotionally uncork the naturally reserved McCartney and force him to begin to come to terms with the tenuous nature of his own life journey. It occurred in October of 1980 in the tiny village of Tenterden, in Kent. Wings had been rehearsing in a manor house rented from prominent London publisher Martin Miller when they heard the terrible sounds of a car crash outside the main gates. Laine recalls: "Apparently, this young Japanese au pair girl who worked for the Millers was taking their infant daughter, Cara, for a walk in her pram when this supposedly drunken driver tried to overtake another car and knocked them both down. The baby flew up into the air and landed unhurt by a hedgerow, but the poor au pair was very badly injured."
Dashing outside, McCartney and Laine instructed Wings' road manager Trevor Jones to get the van and drive the little girl and her hysterical mother to a nearby hospital while they did what they could for the semi-conscious young woman until the summoned medical help arrived.
I was actually the first to reach her, but Paul dove right in and started nursing her, trying to do what he could। I mean he certainly wasn't frightened of blood. It was obvious to both of us she had suffered very severe internal injuries and that unless there was some kind of miracle she probably wouldn't make it. I remember there was blood pouring out of her ears, and her eyes were rolled way back in her head. It was just terrible. To make matters worse, being so far out in the countryside the ambulance took well over an hour to wind its way through the area's twisting, largely unmarked, lanes. McCartney, however, never moved an inch, all the while sitting there by the side of the road, cradling her head in his lap. Laine reflects: "Paul was just saying things like, 'It'll be alright, luv, don't worry,' but we were getting no response. At one point he glanced over at me and slowly shook his head. He knew. We both knew. Still, he just sat there stroking her long black hair, talking and sometimes even singing softly as she lay there dying." That evening, in an East Sussex hospital, twenty-one-year-old Hisako Kawahara died of her injuries। Out of respect for the privacy of the Kawahara and Miller families, McCartney ordered his London office to enforce a tight media ban on his assistance.
"I'm a bit of a cover-up," McCartney commented in October of 1986. "There are many people like me in the world who don't find it easy to have public grief. But that was one of the things that brought John and I very close together. We used to talk about it, being sixteen or seventeen. We actually used to know how people felt when they said, 'How's your mother?' and we'd say, 'Well, she's dead.' We almost had a sort of joke; we'd have to say, 'It's alright, don't worry.' We'd both lost our mothers. It was never really spoken about much; no-one really spoke about anything real. There was a famous expression: 'Don't get real on me, man.' " Perhaps the most telling tale as regards McCartney's inability to either exhibit real emotion or open up to those around him has to do with his father's passing. Denny remembers: "We were in Paris. Wings had just done a great show so we were all in pretty high spirits. Afterwards we shuffled down to this press conference where we met up with our old pal David Cassidy. I remember Paul was struggling to answer all these typically mundane questions from the media while David did his best to crack us all up, making faces and stuff just behind the camera. Eventually this one guy pipes up and asks Paul if either of his parents are still living, to which he offhandedly replies simply, "No."
At that point Laine just about fell off his chair. The tight-lipped McCartney had never so much as mentioned a word to anyone about his father's death, which both surprised and hurt the sensitive Laine. "Over the years I'd become pretty close to old Jim," he confides, "and I was pretty upset that Paul had never bothered to let me know what was up. You see, Paul is very publicly shy in some ways but unfortunately, he's also quite privately shy as well. What can I say? It was just his personality."
The death of John Lennon put an abrupt and unhappy end to speculation about a possible Beatles reunion। The band had almost magically metamorphosed over the years from the black-leather-clad Cavern Club rockers to the four cheeky lads with the daring hairdos and collarless jackets first seen by most North Americans on Ed Sullivan's "really big shoe" in the winter of 1964. Over the next three years they further evolved into the introspective, psychedelic lords of London, resplendent in neo-Edwardian finery, purveyors of eerie otherworldly love songs from the edge of the galaxy. In their final incarnation, as the thirtyish Picassos of recorded sound, they had become a musical collective of such staggeringly successful proportions as to eventually collapse under the weight of their own shared fame. Finally, even the longstanding brotherly bond was strained to the limit and beyond, disintegrating amidst salvos of accusation. "It's a simple fact," said Lennon of McCartney. "He can't get his own way so he's causing havoc." McCartney, in particular, seemed to come out of it all feeling dejected and depressed. Photographs from that period depict a downcast Paul, hands dug deep into his pockets, burly beard, big, sad eyes, and slow, round-shouldered gait. Never mind the breezy let's-look-to-the-future banter he was giving out to the media, the body language alone was undeniable. "My overwhelming feeling was I was of no use anymore, my usefulness was gone," McCartney told interviewer Bernard Goldberg in 1990. "What do I do now? What am I? You were one of the Beatles! That was the frightening bit, you once were. I thought, God, I'm not at retirement age yet. I can't just swan off to a desert island. I've got to do something."
With more than two decades of post-Beatles work behind him, McCartney has emerged as the wide-eyed Everyman of rock 'n' roll, clinging to a deftly manufactured image of whimsy and inherited family normalcy। It is tempting to imagine him at home with Earth Mother Linda, sitting by the fire at night, toking a joint, tittering about the crafty way he's been having us on all these years, a hippie Dorian Gray living out his wildest fantasies at the public's expense. Or, is it possible he actually is every bit the self-effacing, good-natured Liverpool lad he's always insisted?
The rock supernova, the laid-back family man, the shepherd, the ethereal Fool of the Tarot card, effortlessly over-stepping his earthly boundaries and waltzing away on thin air — the real McCartney is cleverly obscured, but partially revealed, by a facade of images. Even those who have been closest to him say that despite all the airy, Beatlesque humor, and good-natured, thumbs-up clowning, the McCartney guard is always up. With McCartney, it seems, there are no clear-cut answers, only an increasing complexity of clues.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
RISHIKESH RISING / GHOSTS OF THE BEATLES INDIA
Introduction to 'REVOLUTION / THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE BEATLES' coming soon from Icon Editions
There is a rare film of a long-ago afternoon in February 1968 preserved )y an Italian television crew who, along with the rest of the world's media, descended on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's enclave in Rishi-cesh for a glimpse of the Beatles as aspiring mystics. Even today it is an enticing image. Here are John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mike Love, Donovan, Mia Farrow with her sister Prudence and brother Johnny, and the Beatle wives singing sweetly to the jangling of acoustic guitars, "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain", "When The Saints Go Marching In" - fronted by George Harrison and Mia Farrow - "You Are My Sunshine", "Jingle Bells", as well as a ragged rendition of the Hare Krishna mantra. The Maharishi urged everyone, "Fathom the infinity, dive into the Ganges. Fathom the infinity!" To which George replied, "Hey, I guess we don't merely just exist after all!"I played it back in my head in the early summer of 2000 as I struggled along in the stifling midday sun past the sparkling Ganges, past the thatched huts of a small group of ash-covered, dope-smoking babas, and finally the monsoon-carved, boulder-strewn left turn that took me to the Maharishi's padlocked front door.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time in Rishikesh, first drawn there in the early 1990s by images I saw as a kid flickering across my family's old black and white TV, of George, John and their friends walking peacefully along brick walkways lined with painted stones, deep inside the Maharishi's secret Shangri-la. Driving along the road from Hardwar (the nearest train stop from Delhi) I might have missed it, but even without being told I knew somehow that this was the place. Although the area has been built up over succeeding decades, Rishikesh is still a quaint village highlighted by an astounding black-topped suspension bridge, Ram Jhula, that connects the seeker to the opposite side of the Ganges. It is only just wide enough for two or three people to walk across shoulder to shoulder. After a sharp right turn, you are on the home stretch to Maharishi Central, circa 1968, the place where the Beatles were inspired to write some of their most compelling and spiritual music. Look hard enough and you will find photos of all of the Beatles, arriving as I did, on that gently swaying bridge.
If nothing else, the wide, swirling Ganges and the cloud-covered blue mountain range are enough to touch the hardest hearts. In this still magical valley there are dozens of tiny temples from which, by four thirty in the morning, you can hear the echoes of blowing conches, the chanting of the Hindu faithful, smell the pungent aroma of doop (north Indian hand-rolled incense) and smouldering cow-dung fires. Rishikesh overwhelms the senses and, within moments of arrival, transmits an immediate peace. After a few days the restless mind reads that as boredom but it soon turns into something deeper, richer and much harder to define.
Almost as soon as the Beatles had left, in the late spring of 1968, the Maharishi ordered the heavy iron front gates locked. No one, except local caretakers, some Indian followers and those foreigners bearing a signed letter from the master, was allowed entrance. As I fell into none of these categories on my first trip to Rishikesh in 1998 I was turned away in brusque Hindi by the guard. Still, I was determined to see inside the place in hopes it might somehow have remained frozen in time. After some debate, my wife Vrnda and I decided that if we got up early enough, around five or six, we might sneak in. Not expecting intruders at such an early hour the guard was sound asleep, his rifle tucked under his chin in the small booth at the outside perimeter. We walked silently through the ten-acre estate, with its own functioning post office, a large multi-storey dormitory and several dilapidated stone cottages, then decided to sneak out through a second gate at the opposite end of the property. There we met a good-natured wide-awake guard, who advised us politely not to go out that way as there were man-eating tigers, spitting cobras, and several wild elephants in the jungle beyond. Not to mention the three-hundred-foot drop directly into the rock-strewn river below.
Several months later I took my twenty-four-year-old son Devin, along with Sanjay Khemani, a family friend from Delhi, and a couple of mischievous Indian boys inside at dusk. This time there was no guard, no guns and even, no gate. Apparently the decades-long policy of guarding the birthplace of the Beatles' White Album and the spiritual revolution of the sixties had been abandoned. As we ventured inside the basement of a large dormitory, an old man rushed over from one of the cottages and warned us to come out immediately: the tigers often came at dusk to feast on young deer in the ravaged rooms that had once hosted the élite of the pop world. We didn't have to be told twice. We made our way to the famous house where the master had met privately with the Beatles to discuss the inscrutable Truth he had offered the war-weary world of the late 1960s. It was not at all the "million-dollar staccato house" to which John Lennon had referred impishly in his quasi-musical litany to the Maharishi but, rather, a simple stone and wood house with several large windows that allowed us to see inside. There was a moderately large living room, a kitchen, and perhaps two bedrooms at the back. Legend has it there is a cave underneath the house where the Maharishi performed deep meditation. What struck me was how often writers like myself, without any first-hand knowledge, exaggerated John's description that this house was some kind of mansion with a helipad. The Maharishi's elaborate chair - asana — with carved lion's feet stood empty on a veranda facing the compound, broken, weather-beaten, and perhaps not used since the Beatles had sat round him and strummed their acoustic guitars. The next morning I came back alone, excited and almost able to feel the imprint of the Beatles and co. from some thirty years before. This time I met an old sannyasi (renunciant), His Holiness Ravindra Damodara Swami, a god-brother of the Maharishi. He remembered well the Beatles' brief, but very public time there, and dancing with Mia Farrow during an impromptu acoustic concert by Donovan, the Beatles and Mike Love on the roof of the dining hall. He also recalled the day a helicopter took John Lennon and the guru for a ride over the Rishikesh valley. Intrigued, I questioned him further but he only smiled and offered me a tattered notebook he took from a trunk. It contained some seventy pages of scrawled Hindi which had evidently been a monk's diary. "You write book about Beatles and Guru Maharaja then you must read this, my writing from that time. Everything is here. You please take, sir!" he ventured. He asked me to return it after I had read it. He then walked me down the curving lane to the front gates and the Ganges, pointing out along the way four pebble-covered stone domes, which he said the Maharishi had built for the Beatles to use for advanced meditation. Inside, the little buildings were about ten feet round at the base with a small area for resting, reading or eating, and a little wooden ladder to a platform on which they would presumably have sat in the lotus position to ascend into the lofty Godhead from which we all spring. They were never used.
In many ways the Maharishi's Rishikesh estate is a kind of cultural time-warp. The events that took place there so long ago have somehow imprinted themselves on its fibre. Pilgrimage is an ancient and important element of human history and my trek to Rishikesh informed and inspired this book. There, among the old stones, rusted signs, tigers and solitary sadhus, many of my views on the Beatles' real import in our cultural history were crystallized. In the exotic, perfumed Himalayan foothills I was surrounded by the ghosts of John Lennon and his cohorts and simultaneously exorcized any doubts I might have had about going forward with this potentially risky book. Here, in a visionary flash, John and Paul were sitting on the stone steps of the former's bungalow composing the gentle Ί Will' while Ringo smoked a cigarette at their feet. As Donovan and George played love songs in the sunny grounds, the Beatle wives chatted in a circle with the children of the ashram staff. Overwhelmed by the enduring magic that hovered among the broken buildings I left my companions to stand alone on the edge of the mountain about which Donovan had once sung: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is," and made a kind of silent pact with the history before me. For everything that this place - and, indeed, the Beatles — had given me I would write without reservation or restraint. Two years later, I am in a cramped mobile home in a northern Florida campground and you are at the other end of this collection of words, which spilled out in my search for the Beatles' secret history. Whether or not I got it right now seems entirely up to you.
Geoffrey Giuliano (Jagannatha Dasa)
August 9, 2009, Bangkok
There is a rare film of a long-ago afternoon in February 1968 preserved )y an Italian television crew who, along with the rest of the world's media, descended on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's enclave in Rishi-cesh for a glimpse of the Beatles as aspiring mystics. Even today it is an enticing image. Here are John, Paul, George, Ringo, Mike Love, Donovan, Mia Farrow with her sister Prudence and brother Johnny, and the Beatle wives singing sweetly to the jangling of acoustic guitars, "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain", "When The Saints Go Marching In" - fronted by George Harrison and Mia Farrow - "You Are My Sunshine", "Jingle Bells", as well as a ragged rendition of the Hare Krishna mantra. The Maharishi urged everyone, "Fathom the infinity, dive into the Ganges. Fathom the infinity!" To which George replied, "Hey, I guess we don't merely just exist after all!"I played it back in my head in the early summer of 2000 as I struggled along in the stifling midday sun past the sparkling Ganges, past the thatched huts of a small group of ash-covered, dope-smoking babas, and finally the monsoon-carved, boulder-strewn left turn that took me to the Maharishi's padlocked front door.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time in Rishikesh, first drawn there in the early 1990s by images I saw as a kid flickering across my family's old black and white TV, of George, John and their friends walking peacefully along brick walkways lined with painted stones, deep inside the Maharishi's secret Shangri-la. Driving along the road from Hardwar (the nearest train stop from Delhi) I might have missed it, but even without being told I knew somehow that this was the place. Although the area has been built up over succeeding decades, Rishikesh is still a quaint village highlighted by an astounding black-topped suspension bridge, Ram Jhula, that connects the seeker to the opposite side of the Ganges. It is only just wide enough for two or three people to walk across shoulder to shoulder. After a sharp right turn, you are on the home stretch to Maharishi Central, circa 1968, the place where the Beatles were inspired to write some of their most compelling and spiritual music. Look hard enough and you will find photos of all of the Beatles, arriving as I did, on that gently swaying bridge.
If nothing else, the wide, swirling Ganges and the cloud-covered blue mountain range are enough to touch the hardest hearts. In this still magical valley there are dozens of tiny temples from which, by four thirty in the morning, you can hear the echoes of blowing conches, the chanting of the Hindu faithful, smell the pungent aroma of doop (north Indian hand-rolled incense) and smouldering cow-dung fires. Rishikesh overwhelms the senses and, within moments of arrival, transmits an immediate peace. After a few days the restless mind reads that as boredom but it soon turns into something deeper, richer and much harder to define.
Almost as soon as the Beatles had left, in the late spring of 1968, the Maharishi ordered the heavy iron front gates locked. No one, except local caretakers, some Indian followers and those foreigners bearing a signed letter from the master, was allowed entrance. As I fell into none of these categories on my first trip to Rishikesh in 1998 I was turned away in brusque Hindi by the guard. Still, I was determined to see inside the place in hopes it might somehow have remained frozen in time. After some debate, my wife Vrnda and I decided that if we got up early enough, around five or six, we might sneak in. Not expecting intruders at such an early hour the guard was sound asleep, his rifle tucked under his chin in the small booth at the outside perimeter. We walked silently through the ten-acre estate, with its own functioning post office, a large multi-storey dormitory and several dilapidated stone cottages, then decided to sneak out through a second gate at the opposite end of the property. There we met a good-natured wide-awake guard, who advised us politely not to go out that way as there were man-eating tigers, spitting cobras, and several wild elephants in the jungle beyond. Not to mention the three-hundred-foot drop directly into the rock-strewn river below.
Several months later I took my twenty-four-year-old son Devin, along with Sanjay Khemani, a family friend from Delhi, and a couple of mischievous Indian boys inside at dusk. This time there was no guard, no guns and even, no gate. Apparently the decades-long policy of guarding the birthplace of the Beatles' White Album and the spiritual revolution of the sixties had been abandoned. As we ventured inside the basement of a large dormitory, an old man rushed over from one of the cottages and warned us to come out immediately: the tigers often came at dusk to feast on young deer in the ravaged rooms that had once hosted the élite of the pop world. We didn't have to be told twice. We made our way to the famous house where the master had met privately with the Beatles to discuss the inscrutable Truth he had offered the war-weary world of the late 1960s. It was not at all the "million-dollar staccato house" to which John Lennon had referred impishly in his quasi-musical litany to the Maharishi but, rather, a simple stone and wood house with several large windows that allowed us to see inside. There was a moderately large living room, a kitchen, and perhaps two bedrooms at the back. Legend has it there is a cave underneath the house where the Maharishi performed deep meditation. What struck me was how often writers like myself, without any first-hand knowledge, exaggerated John's description that this house was some kind of mansion with a helipad. The Maharishi's elaborate chair - asana — with carved lion's feet stood empty on a veranda facing the compound, broken, weather-beaten, and perhaps not used since the Beatles had sat round him and strummed their acoustic guitars. The next morning I came back alone, excited and almost able to feel the imprint of the Beatles and co. from some thirty years before. This time I met an old sannyasi (renunciant), His Holiness Ravindra Damodara Swami, a god-brother of the Maharishi. He remembered well the Beatles' brief, but very public time there, and dancing with Mia Farrow during an impromptu acoustic concert by Donovan, the Beatles and Mike Love on the roof of the dining hall. He also recalled the day a helicopter took John Lennon and the guru for a ride over the Rishikesh valley. Intrigued, I questioned him further but he only smiled and offered me a tattered notebook he took from a trunk. It contained some seventy pages of scrawled Hindi which had evidently been a monk's diary. "You write book about Beatles and Guru Maharaja then you must read this, my writing from that time. Everything is here. You please take, sir!" he ventured. He asked me to return it after I had read it. He then walked me down the curving lane to the front gates and the Ganges, pointing out along the way four pebble-covered stone domes, which he said the Maharishi had built for the Beatles to use for advanced meditation. Inside, the little buildings were about ten feet round at the base with a small area for resting, reading or eating, and a little wooden ladder to a platform on which they would presumably have sat in the lotus position to ascend into the lofty Godhead from which we all spring. They were never used.
In many ways the Maharishi's Rishikesh estate is a kind of cultural time-warp. The events that took place there so long ago have somehow imprinted themselves on its fibre. Pilgrimage is an ancient and important element of human history and my trek to Rishikesh informed and inspired this book. There, among the old stones, rusted signs, tigers and solitary sadhus, many of my views on the Beatles' real import in our cultural history were crystallized. In the exotic, perfumed Himalayan foothills I was surrounded by the ghosts of John Lennon and his cohorts and simultaneously exorcized any doubts I might have had about going forward with this potentially risky book. Here, in a visionary flash, John and Paul were sitting on the stone steps of the former's bungalow composing the gentle Ί Will' while Ringo smoked a cigarette at their feet. As Donovan and George played love songs in the sunny grounds, the Beatle wives chatted in a circle with the children of the ashram staff. Overwhelmed by the enduring magic that hovered among the broken buildings I left my companions to stand alone on the edge of the mountain about which Donovan had once sung: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is," and made a kind of silent pact with the history before me. For everything that this place - and, indeed, the Beatles — had given me I would write without reservation or restraint. Two years later, I am in a cramped mobile home in a northern Florida campground and you are at the other end of this collection of words, which spilled out in my search for the Beatles' secret history. Whether or not I got it right now seems entirely up to you.
Geoffrey Giuliano (Jagannatha Dasa)
August 9, 2009, Bangkok
IMAGINE NATION / UNCOVERING THE LENNON LEGACY
DOWNLOAD THE BOOK AT ICONEDITIONS.NET
Herein is the introduction from 'LENNON IN AMERICA / BASED ON THE LOST LENNON DIARIES' Giuliano's most notorious tome:
Now that John Lennon is twenty years dead, the law of the land will tell you that any appreciable remnant of his manifest time on this earth belongs chiefly to the corporate entity formed around his good name after his assassination. Still, if you think carefully about what Lennon stood for as an artist and a human being, it's difficult to go along with this suit-and-tie theory that anybody can ever actually own music. Let alone something as ethereal and delicate as the persona of a breakout artist like John. Certainly one's descendants should be allotted a share, perhaps even the lion's share, of any profits accruing from the remaining portfolio of their loved one's creative endeavors. Once an artist projects himself into the world, however, and is embraced by the public, how his works are regarded and what history has to say about him have little to do with anyone, not his business associates, his family, nor in the end, even himself. Of course, there exists a profound interest in maintaining the status quo, thus protecting said commercial concerns, but some things are quite simply bigger than that. Bigger than money, bigger than ego, bigger often than even time itself. Things like the consciousness-expanding, life-altering, knee-trembling mind and music of John Winston Ono Lennon. There's a danger too (which is something we see now with the current Lennon estate) that in so tightly sitting on
John's cultural legacy there is the urge to embrace revisionist history.
That is, trying to sanitize (and therefore commercialize) the life and times of the artist toward a more satisfactory bottom line. That the several-hundred-million-dollar empire currently controlled by the acquisitive Yoko Ono is a significant impediment to the free flow of ideas regarding the truth about brother John seems to me obvious. To see Yoko and her right-hand man Elliot Mintz rolling through life on the momentum of John's international love and goodwill is, frankly, frustrating. The fact is that John and Yoko endured a complicated, often explosive, ultimately painful relationship which, in my opinion, says much more about John's gnawing need, abject insecurity, and external emptiness than anything to do with universal love and peace. Mintz, too, has literally made a career from his relationship with John, but the truth is that Lennon, by his own admission, was generally contemptuous of the man, rarely wanting him around, and considered him exploitative, divisive and even dangerous. With the publication of this book, when Mintz is out there blowing smoke about what great buddies he and John really were, it might be instructive to inquire as to what Lennon actually had to say about him in his journals. Elliot's profound silence, I'm sure, would very neatly fill the Albert Hall.
When you respect and admire someone as much as I do John Lennon, it's difficult to sit back and allow anyone to try to turn the man into some sort of psychedelized Disney character with their tatty Une of happy Lennon greeting cards, barbecue aprons, eyewear, and so much else even less tasteful and more humiliating. I admit it may seem presumptuous for me, who only ever spent ten minutes in the man's company, to step forward with the kind of potentially myth-busting views presented in this book. I know too that the popular concept insists one has to be personally intimate with one's subject to accurately portray them in print, but those familiar with the art of biography will realize this can actually be a serious impediment to the committed truth-seeker. Rather, in this case, I have spent some twenty-five years studying and writing about John Lennon and his milieu, not to mention the deep relationships I've developed along the way with John's Liverpool family and his inner circle of friends and associates.
Ultimately, I don't give a damn about what anyone says about me. All that seems to fade away rather rapidly after one reaches forty. But I do have a real interest in the facts about truth-teller John's life being told, and so far that hasn't happened. Not with May Pang's only
occasionally insightful book; Albert Goldman's full-frontal assault; tarot guru John Green's generally evenhanded memoir; or even Lennon-turncoat Fred Seaman's pithy, self-serving tome. Further, John's English family doesn't really know anything about his later years, the Beatles certainly won't turn any heads with their own multi-pound press release memoir, and Yoko has already said she's waiting for many of the principals in John's life to die before she even considers putting pen to paper or indeed publishing his lost diaries. As far as I'm concerned, that leaves me. An enthusiastic rebel ever since I was sent home from a junior high school dance for wearing a dickie instead of a tie in 1966, I have no problem going toe-to-toe with Yoko or anyone else. For all the deep internal trekking done byJohn on behalf of all of us, it seems a small price to pay.
Despite its early revolutionary overtones rock 'n' roll is perhaps the most deeply conservative business on earth. So patently incestuous and uptight are these old rock stars and the people around them that literally no one is ready to own up about anything. With so much money at the end of each dangling chord, these one-time precocious pop stars are now firmly fixed at the very pinnacle of the cautious institutions they once so abhorred. It seems only right therefore that someone, somewhere, call a halt to all this towering, temporal, self-interest and take up the challenge of John's great, still untold tale. I have had possession of copies of Lennon's never-published diariesvia my old chum Harry Nilsson) since early 1983 and was frankly very, very reticent to try to do anything with them. Can you imagine what it feels like to hold in your hand a document you know has the lower to change the course of Beatles history completely and
forever? What do you do with that?
Finally, after a great deal of concentrated soul searching I set off on my quest, amassing quite a lot of equally intoxicating source material, including much of Lennon's final private correspondence, rare audio tapes and, of course, many exclusive eyewitness accounts from
insiders like May Pang, Fred Seaman, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, to name only a few. What you will not find in this book, however, is the personal voice of John Lennon as quoted from his diaries. Lennon's journal entries were often incomplete thoughts and snippets—the exact meaning of which is difficult to discern, absent the knowledge I gleaned from my many other sources. Instead, the diaries served as collaborating source material for the provocative true story of Lennon s final years. I absorbed not only factual information from the diaries, but also a small mountain of other materials revealing more than twenty years of John's dangling thoughts and feelings as committed to both paper and magnetic tape by the great man himself. Perhaps the real challenge was filtering so much incredible source material through my poor Beatle-obsessed brain into the broader, rounder epic of Lennon' s incredible life in America that is this book. Though Lennon was certainly my inspiration throughout, this is the story of John's final years from my viewpoint as told in my words. On occasion you will find direct quotes of Lennon or others in his orbit. Those are not from his diaries, but rather, from the voluminous record I have gathered through the years by conducting numerous personal interviews, sleuthing amid piles of memorabilia, and combing through various published biographies and memoirs.
Altogether some sixteen years of nearly full-time research and writing went into the book you now hold, I pray the narration herein ultimately proves enlightening as to the still largely misunderstood force and character of this troubled genius. I'm sure some, perhaps many, will see this sometimes unusually frank memoir as yet more of the kind of self-interested Lennon bashing which has flared up from time to time since his murder in 1980. My heart, however, tells me something different. Lennon and the Beatles meant everything to me, a lonely kid in Tampa back in the sixties. I raced out and bought everything they ever did, concentrating my devotion primarily on John. To my small circle of friends this man's incredible music and searing lyrics were so much more than mere teen pop. This was important stuff: Lennon casting himself out over the edge of his own musical mortality, shuttling back his perceptions to a turned-on audience of pimply wannabe hipsters—many, like me, already flirting with psychedelic reality, mysticism, various eco-causes and the like. Then, as now, John Lennon was a bona fide cultural hero I admired him as much for his mile-high whimsy as his grit. It is out of my enduring affection for John that I now forever tie myself to the whipping post with the publication of this similarly in-your-face book about his unhappy last years. Providence, one might reason, bestowed upon me all this unseen info for a reason.
Frankly, the only audience whose often tender sensibilities give me some pause in relation to this work are the tens of thousands of dedicated Beatle People the world over whose enduring love for John Lennon and the Fabs compels them to attend just about every Fab-related anniversary, travel the world to stand where their heroes once stood and scour Beatle conventions for the latest gunk from the ever-rolling memorabilia mill surrounding the group. I trust they will try to understand the sincerity of my mission to ferret out the facts on the dismal final days of the charismatic founder of the Beatles—a difficult task given one's personal hopes that Mr Lennon's turbulent life had turned out less tragically than it ultimately did. Beyond that, respect the solidarity of their affection for all of the Beatles and the almost transcendent aura which still surrounds their persona some thirty years after they split up in April 1970.
Some may also question why, in this enlightened age of sexual choice, Lennon's various bedroom or bathroom habits are anyone's concern. The simple answer is that they wouldn't be if he were a dumber, or an accountant, but as a renowned poet who mirrored his innermost thoughts and feelings about life, all life, in his work, it is indeed most relevant. Deeply ingrained in the public's neurotic need to pry into the private fives of famous people is the subtler quest for real insight into those whose life and work have so intimately impacted ours. To ignore something as fundamental as an artist's sensual proclivities, especiallyan artist of Lennon's mythic proportions, would be a profound disservice to his memory. Moreover, in John's case where his often bizarre sexual habits were key signposts to forming an accurate composite picture of the man, such a discussion is not only warrantedbut essential. Wasn't it Lennon who once sang "All I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth"? To settle for less would be a dreadful stain against the memory, the man and his phenomenal work.
Here's to John: Flawed and human as he was, still the single greatest artist of the twentieth century.
Geoffrey Giuliano
Balaji Ashram
Vrndavana, Uttar Pradesh, India
July 30, 2001
Herein is the introduction from 'LENNON IN AMERICA / BASED ON THE LOST LENNON DIARIES' Giuliano's most notorious tome:
Now that John Lennon is twenty years dead, the law of the land will tell you that any appreciable remnant of his manifest time on this earth belongs chiefly to the corporate entity formed around his good name after his assassination. Still, if you think carefully about what Lennon stood for as an artist and a human being, it's difficult to go along with this suit-and-tie theory that anybody can ever actually own music. Let alone something as ethereal and delicate as the persona of a breakout artist like John. Certainly one's descendants should be allotted a share, perhaps even the lion's share, of any profits accruing from the remaining portfolio of their loved one's creative endeavors. Once an artist projects himself into the world, however, and is embraced by the public, how his works are regarded and what history has to say about him have little to do with anyone, not his business associates, his family, nor in the end, even himself. Of course, there exists a profound interest in maintaining the status quo, thus protecting said commercial concerns, but some things are quite simply bigger than that. Bigger than money, bigger than ego, bigger often than even time itself. Things like the consciousness-expanding, life-altering, knee-trembling mind and music of John Winston Ono Lennon. There's a danger too (which is something we see now with the current Lennon estate) that in so tightly sitting on
John's cultural legacy there is the urge to embrace revisionist history.
That is, trying to sanitize (and therefore commercialize) the life and times of the artist toward a more satisfactory bottom line. That the several-hundred-million-dollar empire currently controlled by the acquisitive Yoko Ono is a significant impediment to the free flow of ideas regarding the truth about brother John seems to me obvious. To see Yoko and her right-hand man Elliot Mintz rolling through life on the momentum of John's international love and goodwill is, frankly, frustrating. The fact is that John and Yoko endured a complicated, often explosive, ultimately painful relationship which, in my opinion, says much more about John's gnawing need, abject insecurity, and external emptiness than anything to do with universal love and peace. Mintz, too, has literally made a career from his relationship with John, but the truth is that Lennon, by his own admission, was generally contemptuous of the man, rarely wanting him around, and considered him exploitative, divisive and even dangerous. With the publication of this book, when Mintz is out there blowing smoke about what great buddies he and John really were, it might be instructive to inquire as to what Lennon actually had to say about him in his journals. Elliot's profound silence, I'm sure, would very neatly fill the Albert Hall.
When you respect and admire someone as much as I do John Lennon, it's difficult to sit back and allow anyone to try to turn the man into some sort of psychedelized Disney character with their tatty Une of happy Lennon greeting cards, barbecue aprons, eyewear, and so much else even less tasteful and more humiliating. I admit it may seem presumptuous for me, who only ever spent ten minutes in the man's company, to step forward with the kind of potentially myth-busting views presented in this book. I know too that the popular concept insists one has to be personally intimate with one's subject to accurately portray them in print, but those familiar with the art of biography will realize this can actually be a serious impediment to the committed truth-seeker. Rather, in this case, I have spent some twenty-five years studying and writing about John Lennon and his milieu, not to mention the deep relationships I've developed along the way with John's Liverpool family and his inner circle of friends and associates.
Ultimately, I don't give a damn about what anyone says about me. All that seems to fade away rather rapidly after one reaches forty. But I do have a real interest in the facts about truth-teller John's life being told, and so far that hasn't happened. Not with May Pang's only
occasionally insightful book; Albert Goldman's full-frontal assault; tarot guru John Green's generally evenhanded memoir; or even Lennon-turncoat Fred Seaman's pithy, self-serving tome. Further, John's English family doesn't really know anything about his later years, the Beatles certainly won't turn any heads with their own multi-pound press release memoir, and Yoko has already said she's waiting for many of the principals in John's life to die before she even considers putting pen to paper or indeed publishing his lost diaries. As far as I'm concerned, that leaves me. An enthusiastic rebel ever since I was sent home from a junior high school dance for wearing a dickie instead of a tie in 1966, I have no problem going toe-to-toe with Yoko or anyone else. For all the deep internal trekking done byJohn on behalf of all of us, it seems a small price to pay.
Despite its early revolutionary overtones rock 'n' roll is perhaps the most deeply conservative business on earth. So patently incestuous and uptight are these old rock stars and the people around them that literally no one is ready to own up about anything. With so much money at the end of each dangling chord, these one-time precocious pop stars are now firmly fixed at the very pinnacle of the cautious institutions they once so abhorred. It seems only right therefore that someone, somewhere, call a halt to all this towering, temporal, self-interest and take up the challenge of John's great, still untold tale. I have had possession of copies of Lennon's never-published diariesvia my old chum Harry Nilsson) since early 1983 and was frankly very, very reticent to try to do anything with them. Can you imagine what it feels like to hold in your hand a document you know has the lower to change the course of Beatles history completely and
forever? What do you do with that?
Finally, after a great deal of concentrated soul searching I set off on my quest, amassing quite a lot of equally intoxicating source material, including much of Lennon's final private correspondence, rare audio tapes and, of course, many exclusive eyewitness accounts from
insiders like May Pang, Fred Seaman, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, to name only a few. What you will not find in this book, however, is the personal voice of John Lennon as quoted from his diaries. Lennon's journal entries were often incomplete thoughts and snippets—the exact meaning of which is difficult to discern, absent the knowledge I gleaned from my many other sources. Instead, the diaries served as collaborating source material for the provocative true story of Lennon s final years. I absorbed not only factual information from the diaries, but also a small mountain of other materials revealing more than twenty years of John's dangling thoughts and feelings as committed to both paper and magnetic tape by the great man himself. Perhaps the real challenge was filtering so much incredible source material through my poor Beatle-obsessed brain into the broader, rounder epic of Lennon' s incredible life in America that is this book. Though Lennon was certainly my inspiration throughout, this is the story of John's final years from my viewpoint as told in my words. On occasion you will find direct quotes of Lennon or others in his orbit. Those are not from his diaries, but rather, from the voluminous record I have gathered through the years by conducting numerous personal interviews, sleuthing amid piles of memorabilia, and combing through various published biographies and memoirs.
Altogether some sixteen years of nearly full-time research and writing went into the book you now hold, I pray the narration herein ultimately proves enlightening as to the still largely misunderstood force and character of this troubled genius. I'm sure some, perhaps many, will see this sometimes unusually frank memoir as yet more of the kind of self-interested Lennon bashing which has flared up from time to time since his murder in 1980. My heart, however, tells me something different. Lennon and the Beatles meant everything to me, a lonely kid in Tampa back in the sixties. I raced out and bought everything they ever did, concentrating my devotion primarily on John. To my small circle of friends this man's incredible music and searing lyrics were so much more than mere teen pop. This was important stuff: Lennon casting himself out over the edge of his own musical mortality, shuttling back his perceptions to a turned-on audience of pimply wannabe hipsters—many, like me, already flirting with psychedelic reality, mysticism, various eco-causes and the like. Then, as now, John Lennon was a bona fide cultural hero I admired him as much for his mile-high whimsy as his grit. It is out of my enduring affection for John that I now forever tie myself to the whipping post with the publication of this similarly in-your-face book about his unhappy last years. Providence, one might reason, bestowed upon me all this unseen info for a reason.
Frankly, the only audience whose often tender sensibilities give me some pause in relation to this work are the tens of thousands of dedicated Beatle People the world over whose enduring love for John Lennon and the Fabs compels them to attend just about every Fab-related anniversary, travel the world to stand where their heroes once stood and scour Beatle conventions for the latest gunk from the ever-rolling memorabilia mill surrounding the group. I trust they will try to understand the sincerity of my mission to ferret out the facts on the dismal final days of the charismatic founder of the Beatles—a difficult task given one's personal hopes that Mr Lennon's turbulent life had turned out less tragically than it ultimately did. Beyond that, respect the solidarity of their affection for all of the Beatles and the almost transcendent aura which still surrounds their persona some thirty years after they split up in April 1970.
Some may also question why, in this enlightened age of sexual choice, Lennon's various bedroom or bathroom habits are anyone's concern. The simple answer is that they wouldn't be if he were a dumber, or an accountant, but as a renowned poet who mirrored his innermost thoughts and feelings about life, all life, in his work, it is indeed most relevant. Deeply ingrained in the public's neurotic need to pry into the private fives of famous people is the subtler quest for real insight into those whose life and work have so intimately impacted ours. To ignore something as fundamental as an artist's sensual proclivities, especiallyan artist of Lennon's mythic proportions, would be a profound disservice to his memory. Moreover, in John's case where his often bizarre sexual habits were key signposts to forming an accurate composite picture of the man, such a discussion is not only warrantedbut essential. Wasn't it Lennon who once sang "All I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth"? To settle for less would be a dreadful stain against the memory, the man and his phenomenal work.
Here's to John: Flawed and human as he was, still the single greatest artist of the twentieth century.
Geoffrey Giuliano
Balaji Ashram
Vrndavana, Uttar Pradesh, India
July 30, 2001
THE BALLAD OF GEOFF & YOKO
Guest Blogger / David Haber, Beatles News Editor
War is over, if you want it. Unless you’re Yoko Ono, and the war you’re fighting is a war against the truth. Or, so says Geoffrey Giuliano.
Since 1984, acclaimed Beatles author, journalist and actor Geoffrey Giuliano has written twenty books on the Beatles, and thirty books altogether, including books about Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the writing of his first book, “The Beatles, A Celebration,” which was published in October, 1986. Paul McCartney wrote the forward for his second book, “John Lennon, My Brother”, written with John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird.
But as the years passed with each new book about the Beatles that he researched and wrote, Giuliano started to get to the real picture of the lives of the Beatles, buried under the veneer of their carefully crafted public relations image.
Giuliano told Beatles News, “When I wrote my first two books, ‘The Beatles, A Celebration’ and ‘John Lennon, My Brother,’ those were very complimentary. Even the Beatles had ‘The Beatles, A Celebration’ on the coffee table at Apple. And then, as I continued my research, and went to Liverpool and got in touch with the Beatles’ families, a lot of great things came up, but a lot of disturbing things came up as well. I’m a writer and a journalist, and I have an oath and allegiance to the truth. And fortunately, or I guess unfortunately, I’ve discovered and still possess a lot of information on John Lennon in particular and the other Beatles’ private and personal lives that if you look at them, should change your worldview of who they were.”
Giuliano knows his presentation of the “real” Beatles to the world in his books hasn’t endeared him to some Beatles fans who’d rather view them through rose-colored glasses. He’s sure it hasn’t made Yoko Ono happy, either.
"I don't see Yoko as particularly talented,” Giuliano says. “John Lennon has said, look, if you want to blame her for breaking up the Beatles, please credit her for Imagine, and there's no question, if you read Grapefruit, that Imagine came from Yoko’s influence or inspiration. But surely, the entire body of his solo work cannot be credited to her.”
“I believe that Yoko was a not very talented young person who had her own issues, her family was concerned about her mental state in Japan, she was a hustler, esoteric, exotic, worlds away from Cynthia. But if you tear apart her contribution to John Lennon’s life, it’s far more negative than positive.”
What were Yoko’s contributions to John’s life? Because of his extensive research and unrivaled Beatles archives that he’s collected in the course of his work over the last twenty-five years, Giuliano can shed some very specific light on that question.
Giuliano said, "When Yoko Ono met John Lennon, she was living with her husband, Tony Cox, in London. And there was a document which has been referred to in a number of books and I actually at one point in London was shown a copy of something that was purported to be this document, which was an agreement between Tony Cox and Yoko Ono saying basically that Yoko would render to Tony Cox fifty percent of whatever she got from John Lennon, or got out of John Lennon. Now that, to me right off the bat, doesn't sound like true love."
Giuliano also has documentation about John’s use of psychedelic drugs and where John was in his life at the time when he first met Yoko.
"The acid wore him down. His career, his bad marriage to Cynthia,the incredible pressure of being John Lennon. He was ground down by his life, and for John, Yoko was more an escape from his mock-Tudor life in Kenwood, as he put it, rather than going towards something else. It was him wanting to get away and distance himself the teenage marriage thing he got into with Cynthia.”
Although in the decades since 1969 it has become to be thought of as apocryphal, Giuliano believes that from those bad beginnings, Yoko Ono really did go on to break up the Beatles.
“I know the truth. The Beatles had no love for this woman. She was a negative influence on the continuation of the Beatles. She felt the Beatles were such a great influence over John that it threatened her position, and so she needed to get him out of there, so that she could have him for herself.”
“That’s my position on Yoko Ono, and I have made that very clear in all of my books, and Yoko is aware of that.”
But why does Giuliano take these positions when it makes him unpopular with some of the fans, and some of the people he writes about?
Giuliano proudly says, “I think of John Lennon as a hero, as a mentor. John Lennon’s message was very clear. He said, all I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth. He didn’t mince words, he didn’t waltz around the truth, so why should I?”
“There’s no sense in wasting my life by sitting down and writing twenty books about the Beatles that are just press releases, they’ve got people to do that for them. As a journalist, I’m only interested in getting to the truth.”
“The Beatles are far more interesting as human beings, flawed, fallible humans that came from extraordinary circumstances with everything going against them, for their talent to rise up from nothing and supersede their environment, and allow them to change the whole world, that’s an amazing, much more compelling and interesting story than some kind of Disneyland, magical nonsense that these people keep putting out.”
“I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life doing this, documenting the Beatles, because I didn’t want the sands of time to sweep it away. I wanted it accurately recorded.”
And recorded it, he has. Over the past twenty five years, Giuliano has built a job writing books about the Beatles into a publishing empire, composed of a backlist of thirty published books and over 200 audio tapes, backed up by an impressive library of rare interview tapes, photographs and other archival material about the Beatles and Rock and Roll that can be found nowhere else in the world.
So, what do you do after you’ve written and published thirty books and 200 tapes? Eight years ago, Giuliano, who is a vegetarian and meditates, and was making frequent trips to meditate in India, ended up in Bangkok, Thailand, to put his life in order. One of his books, “Paint It Black, The Murder of Brian Jones,” was made into a movie called “Stoned, The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones,” made by Stephen Woolley, who also made “Interview With A Vampire” and “The Crying Game.” He was doing some acting, and had done his own radio show. And he came to the realization that he had done it all, and decided to retire.
Giuliano’s plan for retirement was to sell his publishing empire, all the rights to his thirty books and 200 audio tapes, including all of his rare archival tapes and photographs, for $12 million, which would provide a nice living for him and his family in Bangkok. He formed a company, G2 Media, to organize it all. Over the following few years he got some offers to buy one piece of the company or another, but he always refused, preferring not to break up his Beatles books, other books, published tapes and all of his archival material, which alone could be used to create other insightful new books and documentary movies.
Around this time, he became aware that Yoko was buying up material about herself. He said, “I sell Beatles memorabilia from time to time from my collection that’s worth a few million dollars, and I was approached by someone who said that Yoko Ono was purchasing and looking to purchase tapes, books, documents, about herself or her and John, and inquired if I had anything I might want to sell her.” But he says, he didn’t think much of it at the time.
In the meantime, writers don’t stop writing, and in 2001 he published the controversial and very successful “Lennon In America,” based on material from John’s lost diaries, copies of which he obtained from John’s long-time friend, Harry Nilsson.
“When I got copies of Lennon’s diaries, people said, wow, you can’t publish that. The copyright clearly belongs to the Lennon estate. But my attorneys told me, no one owns a thought or an idea, only the particular expression of a thought or idea. That means I couldn’t quote from the diaries, I had to reword them. Which I did. That’s how I got around that one and Yoko didn’t appreciate it.”
“I later met someone who worked for Yoko who told me that Yoko was really worried about ‘Lennon In America.’ She left the country with Sean and hid-out in Switzerland until the publicity died down. Another reason I’m not on Yoko’s Christmas card list,” says Giuliano.
And for the last twenty-five years, Giuliano has had another book in the back of his mind, fueled by everything he’s learned about the Beatles and the life of John Lennon. He is currently working on a book called “Black Widow, Yoko Ono Unauthorized.”
Which brings us to the present, and Giuliano’s recent discovery of a special CD interview set that he produced several years ago but ended up never being put out. He found the CD masters in a drawer where he had forgotten them since the company that was to issue the set went out of business. It was to be a five CD box set of John Lennon interviews from 1969 and included many rare interviews including the Bag event in Vienna. The set took two years to assemble and edit, at the cost at that time of about $80 thousand.
Upon rediscovering the material, Giuliano realized that this year, 2009, is forty years since the interviews, and the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s bed-in for peace and international peace campaign. The timeliness of John’s anti-war philosophy to today’s problems jumped out at him as if the tapes were meant to be saved for just this moment in history.
So Giuliano went out and hired one of the world’s best designers, and worked up the CD set into a new package that is going to be something that’s really special.
The new CD set, now called “John Lennon, Man of Peace”, will include the original five CDs of John Lennon interviews from 1969, a 32 page book of liner notes about the CDs, an additional special 300 page book of interviews of John Lennon from 1969, created especially for this set, a previously unpublished 8x10 photo of John from 1969, a button and a bumper sticker, all contained inside a limited edition specially designed vinyl shoulder bag. The impressive set can be seen at its official web site, http://www.johnlennonmanofpeace.com.
It’s very likely you’ve gone ahead and viewed the link above. I did, when I first heard about the site. So did Yoko Ono.
Shortly after the release of the web site, Giuliano received a cease and desist letter from Yoko Ono’s lawyers. Want to try to guess why? Because Giuliano had used interview material who’s rights she claimed? (Which he hadn’t.) No. Because Giuliano had used photographs she claimed she owned? (Which he hadn’t.) No, nothing like that.
Yoko’s lawyers informed Giuliano that Yoko believed she legally owned the words “Imagine” and “Peace.” And that Giuliano did not have her permission to use those words, “Imagine” and “Peace,” on the accessories included with the “John Lennon, Man of Peace” product.
Through his company, G2 Media, Giuliano responded with several letters back and forth between his company and Yoko’s lawyers. His company gave Yoko’s people complete and unrestricted access to the new product and to vet all the material it contained. He even went as far to change “War Is Over, If You Want It” that was to be printed on the set’s shoulder bag, and changed it simply to “War Is Over”.
“I was begrudgingly cooperative,” Giuliano remembers, “but I didn’t want any trouble with her anymore. I was trying to be nice.”
The original cease and desist order and the situation surrounding it has still not been completely settled. But in the course of the letters being exchanged between Giuliano’s company and Ono’s lawyers, and remembering how he previously had heard that Yoko was interested in buying material about herself, Giuliano wondered if Yoko might not be interested in buying his entire company, the rights to all of his published books and vast unpublished archive, just as he’s been openly and publicly trying to sell it for some time.
“My company, G2 Media, offered Yoko Ono, through her attorneys, the same deal that I offered anybody who’s got $12 million to spend. The lawyers wrote back and said Yoko, or perhaps some associated company, like Apple, could have an interest in the material, and they asked for a brief description of all the material, books, tapes and archives.”
It was at this point, sensing there might be some kind of deal in the works, that Giuliano brought in his own lawyer, to protect his financial interests. However, he says he quickly heard from the lawyer for another reason.
“The lawyer told me, Geoffrey, we have a problem. Yoko Ono is talking to the district attorney in Kings County, and they’re attempting to have you arrested for blackmail.”
Giuliano couldn’t believe it. He says, “I’m not a criminal, just a hard working guy, honest to a fault. I’m not trying to blackmail anybody, my company was just offering her the same deal my website was offering, so that I could retire.”
“I have tapes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that no one’s ever heard, and on these tapes they talk about all manner of things. And after the latest cease and desist order, I said, OK, well, maybe it’s time to put this thing down, I’ve been fighting with this chick for years, it’s getting a little old, so, look, why don’t we just offer her the company? I wasn’t trying to blackmail her, first of all, if you’re going to blackmail someone, you wouldn’t do it through their attorneys, would you?”
Mr. Giuliano is still interested in selling all of his research on the Beatles and John Lennon, including his vast audio archive of lost and historically important, unpublished and very private Lennon home tapes. In addition, he’s currently seeking a publisher for his next book, “Black Widow, Yoko Ono Unauthorized,” as well as two new books, “Lennon In London” and “Lennon In Liverpool,” the follow ups to his successful book, “Lennon In America.” Film rights to “Lennon In America” are also available.
Giuliano says, “How can you like her? Because you see what she’s done to John, you see the weakness she exposed in John Lennon, how vulnerable he was. People have demonized me for exposing this. It’s very hard to like Yoko Ono and to have very much sympathy other than the fact that it was quite touching that during WWII she got separated from her family and after the atomic bombs dropped she was homeless with her two younger siblings and they had to beg, so she’s had kind of a tough life, but that doesn’t mean she’s had a charmed life also, and she has a modicum of talent, I suppose, in some quirky way, but certainly not mainstream, you know, nobody goes, ‘Hey! Let’s put on the Yoko Ono records tonight, kids!’ But would be talking about her if she never met John Lennon?”
But we are, indeed, talking about her, and Giuliano insists that it is his mission, he will never stop speaking and publishing the truth about Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
He says, “I guess I am now the Salman Rushdie of Rock and Roll. And Yoko is the Ayatollah.”
War is over, if you want it. Unless you’re Yoko Ono, and the war you’re fighting is a war against the truth. Or, so says Geoffrey Giuliano.
Since 1984, acclaimed Beatles author, journalist and actor Geoffrey Giuliano has written twenty books on the Beatles, and thirty books altogether, including books about Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the writing of his first book, “The Beatles, A Celebration,” which was published in October, 1986. Paul McCartney wrote the forward for his second book, “John Lennon, My Brother”, written with John Lennon’s sister Julia Baird.
But as the years passed with each new book about the Beatles that he researched and wrote, Giuliano started to get to the real picture of the lives of the Beatles, buried under the veneer of their carefully crafted public relations image.
Giuliano told Beatles News, “When I wrote my first two books, ‘The Beatles, A Celebration’ and ‘John Lennon, My Brother,’ those were very complimentary. Even the Beatles had ‘The Beatles, A Celebration’ on the coffee table at Apple. And then, as I continued my research, and went to Liverpool and got in touch with the Beatles’ families, a lot of great things came up, but a lot of disturbing things came up as well. I’m a writer and a journalist, and I have an oath and allegiance to the truth. And fortunately, or I guess unfortunately, I’ve discovered and still possess a lot of information on John Lennon in particular and the other Beatles’ private and personal lives that if you look at them, should change your worldview of who they were.”
Giuliano knows his presentation of the “real” Beatles to the world in his books hasn’t endeared him to some Beatles fans who’d rather view them through rose-colored glasses. He’s sure it hasn’t made Yoko Ono happy, either.
"I don't see Yoko as particularly talented,” Giuliano says. “John Lennon has said, look, if you want to blame her for breaking up the Beatles, please credit her for Imagine, and there's no question, if you read Grapefruit, that Imagine came from Yoko’s influence or inspiration. But surely, the entire body of his solo work cannot be credited to her.”
“I believe that Yoko was a not very talented young person who had her own issues, her family was concerned about her mental state in Japan, she was a hustler, esoteric, exotic, worlds away from Cynthia. But if you tear apart her contribution to John Lennon’s life, it’s far more negative than positive.”
What were Yoko’s contributions to John’s life? Because of his extensive research and unrivaled Beatles archives that he’s collected in the course of his work over the last twenty-five years, Giuliano can shed some very specific light on that question.
Giuliano said, "When Yoko Ono met John Lennon, she was living with her husband, Tony Cox, in London. And there was a document which has been referred to in a number of books and I actually at one point in London was shown a copy of something that was purported to be this document, which was an agreement between Tony Cox and Yoko Ono saying basically that Yoko would render to Tony Cox fifty percent of whatever she got from John Lennon, or got out of John Lennon. Now that, to me right off the bat, doesn't sound like true love."
Giuliano also has documentation about John’s use of psychedelic drugs and where John was in his life at the time when he first met Yoko.
"The acid wore him down. His career, his bad marriage to Cynthia,the incredible pressure of being John Lennon. He was ground down by his life, and for John, Yoko was more an escape from his mock-Tudor life in Kenwood, as he put it, rather than going towards something else. It was him wanting to get away and distance himself the teenage marriage thing he got into with Cynthia.”
Although in the decades since 1969 it has become to be thought of as apocryphal, Giuliano believes that from those bad beginnings, Yoko Ono really did go on to break up the Beatles.
“I know the truth. The Beatles had no love for this woman. She was a negative influence on the continuation of the Beatles. She felt the Beatles were such a great influence over John that it threatened her position, and so she needed to get him out of there, so that she could have him for herself.”
“That’s my position on Yoko Ono, and I have made that very clear in all of my books, and Yoko is aware of that.”
But why does Giuliano take these positions when it makes him unpopular with some of the fans, and some of the people he writes about?
Giuliano proudly says, “I think of John Lennon as a hero, as a mentor. John Lennon’s message was very clear. He said, all I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth. He didn’t mince words, he didn’t waltz around the truth, so why should I?”
“There’s no sense in wasting my life by sitting down and writing twenty books about the Beatles that are just press releases, they’ve got people to do that for them. As a journalist, I’m only interested in getting to the truth.”
“The Beatles are far more interesting as human beings, flawed, fallible humans that came from extraordinary circumstances with everything going against them, for their talent to rise up from nothing and supersede their environment, and allow them to change the whole world, that’s an amazing, much more compelling and interesting story than some kind of Disneyland, magical nonsense that these people keep putting out.”
“I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life doing this, documenting the Beatles, because I didn’t want the sands of time to sweep it away. I wanted it accurately recorded.”
And recorded it, he has. Over the past twenty five years, Giuliano has built a job writing books about the Beatles into a publishing empire, composed of a backlist of thirty published books and over 200 audio tapes, backed up by an impressive library of rare interview tapes, photographs and other archival material about the Beatles and Rock and Roll that can be found nowhere else in the world.
So, what do you do after you’ve written and published thirty books and 200 tapes? Eight years ago, Giuliano, who is a vegetarian and meditates, and was making frequent trips to meditate in India, ended up in Bangkok, Thailand, to put his life in order. One of his books, “Paint It Black, The Murder of Brian Jones,” was made into a movie called “Stoned, The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones,” made by Stephen Woolley, who also made “Interview With A Vampire” and “The Crying Game.” He was doing some acting, and had done his own radio show. And he came to the realization that he had done it all, and decided to retire.
Giuliano’s plan for retirement was to sell his publishing empire, all the rights to his thirty books and 200 audio tapes, including all of his rare archival tapes and photographs, for $12 million, which would provide a nice living for him and his family in Bangkok. He formed a company, G2 Media, to organize it all. Over the following few years he got some offers to buy one piece of the company or another, but he always refused, preferring not to break up his Beatles books, other books, published tapes and all of his archival material, which alone could be used to create other insightful new books and documentary movies.
Around this time, he became aware that Yoko was buying up material about herself. He said, “I sell Beatles memorabilia from time to time from my collection that’s worth a few million dollars, and I was approached by someone who said that Yoko Ono was purchasing and looking to purchase tapes, books, documents, about herself or her and John, and inquired if I had anything I might want to sell her.” But he says, he didn’t think much of it at the time.
In the meantime, writers don’t stop writing, and in 2001 he published the controversial and very successful “Lennon In America,” based on material from John’s lost diaries, copies of which he obtained from John’s long-time friend, Harry Nilsson.
“When I got copies of Lennon’s diaries, people said, wow, you can’t publish that. The copyright clearly belongs to the Lennon estate. But my attorneys told me, no one owns a thought or an idea, only the particular expression of a thought or idea. That means I couldn’t quote from the diaries, I had to reword them. Which I did. That’s how I got around that one and Yoko didn’t appreciate it.”
“I later met someone who worked for Yoko who told me that Yoko was really worried about ‘Lennon In America.’ She left the country with Sean and hid-out in Switzerland until the publicity died down. Another reason I’m not on Yoko’s Christmas card list,” says Giuliano.
And for the last twenty-five years, Giuliano has had another book in the back of his mind, fueled by everything he’s learned about the Beatles and the life of John Lennon. He is currently working on a book called “Black Widow, Yoko Ono Unauthorized.”
Which brings us to the present, and Giuliano’s recent discovery of a special CD interview set that he produced several years ago but ended up never being put out. He found the CD masters in a drawer where he had forgotten them since the company that was to issue the set went out of business. It was to be a five CD box set of John Lennon interviews from 1969 and included many rare interviews including the Bag event in Vienna. The set took two years to assemble and edit, at the cost at that time of about $80 thousand.
Upon rediscovering the material, Giuliano realized that this year, 2009, is forty years since the interviews, and the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s bed-in for peace and international peace campaign. The timeliness of John’s anti-war philosophy to today’s problems jumped out at him as if the tapes were meant to be saved for just this moment in history.
So Giuliano went out and hired one of the world’s best designers, and worked up the CD set into a new package that is going to be something that’s really special.
The new CD set, now called “John Lennon, Man of Peace”, will include the original five CDs of John Lennon interviews from 1969, a 32 page book of liner notes about the CDs, an additional special 300 page book of interviews of John Lennon from 1969, created especially for this set, a previously unpublished 8x10 photo of John from 1969, a button and a bumper sticker, all contained inside a limited edition specially designed vinyl shoulder bag. The impressive set can be seen at its official web site, http://www.johnlennonmanofpeace.com.
It’s very likely you’ve gone ahead and viewed the link above. I did, when I first heard about the site. So did Yoko Ono.
Shortly after the release of the web site, Giuliano received a cease and desist letter from Yoko Ono’s lawyers. Want to try to guess why? Because Giuliano had used interview material who’s rights she claimed? (Which he hadn’t.) No. Because Giuliano had used photographs she claimed she owned? (Which he hadn’t.) No, nothing like that.
Yoko’s lawyers informed Giuliano that Yoko believed she legally owned the words “Imagine” and “Peace.” And that Giuliano did not have her permission to use those words, “Imagine” and “Peace,” on the accessories included with the “John Lennon, Man of Peace” product.
Through his company, G2 Media, Giuliano responded with several letters back and forth between his company and Yoko’s lawyers. His company gave Yoko’s people complete and unrestricted access to the new product and to vet all the material it contained. He even went as far to change “War Is Over, If You Want It” that was to be printed on the set’s shoulder bag, and changed it simply to “War Is Over”.
“I was begrudgingly cooperative,” Giuliano remembers, “but I didn’t want any trouble with her anymore. I was trying to be nice.”
The original cease and desist order and the situation surrounding it has still not been completely settled. But in the course of the letters being exchanged between Giuliano’s company and Ono’s lawyers, and remembering how he previously had heard that Yoko was interested in buying material about herself, Giuliano wondered if Yoko might not be interested in buying his entire company, the rights to all of his published books and vast unpublished archive, just as he’s been openly and publicly trying to sell it for some time.
“My company, G2 Media, offered Yoko Ono, through her attorneys, the same deal that I offered anybody who’s got $12 million to spend. The lawyers wrote back and said Yoko, or perhaps some associated company, like Apple, could have an interest in the material, and they asked for a brief description of all the material, books, tapes and archives.”
It was at this point, sensing there might be some kind of deal in the works, that Giuliano brought in his own lawyer, to protect his financial interests. However, he says he quickly heard from the lawyer for another reason.
“The lawyer told me, Geoffrey, we have a problem. Yoko Ono is talking to the district attorney in Kings County, and they’re attempting to have you arrested for blackmail.”
Giuliano couldn’t believe it. He says, “I’m not a criminal, just a hard working guy, honest to a fault. I’m not trying to blackmail anybody, my company was just offering her the same deal my website was offering, so that I could retire.”
“I have tapes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that no one’s ever heard, and on these tapes they talk about all manner of things. And after the latest cease and desist order, I said, OK, well, maybe it’s time to put this thing down, I’ve been fighting with this chick for years, it’s getting a little old, so, look, why don’t we just offer her the company? I wasn’t trying to blackmail her, first of all, if you’re going to blackmail someone, you wouldn’t do it through their attorneys, would you?”
Mr. Giuliano is still interested in selling all of his research on the Beatles and John Lennon, including his vast audio archive of lost and historically important, unpublished and very private Lennon home tapes. In addition, he’s currently seeking a publisher for his next book, “Black Widow, Yoko Ono Unauthorized,” as well as two new books, “Lennon In London” and “Lennon In Liverpool,” the follow ups to his successful book, “Lennon In America.” Film rights to “Lennon In America” are also available.
Giuliano says, “How can you like her? Because you see what she’s done to John, you see the weakness she exposed in John Lennon, how vulnerable he was. People have demonized me for exposing this. It’s very hard to like Yoko Ono and to have very much sympathy other than the fact that it was quite touching that during WWII she got separated from her family and after the atomic bombs dropped she was homeless with her two younger siblings and they had to beg, so she’s had kind of a tough life, but that doesn’t mean she’s had a charmed life also, and she has a modicum of talent, I suppose, in some quirky way, but certainly not mainstream, you know, nobody goes, ‘Hey! Let’s put on the Yoko Ono records tonight, kids!’ But would be talking about her if she never met John Lennon?”
But we are, indeed, talking about her, and Giuliano insists that it is his mission, he will never stop speaking and publishing the truth about Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
He says, “I guess I am now the Salman Rushdie of Rock and Roll. And Yoko is the Ayatollah.”
JOHN LENNON FILM SPARKS PLAGIARISM SUIT
Originally Published In 'The Telegraph'
It is the debut film by Sam Taylor-Wood, the fashionable artist, and has already been spoken of as a possible Oscar contender by Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul, who bought the American rights.
Mandrake can disclose that Nowhere Boy, which stars Aaron Johnson as John Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his Aunt Mimi, faces a fight to reach the screen, however, as it is to be the subject of a legal action by a biographer who claims that it is based on his book and that he has not been paid or credited.
Geoffrey Giuliano, who co-wrote John Lennon, My Brother with Julia Baird, the half-sister of the late Beatle, alleges that she used material from their book in another memoir, on which the screenplay of Nowhere Boy is based, without his permission.
"There's only one reason she did it, and that's to screw me out of my share," he claims. "The vast majority of the research in her 2007 book, Imagine This, is mine. My lawyers are working on a lawsuit and will file it in London. We are asking that all copies of the book be recalled and destroyed and production on the movie be stopped."
A spokesman for the film says: "There is no merit to this claim. We are looking forward to the release."
It is the debut film by Sam Taylor-Wood, the fashionable artist, and has already been spoken of as a possible Oscar contender by Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul, who bought the American rights.
Mandrake can disclose that Nowhere Boy, which stars Aaron Johnson as John Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his Aunt Mimi, faces a fight to reach the screen, however, as it is to be the subject of a legal action by a biographer who claims that it is based on his book and that he has not been paid or credited.
Geoffrey Giuliano, who co-wrote John Lennon, My Brother with Julia Baird, the half-sister of the late Beatle, alleges that she used material from their book in another memoir, on which the screenplay of Nowhere Boy is based, without his permission.
"There's only one reason she did it, and that's to screw me out of my share," he claims. "The vast majority of the research in her 2007 book, Imagine This, is mine. My lawyers are working on a lawsuit and will file it in London. We are asking that all copies of the book be recalled and destroyed and production on the movie be stopped."
A spokesman for the film says: "There is no merit to this claim. We are looking forward to the release."
LENNON'S HALF SISTER FACES LEGAL ACTION FROM NOTED US AUTHOR OVER NEW BIO & FILM, 'NOWHERE BOY'
John Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, 62, and the makers of a new biopic on the late Beatle’s childhood face possible legal action from American author Geoffrey Giuliano.
The writer has penned several books on the Fab Four, apart from collaborating with Julia for the biography ‘John Lennon, My Brother’, published in the late Eighties.
While Julia wrote a second book titled ‘Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon’ in 2007 without Giuliano, the author claims that the tome is based on his previous research into the musician’s life.
He claims that half of Julia’s earnings from the upcoming biopic ‘Nowhere Boy’ should be given to him, and plans to pursue his case in the courts. The movie stars Kristin ScottThomas as John’s aunt Mimi and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother Julia. Giuliano claims that he persuaded Julia to work on the Lennon book shortly after they first met at a 1986 Beatles convention in Liverpool.
“In doing my own research, I filled in a lot of blanks for her. More than half the material in the book is a result of my research,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying.
He even claims that the new material that appeared in Julia’s subsequent, more recent book on Lennon, including the fraught relationship between Mimi and their mother Julia, was a result of his original findings.
“Aadditional information in Imagine This was uncovered by me in my original research. I was the person who conceptualised the original book,” he says. Julia’s publishers were unavailable for comment.
The writer has penned several books on the Fab Four, apart from collaborating with Julia for the biography ‘John Lennon, My Brother’, published in the late Eighties.
While Julia wrote a second book titled ‘Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon’ in 2007 without Giuliano, the author claims that the tome is based on his previous research into the musician’s life.
He claims that half of Julia’s earnings from the upcoming biopic ‘Nowhere Boy’ should be given to him, and plans to pursue his case in the courts. The movie stars Kristin ScottThomas as John’s aunt Mimi and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother Julia. Giuliano claims that he persuaded Julia to work on the Lennon book shortly after they first met at a 1986 Beatles convention in Liverpool.
“In doing my own research, I filled in a lot of blanks for her. More than half the material in the book is a result of my research,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying.
He even claims that the new material that appeared in Julia’s subsequent, more recent book on Lennon, including the fraught relationship between Mimi and their mother Julia, was a result of his original findings.
“Aadditional information in Imagine This was uncovered by me in my original research. I was the person who conceptualised the original book,” he says. Julia’s publishers were unavailable for comment.
LENNON'S SISTER "BORROWS" IDEAS FOR BOOK & FILM FROM BEATLES AUTHOR GIULIANO
Nowhere Boy, the biopic about Lennon's childhood that's being directed by artist Sam Taylor-Wood, may be shelved because a Lennon biographer says material from one of his books is being used without his permission.Geoffrey Giuliano says Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, took material from the John Lennon, My Brother biography she wrote with Giuliano in 1989 and used it in another memoir titled Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon, according to the Click Liverpool website.
Giuliano says Baird did this without his permission, but he decided not to take legal action then. Nowhere Boy apparently draws "heavily" from Imagine This, and Giuliano now says he wants to sue. "Everything that was additional information in Imagine This was uncovered by me in my original research for John Lennon, My Brother," he says, according to the website. "I was restricted by Julia from including a lot of very interesting information that I learned in the course of my research, including the relationship between Mimi and Julia Lennon, and the fight over where John would live, because Mimi and other older members of the family were still alive at the time."But all that 'new' material was my research, part of the work that Julia Baird and I were 50/50 partners in."There’s only one reason she did it, and that's to screw me out of my share."
Giuliano says Baird did this without his permission, but he decided not to take legal action then. Nowhere Boy apparently draws "heavily" from Imagine This, and Giuliano now says he wants to sue. "Everything that was additional information in Imagine This was uncovered by me in my original research for John Lennon, My Brother," he says, according to the website. "I was restricted by Julia from including a lot of very interesting information that I learned in the course of my research, including the relationship between Mimi and Julia Lennon, and the fight over where John would live, because Mimi and other older members of the family were still alive at the time."But all that 'new' material was my research, part of the work that Julia Baird and I were 50/50 partners in."There’s only one reason she did it, and that's to screw me out of my share."
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