The Working Class Hero at Age 30 (1970)

 

The Working Class Hero at Age 30

No Writer Listed

The Sun (Massachusetts)

December 30, 1970

I was the dream weaver, but now I'm reborn. I was the walrus, but now I'm John, and so do dear friends, you have to carry on. The dream is over.

     For eight years. John has been our favorite performing flea with The Beatles. He submerged his identity and performed cartwheels of compromise on the merry-go-round of madness that he and they and we created. With Yoko, the flea became a crutch for the world's social lepers. Freaks flocked to him, and sadder cases believed he could help them where conventional methods were unable or unwilling.

     "Love and peace," said John, as a turmoil of his and our making engulfed him. "Love and peace," the pace was a fraught lunatic, 100,000 miles an hour, when last spring, he and Yoko dropped out of sight and set to work on the six-month-long course of psychotherapy in California. In September, they reemerged and made straight for the recording studio. John had not been idle during therapy, and the traumas of his experiences became the mirror from which to draw enough songs for a new album.

     Lennon was back and doing the things he knew best. That album has been released-- a brilliant, untitled viewpoint on John Lennon as he now sees himself: not as the Walrus, not as the Beatle, not as the world's guru, not as that performing flea, just the working class hero of age 30.

    "I was saying 'peace' everywhere, and getting none myself," he says.

 A working-class hero is something to be.  If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me. 

    The Lennons' home is an estate near Ascot where doves perch, look out on a high terrace. Seventy hilly acres of Heath groves woods, massive and exotic oriental trees protected by the local council, donkeys, gardens, lodges and an artificially created lake with a bed of rubber lining(to keep the water from running away) and a splendid, white, spacious, perfectly proportional sized house where workmen look like being busy forever, and where John and Yoko entertain in either the kitchen or a large, all purpose room in which the television and stereo speakers stand sentinel on the bed. 

    They have few visitors. It will be a long time before the friendship wall is covered in writing and very few friends. They get an enormous buzz out of showing one around their home, the acres of creamy, furry carpet from communist China, the bath, which looks like a giant saucer set into the bathroom floor, the completely equipped recording studios, dark room, and offices. 

    In the future, their records will be made at home, and the musicians will be able to stay with them. They can be virtually a completely self-sufficient cottage industry, equipped for a technical siege.

     For visiting the gardens, they have a little electric buggy and supplies of army and RAF great coats with the insignia pulled off. They like to spend an hour or so in the garden every day; it is idyllic. "I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am," says John, allowing himself a moment of whimsical satisfaction.

     Yet his new album is, in one way, the work of an eccentric millionaire. It is a plentifully self-aware statement about himself. "I was trying to make a bloody variety show," he says, and he hasn't. There are 11 songs, all of them deeply personal. Songs about his mother, about God, and about his upbringing. In one track, "Working Class Hero."  He uses what would once have been considered a dreadful four-letter word because it was the only way he could say exactly what he not.

     It is a brilliantly precise and economical album. Every word is used with care and thought. There's no lazy moments. It's a devastating, disturbing, autobiographical insight into the mind of one of the greatest hero figures of our time.

     "It's just what came out of my mouth when I tried to write songs, "he explained. "I was doing therapy and going through my life, and so I wrote about the most important things that happened to me in my life."

Mother, you had me, but I never had you. I wanted you, but you didn't want me. 

    "I'm writing this now because that's the way I feel. I used to say I wouldn't be singing. 'She Loves You' when I was 30, but I didn't know I'd be singing about my mother."

     This interview took place, generally over three separate visits to Ascot, but mainly one night after dinner, when John and Yoko sat on their bed and went through a more formal question-and-answer bit for my sake.

    They're both plumper than they used to be. John, being as heavy as he was, in Help!, although it hardly shows with Yoko. And I thought I detected a noticeably more aggressive attitude.

     "No," says John, "it's just that I get carried away a bit when I can talk to someone. We don't talk to many people, and I'm very excited with the record coming out and everything."