Welcome to this week’s Rabbit Hole. As a reminder, Rabbit Holes are shorter and much less polished than the main episodes of Beautiful Possibility, so please set your expectations accordingly.
In the main episode, we talked about John’s breakup interviews, and specifically about his infamous breakup manifesto interview with Rolling Stone that was subsequently published — over John’s objections — as the book Lennon Remembers.
When I started writing this series, I knew I’d have to spend a lot of time immersed in these interviews, and needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to it. I knew it was going to hurt to read him saying those words, even knowing about his later retractions — and it did.
I suspect it was painful for many of you as well. And so for today’s Rabbit Hole, I want to tell you — or perhaps remind you, if you’re familiar with it — about “Magical Misery Tour,” and no, that’s not a typo.
The breakup was a big, big story, so obviously, the Rolling Stone interview attracted a lot of attention, including the attention of British satirical writer Tony Hendra, who was putting together a comedy album for the humour magazine National Lampoon. Hendra and the rest of the Lampoon staff were as confused and disappointed as most people by what John was saying on his Breakup Tour. In reaction, they created what’s essentially an avant garde spoken word piece made up of actual quotes from Lennon Remembers. Hendra sings the piece — primal screams it, really — over a piano track in an uncanny imitation of John’s voice.
My first thought when I discovered “Magical Misery Tour” was that listening to it would indeed be a misery, as much or maybe more than the original interview. John’s words were painful enough on their own. I definitely didn’t need to hear them screamed at me by the National Lampoon. Not to mention I’m not a fan of humour that exploits people’s pain, be it mine or John’s, for cheap laughs.
So I was surprised to discover that “Magical Misery Tour” is not a misery. But it is a little bit magical in some interesting ways.
Here’s a slightly condensed version of Tony Hendra’s account of recording “Magical Misery Tour”—
“I have never been so nervous as the night we recorded this cut. It was, to put it mildly, a high-profile assault, and I’d never had the slightest talent for impersonation... It was a very strange sensation to be assuming one of the most familiar voices of the generation, particularly expressing such extraordinary and atrocious sentiments. I had no idea why I was doing it, only that it was right and new — another of those leaps in the dark. It was frightening even just to attempt it. Lennon might have been sacred, but I was scared...”
Hendra was right to be scared, because there was no “might have been” about it — John Lennon was sacred, and a bit more than sacred even, and maybe by now you can see why.
For almost a decade, The Beatles had changed the world with a wave of their hands. The suggestion that they’d become gods wasn’t far off, if the definition of a god is the creator and chief influencer of a new world. Hendra’s recording of “Magical Misery Tour” was a throwback to pagan mythology, when the gods controlled the forces of nature. To hurl John Lennon’s words back at him in satirical anger was an act of willful self-destruction, a lightning bolt hurled back at an already enraged god.
But Hendra was also right when he called it a leap in the dark, something “right and new.” Anger at the gods for their cruelty is what makes us more than just a slave to the whims of the Universe. It’s what gets us up off of our knees now and again, and I suspect Breakup John would have been the first to agree.
Here’s the rest of Tony Hendra’s story, again condensed for space and readability —
...when I got into the booth... something happened. Another voice, one I barely recognised but which sounded a lot like Lennon, a voice I didn’t know was inside me began screaming out the words in a ferocious tumble of hate and disappointment. My hatred of his words, my disappointment at his hate — all of it magically, and miserably, in his voice.... It was an uncanny experience, like being taken over — both exhilarating and disturbing. Nor did the voice falter — it ranted on inexorably... through the muddle of fear and loathing to a cataclysmic breakdown, one final primal grunt, and then Melissa Manchester as Yoko, whispering softly, “The dream is over.”
Hendra’s anger (let’s not say ‘hate’) and more than that, his disappointment at John’s breakup narrative is, of course, first and foremost an act of personal catharsis. But it’s also an act of collective catharsis — Hendra is screaming not just his own pain, but the pain of a generation raging against the dying of the light.
There’s more going on here, too.
Here’s this part again—
“... a voice I didn’t know was inside me began screaming out the words in a ferocious tumble of hate and disappointment. My hatred of his words, my disappointment at his hate — all of it magically, and miserably, in his voice...”
Hendra impersonating — but really quasi-channeling — John is what makes “Magical Misery Tour” into an act of sympathetic magic.
The words are the actual words John said, but it’s not John saying them even as it sounds like John saying them, and of course we know this when we listen to it.
We’re also on some level aware that John’s words are the sorts of words one might say in the midst of a mental breakdown while being treated by a dodgy primal scream therapist. They're pretty much the definition of the kinds of words about which we later say “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it. I don't know what came over me, I wasn’t myself,” which is more or less what John said in his retractions.
This “not himself” might be the deeper gift of “Magical Misery Tour.” Hearing John’s words but not in his voice makes it literal that he’s “not himself.” It made it easier to read those interviews and recognise the two Johns speaking — the one performing his coping mechanisms to forestall the pain, and the real John trapped underneath the anger, heartbroken and lost in his pain. And that makes “Magical Misery Tour” not an act of ridicule of that pain, but rather a recovery mission for the real John — and not coincidentally, a parable for the Love Revolution — an instinctive act of healing through art.
I took us down the “Magical Misery Tour” rabbit hole for two reasons.
The first is that “Magical Misery Tour” is genuinely funny. If anyone had told me before I listened that I’d be laughing at John’s Breakup Tour, I’d have told them they were nuts. And yet, laugh I did — and do. And being able to laugh at the over-the-top absurdity of John’s breakup interviews made the whole thing less painful. It helped me to see that in real life, Lennon Remembers was less an actual manifesto and more of a caricature of a manifesto, in the same way the people in John’s drawings are caricatures rather than characters. And “Magical Misery Tour” is funny because it reveals that.
When we laugh at something and when that laughter is genuine, we undercut its power. If raging at the gods gets us up off of our knees, then laughing at their hubris and occasional cruelty is how we make it a relationship of, if not equals, then at least free citizens of a democratic universe.
The other reason for sharing this story with you is that in a very different way, “Magical Misery Tour” may also have been a healing story for John.
Shortly after the album containing “Magical Misery Tour” was released, a staffer at KRLA in Los Angeles played the track for John and Yoko. Hendra writes in his book that when John heard it, he turned “several shades whiter than pale” and left the studio without a word.1
I haven’t had the time to research exactly when this anecdote took place, except that it was sometime in early 1972. And that’s right around that time that John more or less ended his Breakup Tour. The tone of his interviews started to soften, the retractions began, his sense of humour crept back just every once in a while. Listening to his 1972 interviews, I get a sense that — as I suggested in the main episode — he’s delivering his breakup narrative less like he means it and more like an actor performing a role he’s no longer fully committed to.
Never think that art doesn’t make a difference.
Anyroad, here’s the link.
PS “Magical Misery Tour” is a bit of an earworm. Consider yourself warned.
Until next week.
Peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith
“Someone at KRLA had apparently played the Lennon cut to John and Yoko while they were promoting their latest album, and Lennon had left when it was done, without a word, several shades whiter than pale.” Going Too Far, Tony Hendra, 1987, Doubleday, p. 346.
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