Music: Beatledmmerung

The sad thing is that John Lennon now remembers only the pain. As the No. 1 Beatle, he lived one of the most exciting, financially successful and creative lives of the rock era. But what sticks in his mind today is not the joy of the pop classics he wrote with Paul McCartney, but the misery that fame brought him, as well as the suppression of ego required by working in the group. It was Paul McCartney who quit the Beatles last spring and who is now formally seeking to dissolve the group in a London court. The only thing Lennon regrets about that, or so he says in a current two-part interview in Rolling Stone magazine (TIME, Jan. 18), is that he did not walk out first.

A true child of the 1960s, Lennon had it all—LSD, heroin, groupies and so much of the razzle-dazzle of superstardom that after a while, to hear him tell it, he no longer knew which end was up. Lately it has become increasingly hard to tell what means more to him, peace propaganda or pornography. Now, after undergoing analysis in Los Angeles, he is apparently trying to relive all the hurts of the past in order to clear them from his mind. The Rollins Stone interview may thus be regarded as a kind of public therapy. But especially in Part 2—out this week—a rather whiny self-portrait emerges. In a primal scream, Lennon complains that nobody recognized his greatness during pre-Beatle school days in Liverpool. “I used to say to me auntie, ‘You throw my f—in’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous.’ ” Auntie threw it out anyway. Summing up Brian Epstein, the discoverer of the Beatles, who died in 1967, Lennon says: “Brian was advised by a gang of crooks.” None of the Beatles had any money in the bank according to Lennon, but “people were robbing us and living off us to the tune of £18,000 to £20,000 a week.” He also confided that he considers his talents suitable for competition with the likes of Van Gogh, Renoir and Shakespeare. “That’s been my hang-up you know—trying to be Shakespeare or whatever it is. Rock just happens to be the medium which I was born into.”

Black Comedy. Running on so, Lennon proves once again that artists like politicians, are best judged by their works, not by what they say in public An excellent byproduct of Lennon’s recent wallow in self-pity is his latest record John Lennon Plastic Ono Band (Apple), one of the most fascinatingly dour LPs in rock history. Part psychoanalytical printout, part notes from a Dostoevskian underground, part black comedy, the music has a morbid, Mussorgsky-like power that makes it hard to believe that its author once wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand. Working Class Hero a relentless dirge with the style and strength of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War—has the ring of hard-lived truth:

They hurt you at home and they hit

you at school, They hate you if you’re clever and

they despise a fool.

Till you’re so f—ing crazy you

can’t follow their rules, A working class hero is something

to he. . .

Coproduced by Phil Spector and already in the top ten on the Billboard charts after only four weeks, John Lennon /Plastic Ono Band has a spare, economic deployment of musical means that suits Lennon’s soul-baring mood perfectly. / Found Out (“There ain’t no Jesus gonna come from the sky/ Now that I found out I know I can cry”) relies for much of its effect on the simple, choked sound of a single guitar strand. Elsewhere Lennon mourns the death of his mother twelve years ago, defines love (as feeling, reaching, needing, freedom) and finally, in God, Lennon says farewell to the Beatles:

But now I’m John And so, dear friends You just have to carry on. The dream is over.

The spiritual finality of Lennon’s musical utterance makes it clear that McCartney’s suit to dissolve the Beatles, though it could drag on legally for years, is nothing more than a formality. Still, McCartney has a fiscal fight on his hands. The main reason is that John, Ringo and George Harrison and Apple Manager Allen Klein realize that to break up the partnership they would have to liquidate all their assets (estimated at $100 million) and run the risk of a breathtaking British capital-gains tax. McCartney is willing to chance it because he apparently feels that he can do better on his own.

Nothing personal, of course. Reached last week at his farm in western Scotland, McCartney declared: “There is no rift between John and me. I like him. Maybe when the partnership is dissolved, we could all meet together and have a drink.” But, he added hastily ‘ not just now.”