Alan White- His Memories of Working With
Legends John Lennon and George Harrison
With A Fresh Look At John’s Peace Legacy

By: Shelley Germeaux
West Coast Correspondent, Daytrippin Magazine

Donn Bennett, Beatle fan and owner of the drum shop where Alan White shops, commented, “When you are compelled to do something, things transpire”. This was his response to my question “How did you get to meet Ringo Starr, and work with Alan White, and so many other famous drummers?” This statement certainly has its echoes in my own life. I had assumed that if you wanted to meet someone who knew John Lennon you’d best get on a plane to Liverpool, which I have indeed done a few times and met some interesting friends and relatives of John’s. But to my surprise, on December 10, 2000, I happened to see an article in the Eastside Journal in my hometown of Bellevue, Washington, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, entitled, “Lennon’s Beat Goes On With Local Man”. It showed Alan White at Donn Bennett’s Drum Shop, sitting at the drum set he used for Imagine, mentioning that he had also been the drummer for Yes for the last 30 years. Not only did I not know this, (Yeah I know— and I call myself an expert…) but also I was really stunned to discover that this famous rocker actually lived just a few miles from me! I had just begun writing for Daytrippin’, and realized I might be able to get an interview with Alan for the magazine. I finally went down to the shop and introduced myself to Donn Bennett, and he thought Alan would be game to talk to me.

Now imagine my excitement to see “Alan White” displayed on my caller ID a few days later, and hearing his British accent on my voice mail. We set a date to meet at the drum shop the next week. He said he had time now, but he would be very busy soon. When Alan walked into the store, I was struck by his “rock star” aura and charisma, with his torn black leather vest and jeans. But to my relief, from the moment he shook my hand, he was one of the nicest men I’d ever met. He graciously allowed me to pick his memories about John and George for two hours.

As we sat down in an adjacent music room, I asked him what in the world brought him to Bellevue, Washington of all places? He replied that his wife of 20 years, Gigi, whom he met in England, was raised in Seattle. She was a model in London. Oddly enough, and this is a good one for you trivia buffs, Richard Branson, of Virgin Records, who introduced Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, is also indirectly responsible for this match, as they met at his manor in England. When Alan and Gigi got married they moved back here to her hometown and they’ve been here ever since. Grinning, Alan informed me that Yes was going back on tour in July, beginning in Seattle at the Paramount! Now I knew why he was going to be busy later, and I was very glad I pursued him when I did.

The Peace Movement

The backdrop in which Alan found himself while working with John Lennon between 1969-1971 is a profoundly interesting one. It may seem like a short period of time, but think about it. He was there with John during four pivotal moments in his life: 1) the Toronto Peace Festival--the Plastic Ono Band’s debut and John’s first public performance sans the Beatles; 2) the kickoff of John and Yoko’s “War Is Over” campaign, the UNICEF peace benefit at Lyceum Ballroom in London—but the Plastic Ono Band’s last peace effort; 3) the recording of Instant Karma, John’s first statement as a political activist; and 4) his recording of “Imagine”, an anthem for this generation, and the last album he recorded in England. Alan would be the last drummer to work with John before he left for New York in 1971.

Consider the irony in the fact that the first live gig that John and Yoko did together for the sake of the peace movement was almost exactly 32 years to the day before the September 11 tragedy of 2001. In the wake of that assault on America, one of the first songs people grabbed for was “Imagine”. But the peace activists who have not supported America’s actions in the Middle East, have quoted John Lennon’s song title, “Give Peace a Chance”. They believe that John would have not supported retaliation because they remember his peace efforts of 1969. To say they are missing the point of John’s political stance of that time period would be an understatement. The Peace Movement of 1969 was about the war in Vietnam, and Nixon’s policies, because it was not our war, and had nothing to do with our people. Our soldiers were being killed in droves, in unfamiliar terrain, in a war we could not win. It was an unsupportable sacrifice.

All the Beatles, not just John, were against the Vietnam War. But it was Paul McCartney who recently penned “Freedom” as the anthem to September 11, saying, “I will fight for the right to live in freedom”. Remember in “Revolution”, John said “count me out….in”; making the point that depending on the situation, he could change his mind. I think if John had been alive on September 11 last year and watched terrorists fly commercial jets full of people into the World Trade Center towers from his window at the Dakota, he would have been just as outraged as all of us…and would have counted himself….in. He hated violence, but John loved America passionately, and he would have understood the necessity of protecting the freedom he held so dear.

With the anniversary of that horrific day approaching, perhaps this article is a timely look at the circumstances that formed John Lennon’s views and his bold public stance. Alan White’s memories provide amazing insight into those events.

By late 1968, John was bursting publicly about his disgust over the Vietnam War, which now had become nothing but a killing field, and Brian Epstein was no longer around to keep John quiet. John supported other “New Left”, or radical efforts, including feminism, and racial equality, but criticized the riots and violence of the anti-war protests. His song, “Revolution” was his first political song, and reflected this pacifist sentiment, saying, “free your mind instead”. “Revolution #9” was his interpretation of what a violent revolution “without a plan” would sound and feel like---chaos. The Beatle’s record company, Apple was created, calling it, “western communism”, attempting to gain autonomy for their own productions, and free themselves from the constricts of big corporations. (“Come Together” Jon Wiener 1984)

He married Yoko Ono March 20th, 1969, and as avant-garde peace-niks they immediately filled the news with, with two bed-ins, one in Amsterdam, and one in Montreal, Canada, (they were not allowed into the U.S. because of an erroneous drug charge that would plague him for years). John wrote and recorded “Give Peace A Chance” right in the hotel room packed with people. They granted scores of interviews and gathered widespread media attention constantly. They did crazy things to make people think “peace” because they knew the power of humor and visualization. They put up billboards saying “War is Over—If you want it”. They hid in bags during interviews, sent acorns for peace to world leaders. They used the media for their message, which alarmed leaders in the Nixon Administration. Plans were also in motion to permanently disband the Beatles, who were falling apart as a group in front of everyone’s eyes, as they finished recording their swan song, Abbey Road.

At just 29, John had changed his world, and the world’s opinion of him also shifted dramatically, from lovable moptop to a wife-and-child-deserter hooked up with a strange avant-garde Japanese artist, posing nude with her on an album cover. He then grew long hair and a beard that covered his face, looking more like Jesus than a Beatle. The shock was nearly too much to bear for his fans who had considered him cute and witty.

Toronto Rock-n-Revival Festival- September 13, 1969

On September 12, 1969, the concert promoter for the Toronto Rock-n-Revival Festival called John at his office in London and asked if he would attend the festival the next day. John, seeing the opportunity to do something constructive for the Peace Movement, said he would attend only if he could perform. Stunned, the promoter immediately made arrangements for it.

But John didn’t have a band. Besides Yoko, he immediately got Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman, but didn’t have a drummer. He had been running around clubs the night before and had spotted Alan’s band, and liked his style. He decided to call him up the next day.

When John spotted Alan, his judgment of talent was right on target, a trait that was part of his genius. Alan had already played with Ginger Baker’s Airforce, and then had his own band in London. Alan explained, “Prior to playing with John, I had my own band that was already experimenting with odd time signatures. It had a jazz influence, a classical influence, and we had three horn players; we’d take things to different areas.”

Alan tells the story: “He called up and said, ‘Is this Alan? I saw you last night’. He had that Liverpool accent, and I thought it was a friend of mine, Terry Doran, who also worked with the Beatles… He said ‘what are you doing tomorrow night?’ and I said ‘well, I have a band, and we have a gig tomorrow night’, and he said, ‘well do you want to come to Toronto with me tomorrow?’ and I said ‘who is this?’ and he said, ‘This is John…John Lennon.’ I thought he was joking, and he said, ‘no, no, I’ll send a limo for you in the morning,’ and I didn’t believe it, and put the phone down….five minutes later he called back and said, ‘Listen, this is really me, and I’m gonna send a car for you in the morning, and I’ll see you at the airport.” Then I got it, and said, ok, sure, I’ll do it, you know… But my band got really annoyed with me because we had a gig that night, and they needed the money! I said, ‘we have to cancel the gig, but you guys can get another drummer, cuz I’m gonna go play with John Lennon!’

“So I met John, Eric, Klaus Voorman, and Yoko at the airport the next morning in the V.I.P Lounge, pinching myself and saying, is this real? It was huge, everyone knew about it, there were so many people there.” …Actually, the Lennons weren’t there yet when the rest of the band arrived. Yoko had decided she didn’t feel well and anyway, John hadn’t found Eric, so they were cancelling out. Anthony Fawcett (“One Day at a Time”, 1976) told everyone to wait, and drove out to Tittenhurst himself to convince John to get up and come get on the plane. Eric then called John to say he was on his way, which sparked John’s excitement. A later flight was booked, and the party was in tow to Toronto.

Alan recalls Allen Klein’s role in “making” John do this gig, and that he was reputed for his “gangster” persona. “There was about four or five cars following the limo we were in, and I remember Allen Klein picking up a tire wrench, and throwing it out the window, hoping it would hit one of the cars, and I said, ok, this guy’s for real, he’s a real gangster! (laughs)”.

Was Alan nervous about playing with John Lennon? “Not really”, he shrugs, “Remember I was very young, around 20, and a bit of a rebel, so I was saying, I can handle this. I guess I was too young to realize what was going on. It’s only years later that I started saying, ‘wow, did I do that?’ John was eight years older than me, and he’d been through a lot with the Beatles, and this was his first gig without the Beatles. He took me under his wing and we formed a good rapport with each other. He never ever told me what to play, I just played, and he said ‘that was fantastic’, in that Liverpool accent. He loved how I played.” The new band rehearsed on the plane. The guys all had guitars, and Alan had his drumsticks and the back of the airplane seat to rehearse on.

“I was pretty much swept away. He made sure he knew what we were all doing. I remember one conversation in particular, because he wanted to play the Carl Perkins version, not the Chuck Berry version, of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, because it’s one beat shorter. ‘One for the money---da-da-da-- two for the show…’ It was very funny because he was insistent that we stick to that version for the show.”

What was Alan’s impression of Yoko? “She was very quiet, much of the time… she would speak to me, but she talked to John mostly…she was very much part of John’s thing. But it was something that, you couldn’t really put your finger on it--- it was their own private, personal thing, it was very hard to see into it.”

Lots of people, simply put, at that time, thought John had gone crackers. But Alan understood John’s deeper mission and wasn’t fazed. He recalls with sincere feeling, “He wanted to change people’s lives….What he wanted to do was change the world into a better place, and that’s what the great feeling was about being around him… He’d walk into a room, and you could feel the aura around him. It was huge---I mean, everyone would start revolving around him because he was emanating so much.”

Alan said there were no drugs in John, just “genuine nerves”. He said, “It wasn’t obvious, initially, till we got into the dressing room, and then Gene Vincent walked through the door, and then, Little Richard was standing in the corridor, and then it was like, am I doing this? Little Richard had a glass waistcoat on, inch-by-inch mirrors, you know, and I thought, my god that looks ridiculous! (laughs) But then when he got on stage, I understood why. The lights hit him and it was unbelievable. Then John got very nervous, and started throwing up, and had to go to the bathroom. You know it was the first gig he had done since 1966. He was fine until the point when he had to go on stage, and then suddenly it was like, god, I guess there’s a lot of weight on my shoulders!”

John was already feeling the pressure of living up to his own success. His own act as a Beatle would be tremendously difficult to follow, especially in such a different format with such different people, and unrehearsed. His confidence faltered in the presence of his former idols.

The arrival of the Lennons at Varsity Stadium generated incredible enthusiasm that obliterated the reaction to Bo Diddley, The Doors, and even Little Richard. Festivalgoers clamored to see John Lennon. Sporting his white suit, he modestly said, “We’ll just do numbers we know, because we haven’t played together before”, to a cheering audience of 27,000. Then, finding his typed lyrics, he launched into “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Money”, then “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, then three new songs, “Yer Blues”, the debut of “Cold Turkey”, and “Give Peace A Chance”, while Yoko climbed into a sack, much to the confusion of the other band members.

Then John said, “OK, Yoko’s gonna do her thing all over you”, and Yoko proudly took center stage while John backed off. She did the next two numbers, which put the audience in a catatonic trance, with her shrill, multi-faceted vocal abilities and long winded painful cries and howls, “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand In The snow)”, and “John John, (Let’s Hope For Peace)”. The last piece went on forever, finally ending with the musicians standing up their guitars against the speakers and leaving, while the feedback complimented Yoko’s vocal range.

Did the band know Yoko was going to “do her thing”? “No, no,” Alan said, “it was all impromptu. But I think her message was that, you don’t really need to stand up here and do that, I can do this---from a sack.” How did the band know when it would end? Alan laughs. “The guitars were standing there going wahh wahhh wahh, and we just finally walked off! (laughs) The audience was mesmerized by Yoko…spaced out.”

In the DVD of the performance,” John Lennon- Sweet Toronto” (1988), (first release was called “Live Peace”), you see John whispering to Yoko several times towards the end of her performance. “I’m curious,” I said to Alan, “what do you think he was saying?” Alan laughed. “I think it was probably, ok, Yoko, I made my commitment, it’s time to go!”

Alan assures us that doing avant-garde “weird” music was something he was willing to do with the Lennons. “I also made ‘the Fly’ with them, I played on the whole album. We did a couple of albums. I did Hare Krishna stuff with George in the studio, too, we were chanting forever. I said, Ok, when does it stop?? It was fun though; we got into a bunch of different stuff then. It was a mind expanding experience, let’s put it that way.”

Rumors of Beatles Break-Up

Did Alan know that John was planning to leave the Beatles at that point? “I was under the impression, because I knew some people in Apple, that this was the last hurrah type thing. You would see it in the English press every day, the tabloids. We knew that everything was falling apart. But John never said anything to me. He was already in his own mode by then, and getting on with his own stuff. They just had to sort everything out legally, but he was already carrying on with his own direction.”

Alan reacted in astonishment when I had mentioned Anthony Fawcett. “Ohh—geez----That’s a name out of the past! He’s the guy that played me the tape--- you just said a name that really sparked me off--- Anthony Fawcett was the guy who played me the tape of the breakup of the Beatles! Have you ever heard that? He was like Derek Taylor, he was the assistant press guy. He was like a skinny office guy with horn rimmed glasses, and shoulder length hair; he was everywhere. He taped that meeting, and they didn’t know it. I wish I could find it. It’s all the Beatles sitting around in Apple, and John says, ‘well, I guess that’s it then.’ It’s a long tape, they had this whole meeting. And everybody just got up and left!”

Peace for Christmas-Lyceum Ballroom Dec. 15, 1969

The Peace for Christmas benefit for UNICEF at the Lyceum ballroom in London 12/15/69, was John and Yoko’s “War is Over” kickoff event, and the first time two Beatles were on stage together since 1966. But it would prove to be John and Yoko’s last effort for peace, even though they were about to go to Toronto to plan a huge Peace Festival for the following year. Alan remembers, “There’s a funny story about that. I got a call, and they said, ‘we’ve gotta do this gig tonight at the Lyceum’ and I said, ok, and Mal (Evans) said to bring everything down to set up. Klaus drove in, and there was myself, Yoko, and John, and we were going to have the five of us, with Eric (Clapton) coming in later. Except when Eric showed up, he brought the entire Delaney and Bonnie band! And they all wanted to play. So we had to stall it for an hour.”

Also included in the “Plastic Ono Supergroup” were George Harrison, Bobby Keyes, Billy Preston, Jim Gordon, and Keith Moon. They played “Cold Turkey”, and “Don’t Worry Kyoko”. Alan remembers, “They all stood next to the drum kit...we all got on stage together, but no one knew what we were going to play! (laughs) So George Harrison started playing this lick that you hear on that, and we started getting into it. But it kept going and going and going. In my experience with doing jams on stage, and trying to figure out, how in the hell do we finish this thing---because no one knows where the end is--- I worked out this thing where I just kept playing faster and faster. They all looked around and thought, ‘oh, I know what he’s doing’; Keith Moon was standing next to me pounding on my tom toms. Finally no one can play any faster, and it comes to one note, and you slow it down, and go---Bam!---to end it. John knew what I was doing.”

Peace Movement turns to Activism-Instant Karma (Jan 1970)

John then went to Toronto to advertise the Toronto Peace Festival, announcing that it would be July 3,4, and 5, of 1970. John was excited after the first Toronto festival. They stayed at Ronnie Hawkins Farm, had macrobiotic diets and went skidooing through the hills.

John was granted an unprecedented meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau in Ottowa, and he was incredibly nervous when the time came. But Trudeau was really excited to meet John, and gave his official endorsement for the festival. This was John’s most memorable day of the Peace Campaign. But despite all the enthusiasm that followed, including 400 U.S. radio stations joining in the “Peace Network” to broadcast “festival news” daily, John would drop the whole thing in less than a month. Festival organizers found him in Denmark in January to discover he’d shaved his head and donated his hair to Michael X (which burned in a fire later). He also withdrew his support for the festival, leaving the organizers speechless. The festival fell apart.

When John and Yoko cut their hair off, they also cut off the peace movement. Now it was on to direct political activism. At that point, there were intellectual activists who had been writing to John trying to get him to be more active in their cause, and he finally took the bait.

On the morning of January 27, 1970, John wrote the song “Instant Karma”, and went to Abbey Road Studios that very day to record it, with Klaus Voorman, Billy Preston, George Harrison, and Alan White.

Did Alan see a persona shift in John that morning, with his cropped haircut, and change in approach, and how did he react to that? Did he think, “Oh, my, what’s John doing now?” Alan chuckles. “I was still young and in awe of his presence…it didn’t matter to me… no, he was the same---but he was more direct, and more meaningful, about what he was trying to say, I noticed that. I just remember that the two of us played one piano, and Gary Wright, and Klaus, too, on another piano, and we didn’t have any backing singers. He wanted a huge chorus type thing. So he sent Mal Evans to this nightclub, at 2 in the morning, and Mal invited everyone at the club over to the studio! And they all came in, and we were standing and directing them to sing ‘ we all shine on!’ and that’s who did that. We were in the big studio there, and Phil Spector was doing his whole bit; the four of us were conducting them all, and all these people were so drunk! Singing, ‘we all shine on…’ (waves his arms while singing) it was really funny! That whole session of Instant karma was done in just 6 hours.

I asked Alan about the “Instant Karma” music video, from the Top of the Pops, the one that shows Yoko either knitting or holding up signs next to John. They didn’t film the actual session, Alan said, so they used three different videos from different sessions for it.

Alan feels that John was weary of the peace movement. “At that point, I think he had moved on to a different thing. He was already into being an activist, he felt more like an ambassador, to try and change things, internationally. He was a huge name, and he had a whole lot of influence on a lot of people…I think he realized that the really good way of doing it was to get to the big guys, and change it from that angle, to governments, and stuff like that…so he got that far, which is fantastic, for a musician. He had control of so many people, by what he wrote.”

To give an example of the tremendous influence John had on the youth at that time, John’s 1971 mega-hit, “Power to the People”, was in reference to his association with the socialist London magazine called the Red Mole. (He also did “Do The Oz” at that time, for a controversial underground magazine called “OZ”) It was a marching song, a protest song for workers that were being laid off in Britain. It was interpreted by America’s youth to stand up to governments, institutions and cops. The same week it hit the charts in the U.S., thousands of Vietnam vets staged a massive demonstration in Washington D.C. Many of them were in wheelchairs with missing limbs. These soldiers angrily threw their medals on the steps of the Capitol. Nothing like that had ever happened in U.S. history. John’s relentless message was so powerful in our country that it outraged and frightened Nixon’s people, like J.Edgar Hoover into illegally trying to deport Lennon from the U.S. after he arrived in New York in 1972. (“Come Together”, Jon Wiener, 1984;”Gimme Some Truth-The John Lennon FBI Files” Jon Wiener 1999)

Did Alan think that John might ask him to become a part of a permanent Plastic Ono Band with him? ‘No, his idea, his conception of what the Plastic Ono Band was, was whoever was there at the time. He had no ideas of putting a band together. He said, “If you’re there, you’re in the band.” Sometimes in Yes, it’s the same. People have to take time out and explore different things. There’s a lot of talented players in Yes, and that’s what attracts you back to people who can play their instruments as well as they do. But it was the same with the POB, you turn up, and all of a sudden Eric’s wailing away, and Klaus was a really good articulate bass player, it just all worked. Whatever happened at that time, it all worked.”

Despite his efforts for peace, and his commitment to make the world a better place, John’s own life was a wreck, and he took time off to recover emotionally. John and Yoko tried to deal with their suffering through Primal Scream Therapy in Los Angeles, while also dealing with drug addiction. They unraveled after the prior year’s high profile peace efforts and exhausting media work, at the same time enduring public ridicule and scrutiny. The divorce from the Beatles was official, too, which wasn’t exactly easy to bear.

As George Harrison was about to record his blockbuster album, “All Things Must Pass”, Lennon recorded “Plastic Ono Band” with Ringo on drums in December of 1970. It was all about John’s quest for authenticity, not generating commercial hits. The songs addressed entrapment in societal dysfunction, (“Working Class Hero”, “Remember”), the sadness caused by failures of the peace effort, (“Revolution”, “Isolation”, and “Hold On John”), women’s liberation and revolution, (“Well Well Well”), and the childhood pains uncovered in primal scream therapy, (“Mother”, “My Mummy’s Dead”). “God” was a rejection of idolotry, while “Love” and “Look At Me” are beautifully romantic. It was like a diary of John’s emotions as he recovered from the prior year.

All Things Must Pass – November 1970

Alan remembers then being called to work with George Harrison. “Mal Evans called me, and George called me. They were sweethearts. Those sessions were full of musicians. I think it took three weeks to make a whole album. We’d go there every day about lunchtime and just start working. I just loved playing all that music.” Alan humorously recalls with some sheepishness being asked to play drums instead of Ringo. “One of the funny things is, one day Ringo, John, and George were all there in the same room and Ringo had a tambourine, and I said, ‘shouldn’t he be playing drums?’ and George said, ‘no no no, you play the drums”, and I felt really bad! Ringo was just standing there being Ringo, he didn’t care. It was on ‘My Sweet Lord’. I don’t think John actually played on the track, but he was in the studio. It was basically George and Eric playing on guitars, and Carl Radle was on bass. Then myself on drums, with Ringo on tambourine. It was very funny.”

I asked Alan how John and George differed in personalities. What were they like to work with? “John was a type of guy who was led easily, but he was the leader. George was more organized in a musical sense than John was. John would let things happen as they happened, but George was a little more organized coming into it. John would feel it for the moment and take that and go, ‘this is working, this is happening’. He’d go with the flow, whereas George had a definite idea of what he wanted to do before he got there. He did a lot of work on his songs at home before hand.”

Who was easier to work with? Alan chuckles as if on the spot, and pauses. “Ha… no, they were both easy to work with. They never told me what to do. They let me play whatever I wanted. They always said they liked what I did. But George was more of a perfectionist.”

Alan said he definitely felt the power of George’s spiritual aura. “Oh, totally, yeah. He emanated that all the time, in fact I felt it around John, too, there was a very deep, heavy spiritual thing inside, cuz they’d been through the whole thing in India, so you could feel it emanating from them after the success the Beatles had had…the music shows that direction, which was great. That’s what changed the atmosphere in the studio.”

Did George talk about his spiritual beliefs around Alan? “No, I don’t think he did that with anybody. He was very private about his beliefs. The outlet was the music for that stuff…

Alan talked about the last memory he has of George with great humor. “The last time I saw George was around 1993 in Los Angeles at a party for Tom Petty. And Tom and George were really drunk... They could hardly talk. He used to call me ‘Whitey’, that’s a British thing. George was fine then. They used to smoke a lot of cigarettes as kids. It calmed them down because they were in the spotlight so much and it gave them something to do with their hands. I never smoked at all. I used to worry about second hand smoke being in the music business! It’s part of my career to be around it, but I’m definitely aware of it. But no one really worried about it back then.”

Alan recalls hearing the news that George had died on November 29, 2001. “I got up that morning, and saw it on the news.. ugh… I knew it was going to happen. The day it happened, I was walking around the streets of Dublin, Ireland, feeling real bad. I walked past a pub, and Jon Anderson (of Yes) runs out from a pub, and said, ‘you’re having a bad day, aren’t you?’ and poured me a beer. George was sweet. He was a great person.”

Imagine Recordings – July 1971

The Imagine sessions were recorded in July of 1971 at John’s home in Ascot, England, at the estate called Tittenhurst about a half hour south of London. Alan was called by John and told that he could stay there if he wished, which Alan did. The sessions lasted about eight days.

Driving into the estate, Alan recalled there were no security guards surrounding the estate, which today would be unheard of. He said, “No, we just drove in, I think Mal was around most of the time, and Phil (Spector) had his guy that always hung around him. Now, he’s the most paranoid guy in the world, Phil. He thinks everybody’s gonna shoot him, so the guy that worked for him had a gun.”

Imagine included soft love songs like “Oh Yoko”, and “Oh My Love”, and the peace anthem, “Imagine”, which John described as really a “sugar coated” political statement, but also included the angry “Gimme some Truth”, directed at the Nixon administration, “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama”, about the fear of dying as a soldier, and “How Do You Sleep?”, a tongue-in-cheek backlash to Paul McCartney. Alternatively, “How?”, “Jealous Guy”, “It’s So Hard”, and “Crippled Inside” reveal his deep-seated insecurities. Alan was taken aback when I showed him that he was not given a drumming credit on “Crippled Inside”. In fact, no one is given drum credits. Alan says he absolutely did play drums on it.

Alan recalls John’s caution in recording these new songs. “He spent a lot of time thinking about those songs…When I first got to the studio, we set the equipment up, getting ready to go, and he pulled everybody into a small room and handed us lyrics for the whole album. He said “I want you to read all of these lyrics before you play on it, and you can play on it, or not, because I’m saying some pretty heavy things in these songs”, and we all read through it, and just got into making it. It seemed fine at the time, I think he was talking about the one with Paul, (“How Do You sleep”) which he liked to call “Uncle Albert”.” But no one raised any eyebrows, and recording started.

It was a homey kind of atmosphere, except they had the builders in there at the same time, they were rebuilding the kitchen, and the studio was tucked around the corner from the kitchen.”

Alan mentioned that because of construction, there was only one working bedroom, John and Yoko’s. I asked, “How did you sleep then?” He explained, “John and Yoko slept in their bedroom upstairs. At the end of the day, they disappeared together, and we just slept in the other bedrooms that hadn’t been finished yet.”

What kind of schedule did they have? “We used to start warming up around 11 in the morning, and we’d go have lunch at 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and then see if we could get something down, or at least get to a point where it was sounding good. Sometimes we’d record things late in the evening. But mostly we recorded in the afternoon, we usually recorded, if we got a really good take, we’d finish and have dinner around 6:30, 7. We ate around that same table every day. The cooks had a schedule; we had mostly health food, which they were into. There wasn’t a lot of red meat around, sometimes chicken. George was total vegetarian. He came for two of the days, he lived about an hour away, so he just drove in…We’d be sitting around the dinner table at night. John would be there, but then you also had George, and (the energy) was doubly amplified, and everything revolved around two Beatles being in the same room. They obviously had their own relationship, but they acted just like me and you, sitting down here talking. It was like normal people. Everybody would just sit there and think, these guys are really great people.”

Alan explained some of the recording specifics. “Imagine was all done on 8-track machine…the studio wasn’t big at all. It was tiny. In fact, on a couple of tracks where Jim Keltner played, I was playing vibraphone in the bathroom. There was a door in the corner, with a bathroom back there, and we couldn’t have the vibes out in the room where the drums were, cuz it would go all over the mics, so they put me in the bathroom, and the door had a two inch crack in it where I could see people out the door, (laughs), and that’s ‘Jealous Guy’. I played all the vibes in the bathroom. You know that part? That’s why he said “good vibes” on the credits. John said, “Keep playing that!”

I asked Alan if he noticed the change in John at that time, after primal scream therapy, and becoming angrier in his political stance. “No,” Alan shrugged, “you could never notice it in the studio, we just got on with business making the album, I was just doing my job. I think he felt he was too, but he had much deeper things going on in his head about what he was saying. But no real change that you could see.”

“He was still being John, because he was always very funny, and he’d come out with comments all the time that would just make you laugh, all the time! Then he’d get serious while talking about music with Phil, he’d get really serious and make sure everything was right in that area, but he always had the John quote on the side. He’d have a comeback line all the time, to make fun of the situation, so it made the group that was playing Imagine, a really good kind of feeling for each other, it was very much like a family.

“One day I sat there when John gave his Rolls Royce to Phil. He said, oh that track sounds really good, here’s the key to my white Rolls Royce. (laughs) I said is this real?”

It’s been written that John and Yoko at that time were getting along miserably and fought allot. Alan said he never picked up on any real tension between John and Yoko during the sessions, but adds, “There were some times when Yoko used to go on about vocals. You can see it on the movie, where she’s saying, ‘no, John, do it this way’, and he’s getting a little irritated about that.

I suppose being a female, I was curious to know if there were any real “male bonding” times with popcorn and beer at night, or anything like that? Alan laughed. “Not really. There was one night when John decided he had to see something on TV, and he made us all watch it, it was some soap opera that he watched every week. So we all went up the stairs and climbed onto his bed and watched the show together. It was hysterical. Other than that, we did go down the road to a pub a couple of times, but we were usually on our own at night.”

Alan told me that John had given him a plastic box for Christmas one year on a stand that said “Build Around It.” He hasn’t seen it in years, unfortunately, but believes it’s in “one of the boxes from England.”

We talked about “Gimme Some Truth”, the documentary about the Imagine sessions that came out in 2000. Alan remembered his specific contribution to the song “Imagine” while watching the documentary with some friends, the night it debuted on TV in the U.S. “I noticed, there’s one part where I’m talking to John. I was saying ‘look, in ‘Imagine’, I don’t think I should be playing at the beginning of the song. It needs to be you and the piano. And (turning to Phil Spector), he went, ‘what do you think about that Phil?’ something like that, and I said ‘no no no, the drums don’t need to be there until a little bit later’, and he went, ‘hmmm…yeah, let’s try that,” So my wife Gigi was watching that and she said, “you changed the beginning of that song?” and I said “well, I’d forgotten about it until I saw it just now!”

I asked what he thought about the documentary. Did it accurately portray those sessions? He said, “I think they tried to pull some of the more extreme moments out to make it balance out with all the good stuff, but 99% of the time, it wasn’t like that. They made it look like that. Usually it was perfect, a lot of harmony between people. There were times where she (Yoko) would whisper in his ear, and then he’d think about it, and say, ‘no, Yoko, we’re gonna do it like this’, and it was happening quite a bit at that time, but it never really was that angry. It was usually just dealt with. We, being the musicians, were just getting on with our stuff.”

One example of an “extreme” moment portrayed in the film is the scene where Yoko is whispering to John about them “improvising”, and John, to appease her, demanded that everyone “stop improvising”. Was the band annoyed by her? Laughing, Alan said, “We didn’t take notice of that, cuz you know what? We’d do it again, and do it the same way, and she didn’t know the difference. He knew that we knew what she was doing, and he’d just get on with it. He knew we were doing the right thing, but it’s just the wife, doing her thing. We didn’t care, no we didn’t get annoyed. We knew the music.”

I humorously asked about the incredible meltdown John had while recording “Oh Yoko”, where he gets really mad at “Philip”, the engineer. Was Alan there when that happened? Alan laughed and said, “Oh, yes, I know what you’re talking about. I never really saw that. I saw him once get mad like that, but it was rare. But on that song, they had to re-do some of the vocals later after everyone left.”

What about the transient, the grungy guy who comes to the door during the movie? I told him I’d read once that the scene was “invented” to make John look like a humanitarian, that the producer made John talk to the guy. Alan said “No way. It was real. I was there!” Alan exclaimed. “They came and said somebody was sleeping in the gardens or something. John was the one who found him; the guy was looking in through the windows or something like that. John asked him if he was hungry, in the movie, remember that? And he came in to eat. We all sat down for dinner with this guy, and he had dirty hands and everything. He didn’t say anything so we didn’t talk to him. That was a perfect example of what John was like. He was very spontaneous, John. He’d do things like that, and say ‘you look hungry’, and all of a sudden, the guy’s in the house! Eating some food! That’s the kind of atmosphere John created in the house all the time, and he’d say things like I said before, one-liners that made people laugh. He was that kind of person.”

Just after the Imagine album was completed, John and Yoko suddenly moved to New York without warning, where they picked up new causes with another group of radicals. Alan then was asked to join Yes, and he never saw John again. But he had heard from friends that “John really likes your music. He likes Yes,” which made Alan happy.

My last question was the most sensitive. I asked Alan how it affected him when he heard that John had been killed, to which he became visibly emotional. He paused before answering, and as he looked at me, the silence in that long second spoke a thousand words of respect, admiration, and deep love for someone who had made an impact on his life. His lips quivered a bit and his eyes looked very sad. He cleared his throat and said, “It was a bad day. It was a really, really bad day.”

(Yes is officially on tour now. Tour dates and other information about the band can be located on their web site. www.yesworld.com. A Boxed set ,“In A Word, Yes (1969- )” covering three decades of music has also been released. Many thanks to Donn Bennett. and to Alan White for their generous time and openness.)

http://www.lennonworld.com