Perry Kane is a pop-culture, rock music historian who has studied John Lennon and the Beatles for over twenty years.
Born on January 24, 1965 in New York City, Perry studied history at California State University, Los Angeles where he also attended graduate school. Among his other scholarly pursuits are American political history and Twentieth century Europe.
Single with no children, Perry lives in Pasadena, California.
INTRODUCTION "THEY WERE HARASSING ME"
One day in late April 1972, there was a knock on the door of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bank Street apartment in New York's Greenwich Village. A man stood there in a workman's uniform. He said he was there to repair the telephone. John Lennon, rock superstar, former member of the Beatles, now living in the United States was a bit puzzled. There was nothing wrong with the phone. John let the repairman in anyway, who made a beeline for the broken phone. A few minutes later he was finished and John walked the repairman to the door. That didn't take long. The repairman sure knew what he was doing fixing the phone that fast. Actually John was right all along, there was nothing wrong with the phone. The repairman didn't "fix" the telephone: he bugged it.
From then on it seemed something weird was happening. "Everytime I picked up my phone there was a lot of noise," Lennon later said. It began with a certain hollowness followed by soft clicking noises and the vacuum of a third person listening. John told a friend about it and the friend gave him a telephone number to call. "If you call it, you get this feedback sound that confirms your phone is being tapped."
John went back to his apartment, nervously picked up the receiver and started dialing. Sure enough, there was a feedback sound on the other end of the line. John's worst fears were coming true.
"Suddenly I realized this was serious," he said. "They were coming for me, one way or another. They were harassing me."
"They" were the U.S. Government. Six weeks earlier, on March 16, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were served with deportation orders by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their temporary visas had expired on February 29, and after receiving a fifteen day extension the visas were revoked because of John's 1968 marijuana conviction in London, a charge that made Lennon deportable under U.S. law. John and Yoko didn't believe that marijuana had anything to do with the INS order. Their immigration problems began shortly after they publicly announced their desire to become part of the American anti-Vietnam War movement, and John and Yoko believed that they were being given the boot because of their political associations. Wishing to remain in the U.S., they decided to fight back in court, but because of their intransigence, they were being harassed.
It got to the point where whenever John and Yoko were out of town in a strange hotel, if someone dropped by to talk about drugs or politics, they'd all quietly walk into the bathroom and turn on all the faucets, in the sink and in the bathtub; in case the hotel room was bugged.
Then came the real twist. It happened whenever John left his apartment to catch a ride from a friend's car or limo waiting at the curb.
"I'd open the door and there'd be guys standing on the other side of the street," John recalled. "I'd get in the car, and they'd be following me in a car. Not hiding either. That's what got me paranoid. They wanted me to see I was being followed."
Sitting in the back seat, Lennon would peer out the back window to see if he was still being followed. Sure enough, the same men would be trailing right behind in their establishment Ford. No matter how long the drive, the men continued to follow Lennon all over the city just to see where he was going. They didn't even bother to remove their sunglasses. John was so nervous he began chain-smoking cigarettes and dreaming-up conspiracy theories. He even told people that he felt he was the victim of some clandestine plot concocted in the Oval Office of the White House.
"I was so paranoid from them tappin' the phone and followin' me," John said, concluding his story on The Dick Cavett Show on May 11, 1972. "There was a period where I just couldn't function, you know?"
Sitting in the host's chair, Cavett concealed a little smile in an effort not to seem too amused. The audience and TV viewers weren't too sure either. After all, this was the same John Lennon who six years earlier had rambled on about his band being bigger than even Jesus Christ. Also, this was the same Lennon who in 1968 trekked all the way to India to meditate with some little, funny-voiced guru. And wasn't this the same John who in 1969, with his new wife, Yoko Ono, spent a whole week lying in some hotel bed in a "protest" for peace? And now this? The guy's phone is tapped and strange men are following him? No one believed him.
"Who's gonna chase you?" asked one reporter. "You're not that important."
The whole thing was too much. John Lennon, you've gone too far this time, people thought. It was too ridiculous to be true.
And yet it was true.
