George Jones, 1931 - 2013

George Jones was a great singer for two reasons: he had a great voice, and he knew how to dramatize an idea. But because genre distinctions matter to consumers and marketers, and are therefore bound up with identity categories, George Jones is known primarily as a great country singer. Kris Kristofferson, who knows something about country music, observed that George Jones was the greatest country singer since Hank Williams, perhaps the most accurate assessment of George Jones' stature. Because Hank Williams died so young and so many years ago, it is easy to overlook the fact that George Jones was, almost to the day, just eight years younger than Hank Williams. Born in Texas in 1931, after the end of Prohibition and at the beginning of the Texas oil boom, George Jones grew up knowing well those taverns at the outskirts of large towns where itinerant Southern white laborers, farmers, and truck drivers assembled to drink beer and listen to music, otherwise known as honky tonks. Indeed, as Joli Jensen observes, the honky tonk "figured in the careers of virtually every major country music star of the '50s and '60s" (The Nashville Sound, 23). Of those performers strongly associated with honky-tonk music, among them Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, and Ray Price, George Jones was the last surviving member.

The honky tonk bar is, of course, one of the many mythic sites of origin for country music, along with the front porch, the country barn dance, and the hills of home (the recording studio is often elided in the list of such origins). Hence honky-tonk is an urban music, the symbol of which is wet asphalt and the neon sign. In "Honky Tonk Blues," Hank Williams sings:

Well, I stopped into every place in town
This city life has really got me down
I got the honky tonk blues
Hey, the honky tonk blues

Lyrics such as these lead Joli Jensen to argue that the structuring absence of honky-tonk music is "the mythological hills of home," "the absence of the hills and hollers," the loss of Eden. The honky-tonk music genre "is about living in a city, cut off from the solace of home" (The Nashville Sound, 24). Hence, although considered "country music," honky-tonk music has nothing to with the hills, porches, and barns of home, but rather is about the risks and temptations of urban night life: drinking, cheating, and getting hurt (either physically or emotionally). The steel guitar became essential to honky tonk music as a sonic equivalent to boozy self-pity (memories) and self-indulgence (another drink).

George Jones became George Jones the great country singer only after his voice matured into a mellow baritone, perfectly suited to the world-weary experience of the persona he adopted to convey the anguish of his best songs. For the best songs by George Jones are about the traumatic loss of home, symbolically about the loss of Eden. We live in a curious age, in which excess of whatever kind (for example, drugs, alcohol, spending money) is considered a form of authenticity. Strangely, during his years of drug use and heavy drinking, Jones himself (as opposed to the person who earned his living as a singer) was lost and inauthentic. Despite his legendary drinking and drug-taking, George Jones always seemed most comfortable not in the big concert halls, but in small venues in the South; he never seemed comfortable in "the big city." (Remember that one of the better duets he recorded with his one time wife Tammy Wynette was, "(We're Not) The Jet Set," and I think Jones, at least, meant it.) The one time I saw George Jones in concert, in 1991 and by which time his past exploits had become installed as part of his legend ("No Show Jones"), it was in a relatively small theater in Branson, Missouri, and he was in fine form. His was one of the finest concerts I've ever attended, not only because of his exuberant, enthusiastic performance (Becky and I were fortunate enough to be in the front row) and great band, but because he seemed perfectly relaxed, comfortable, "at home." Certain of his songs employed standard honky-tonk themes, such "Tennessee Whiskey," in which the special virtues of his woman are likened to the pleasures of drinking good whiskey. Better songs, though, are "The Window Up Above" (written by Jones), "A Picture of Me (Without You)," and "The Grand Tour," precisely because of his heartfelt performance of what it means to lose Eden. He returned to this theme in one of his last great recordings, "Where the Tall Grass Grows" (on the album, And Along Came Jones, recorded in 1991 after leaving Epic and also producer Billy Sherrill, with whom he recorded many of his best-known songs). If you can't appreciate songs like these, you'll never understand the special power of George Jones, and why he was so widely admired. I really can't deny the fact that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is quintessential George Jones, widely touted as "the greatest country song of all time" (Jones, however, after having finished recording the song, allegedly referred to it as a "morbid son of a bitch"). "Best of" lists, are, of course, an old Victorian parlor game, a pleasant form of diversion, a way to pass the time. However, assuming for the sake of argument that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is indeed "the greatest country song of all time," it holds that distinction not because of the song, but because of the singer. Had a singer of lesser talent recorded it, it would indeed have remained only a morbid son of a bitch.

Pop Aphorisms XIII

It has been four years since my last list of pop aphorisms. I thought it was high time for another.

1. The discovery of the teen idol was to pop music what the discovery of the star system was to Hollywood.

2. Brill Building composers are to the Sixties teenager what filmmaker John Hughes is to the Eighties teenager.

3. Improvisation is the name for privileging performance over composition, while pretension may be understood as the name for uninspired improvisation. No drum solo ever heard on a rock album must be considered as improvisation.

4. The rock drum solo is simply a form of Modernist bluster.

5. "Noise" must be understood as simply another category of taste.

6. If fans of rock music hadn't routinely violated the dictum, "don't judge a book by its cover," records in cut-out bins never would have been purchased.

7. Rock culture's most pernicious myth: initial failure is a sign of greatness.

8. One unanticipated consequence of the Beatles' success was the Sixties garage band, while an unanticipated consequence of the garage band was the groupie.

9. Rock critics' greatest theoretical challenge: how to explain why the worst records they've ever heard have perhaps ten or fifteen wonderful minutes, while the best records they've ever heard have perhaps ten or fifteen wonderful minutes.

10. Rock critics' second greatest theoretical challenge: how to distinguish between the music of fans trying to be artists from the music of artists trying to be fans.

Knockin' On Heaven's Gate

The forthcoming Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980/81) has, predictably, prompted a fair amount of revisionism. Once a film that Vincent Canby claimed was nothing less than “an unqualified disaster,” now at least one website hails it as a “masterpiece.” A recent screening of the restored (original) version of the film at the Venice Film Festival received a standing ovation. Strangely, like many of the “New” Hollywood films released during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the film has conspicuously polarized its viewing audience, eliciting strong responses from both sides, revealing that the issue is not really about the film itself, but about the film and its audience. Once reviled, now celebrated, the film’s curious afterlife should remind us of an insight offered by the great cynic Diogenes, who, legend has it, asked to be buried standing on his head, because, so he thought, one day down would be up, and up would be down.

Touted on the Criterion Collection website as a film that is “among Hollywood’s most ambitious and unorthodox epics,” I think Dennis Lim, writing in the New York Times, offers a more accurate insight into the film absent the promotional spin: Heaven’s Gate “plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. . . .” Mr. Lim goes on to say that by the time Heaven’s Gate was released, late in 1980, it was an anachronism, in large part explaining its failure. While the popular and critical success of The Deer Hunter demonstrated that Michael Cimino had been able to address historical events by employing a traditional, Classic Hollywood form (The Best Years of Our Lives set in the post-Vietnam era), Heaven’s Gate was far more radical, having a counterculture sensibility that more properly belonged to what Robert B. Ray calls the “Left and Right cycle” of the late 60s and early 70s (A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980, p. 296 and following.) Many of the comments that follow are extrapolated from arguments made in his excellent book.

As Steven Bach pointed out in Final Cut (1985), his best-selling account of the production of the film, Heaven’s Gate was originally titled The Johnson County War and was based on a script that Cimino had written several years earlier, perhaps around 1971 or 1972, in other words, at the height of the Left and Right cycle that characterized the so-called “New” Hollywood of the period. Ray observes that following the 1967 success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, “the industry followed with a series of movies intended to appeal to the counterculture’s most visible elements. Nixon’s election, and the surprising popularity of the old-fashioned Airport (1970), however, demonstrated the existence of a large conservative audience and set off a wave of right-wing films” (298). In addition to The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, other Left films included Cool Hand Luke (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Among the Right films are Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Walking Tall (1973), and Death Wish (1974). What this list of Left and Right films had in common was the motif of the frontier and its ideological value in American life. “Politically,” Ray writes, “the willingness to concede the frontier’s closing became the bedrock issue dividing the Left and Right” (301). The Johnson County War/Heaven’s Gate was created during this period.

Obviously, the explicit treatment of this theme was in the Western, and the Left movies of this period rather uniformly concluded that the American frontier had closed. So, too, does Heaven’s Gate, except it did so long after the Left and Right cycle had come to a close, supporting Dennis Lim’s argument that the film’s failure was due in large part to being released too late, after the political divisiveness of the 1960s had subsided. Moreover, Heaven’s Gate was released after what Robert Ray calls “corrected” genre pictures such as The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976), two films premised on an ideological ambivalence, meaning they could be read two ways, appealing to both Left and Right. (Actually, the first film I remember working this way was Patton [1970], which had adherents on both sides of the ideological divide cheering: Patton as psychopath, Patton as hero. Think Travis Bickle.) Essentially, these “corrected” genre pictures had brought the Left and Right cycle to a close, years before the release of Heaven’s Gate.

Given that Criterion has chosen to champion Heaven’s Gate thirty-two years after its initial release, it’s now possible to see the film for what it was originally intended to be, a film made for what Robert Ray calls “ironic filmgoers,” film buffs who are “bored with conventional movies” and who champion “art films and revisionist reworkings of Classic Hollywood formulas,” precisely the sort of filmgoer for which Criterion was established. Certainly, this sort of viewer has steadily grown since the early 1980s, but one must remember that the sort of films that set out to frustrate viewer expectations promoted by their genres almost always fail at the box office. As Ray points out, none of the seventies movies now greatly admired by ironic filmgoers, films such as Badlands, New York, New York, The Conversation, Mean Streets, and Nashville, made the Top Twenty lists. As Ray observes, these films’ “lack of success reconfirmed the audience’s fundamental conservatism” (328).

Seen in the context of the late 60s and early 70s Left and Right cycle, however, what seems most obvious about Heaven’s Gate is not its singularity, but its ordinariness. Formally and thematically, it shares a startling number of features with films of the Left and Right cycle. Formally, like all Left films, such as those made by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, for instance, Heaven’s Gate foregrounds its artiness (for many Left films made in the sixties and seventies, a heavy borrowing of stylistic devices borrowed from the French New Wave), leading to the charge made by its opponents that the film is too “artsy.” Right films were never “artsy.” On the contrary, they sought to be anything but “artsy,” employing a traditional or Classic Hollywood style that sought to make its narrative strategies “invisible.” Heaven’s Gate’s much-ballyhooed budget overrun is really just an underhanded form of mockery, a way of condemning the film for being too pretentiously “artsy.”

For the film’s thematic adherence to the films of the Left and Right cycle, a few examples will suffice.

The Villains. Left movies of the late 60s and early 70s period typically had villains whose cold impersonality, according to Ray, “seemed to stand for an historical process” (303). Outside of the head of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, Frank Canton, Heaven’s Gate’s villains, an army of thugs, is largely anonymous and impersonal, a mass. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association functions rather like the mysterious “Corporation” of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, representing the inexorable advance of modernity. The icy cold and imperturbable “Man with No Eyes” of Cool Hand Luke is an another obvious example of the impersonality Ray is talking about, but so, too, is the line from 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?,” referring to the Pinkerton men pursuing the outlaw heroes. (Pinkerton men as avatars of the closing of the frontier also appeared in Philip Kaufman’s 1972 Left film, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.) Indeed, the question, “Who are those guys?,” caught on in the counterculture, and is a line that Ray avers “summed up the Left’s anxiety about the Europeanizing of America” (303). The “Europeanizing of America” is what Heaven’s Gate is all about.

The Setting. Although set in frontier Wyoming, Cimino’s West is Breughelian, already crowded and claustrophobic, suggesting the closing of the frontier is all but over. The closing of the frontier appears in The Wild Bunch (1969), for instance, and is associated with the dawn of a new, technological age represented by automobiles, machine guns, and German military advisors. Ironically, the giant roller skating rink that supplies Heaven’s Gate with its title is a symbol of the closing of the frontier, since its financial existence is premised on large numbers of customers, or, in this case, settlers. The film’s title is thus ironic, irony being a standard feature of many late sixties and seventies films of the Left and Right cycle. The film’s concluding sequence, showing James Averill having returned East, implies the West has run out of room.

The Hero. Like other Left films such as The Wild Bunch, Heaven’s Gate suggests that individualism is outdated, an outmoded lifestyle. (The Wild Bunch’s tagline was, “Unchanged men in a changing land.”) As a consequence, Bonnie and Clyde, the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Heaven’s Gate’s James Averill seem, to borrow a phrase from Robert Ray, “to exist in worlds mysteriously emptied of alternatives” (311). I think the frustration expressed by the critics when the film was first released in 1980 can be boiled down to one critical issue: the audience’s identification with the hero. James Averill’s moral choice amounts to nothing more than choosing sides. No middle ground exists. Perhaps Cimino should have been told about Robert Warshow’s observation, that Hollywood has “always been uneasy with a situation that cannot be solved by personal virtue.” We know Averill is the hero because any character he meets with an opposed point of view is almost always repulsive. And, like other protagonists of Left films during the period in which Heaven’s Gate was first written, the hero’s individualism was suggested by his non-adherence to the standards of genteel morality—like the Wild Bunch, Easy Rider’s Billy and Wyatt, and John McCabe, Averill prefers whores. It may be that the closest analogue to James Averill is John McCabe, of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (the two films also share the same cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond). In Altman’s film, as part of what we can call its pattern of intention, we slowly come to realize, or at least strongly suspect, that McCabe has created a fraudulent image of himself, that he is a fake. But Heaven’s Gate has no similar pattern of intention. Are we to believe that James Averill, like some of the other protagonists of the Left films (e.g., the aforementioned John McCabe, Easy Rider’s Billy, Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck), has self-consciously derived his sense of self from ready-made Western myths? If not, where does his sense of self come from? After all, he’s hardly a “natural man,” since he graduated back East, at Harvard. Unlike McCabe, however, he isn’t murdered by the agents of some pernicious “Corporation,” but instead, in the film’s final sequence, is shown to have acquired all the external signs (wife, yacht) of bourgeois respectability. To the film’s detriment, what David Denby said about McCabe can also be applied, for the worse, to James Averill: he is a man “who adopts the manner of some famous or legendary character of the Old West, but who actually has the imagination and humor of a second-rate traveling salesman.”

A final point. The film’s problematic hero reveals how Heaven’s Gate is unlike a standard Left movie, for by refusing to glorify its hero (violence does not lead to regeneration), it reveals his individualism as woefully obsolete. He seems overwhelmed by the complexity of the emerging modern world, fails to protect his friends, and inevitably succumbs to the inexorable forces of modernity.

When Did Allen Klein Buy John Lennon's White Rolls-Royce?

John and Yoko with Allen Klein in happier times, probably in the early 1970s

Guest blogger Eric Roberts reports:

One primary aim of this research blog has been achieved. We now know that John Lennon's white 1965 Rolls-Royce, last seen in public in the mid 1980s, still remains the property of the Klein family and is currently being restored in England. However, two salient points remain unanswered: when exactly did Lennon purchase this second-hand Phantom V Rolls-Royce, and when did he sell it?

In answer to the first question, we have established that he bought the ex-hire car in 1966, the same year that it appeared in the film, Georgy Girl. What we don't know is the precise date. Based on circumstantial evidence, we strongly suspect that Lennon felt the need for for a second Phantom V after his first encounter with Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery in London on 9 November 1966. It is on record that soon after purchasing it, Lennon gave instructions for the entire car to be made white, both inside and out. Surely, this could only be a kind of homage to Yoko Ono, since white was her signature color.

As for the date that John Lennon sold the white Phantom, elsewhere in this blog it has been suggested that perhaps ownership transferred to Allen Klein in 1977, when Yoko Ono negotiated a deal with Klein which put an end to several years of litigation. Recently, though, new information has emerged that contradicts this assumption.

We owe Bob Lange of KarKix our thanks for alerting us to the fact that Allen Klein's former chauffeur, Alf Weaver, asserts in his autobiography that sometime in late 1969, Klein acquired John and Yoko's famous limo. The relevant paragraph in Weaver's book is worth quoting verbatim. On page 93 we read:

My job during 1969 also now included keeping close to Klein, but he was only in the UK about one week in every eight. He was mostly based at his glass tower in New York, the ABKCO offices, on Broadway. A bit later in the year, Allen asked me to pick up his new car. Actually, it was John's old car, his Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine, EUC 100C. Lennon had bought it in 1966 and completely resprayed it (white) and refitted its interior (white shag and white seats). John liked white. Lennon and Klein sealed the deal. $50,000, I think. Good price, John. I picked the car up at Hoopers in Kilburn and ended up driving it for the next decade, on and off.

(Quoted from The First Rock 'n' Roll Bodyguard, Alf Weaver and Robert Ashton. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2001. ISBN: 1-86074-328-5.)

We are inclined to believe Alf Weaver's claim, despite Tony King's recollection that the car remained in the garage at Tittenhurst after Ringo bought John and Yoko's mansion in 1973. After all, if anyone is in a position to know when Allen Klein bought EUC 100C, it's Klein's driver.

Alf Weaver and friend on the bonnet of Allen Klein's Phantom V in 1976, ten years after John Lennon bought it

So with what make and model of car did John replace his '65 white Rolls-Royce Phantom V? In 1970 he bought a white Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman, which you can read about here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/4749300/Baby-you-can-buy-my-car.html

Young and Old

Tuesday night's History Detectives program focused exclusively on rock music collectables, the dramatic intrigue hinging on determinations of whether certain rock culture artifacts were the Real Thing, or fakes. After having spent the past couple of years trying to find the whereabouts of John Lennon's white Rolls-Royce (5VD63), and in the process of doing so encountering several fakes, the roughly seventeen minute sequence of Tuesday night's show devoted to authenticating the electric guitar Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965 seemed strangely familiar.

Of the many foundational myths of rock culture, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is perhaps one of the most heavily mythologized, having been repeatedly subjected over the years to a number of misrepresentations, distortions, and false claims. For many years, the predominant myth surrounding Dylan's Sunday night appearance at the festival was that Dylan was booed by an irate crowd because he had “betrayed” folk music by playing rock & roll. Recent revisions have attempted to redress this inaccuracy, but there are still widespread misperceptions. To name just a few: First, Dylan had already “gone electric" before that night, otherwise he wouldn't have had a Fender Stratocaster to play. Second, earlier, on 26 March 1965, he had already appeared on stage with The Byrds at Ciro's Le Disc nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, this just prior to the release (on Columbia Records) of The Byrds' cover single of “Mr. Tambourine Man” on 12 April 1965, over three months before the Festival. In a sense, the “electrification” of Dylan had already occurred prior to the Newport Folk Festival, with the release of The Byrds' cover version of Dylan's song. Just so the point cannot be conveniently neglected, The Byrds sold more records for Columbia during the mid-1960s than Dylan. Third, Dylan had already recorded “Like a Rolling Stone” prior to the Newport Folk Festival, the single being released about five days before he appeared at the Newport Festival. The assertion that Dylan was “transformed” that night “from a protest folkie to a rebel genius” is an example of what Robert Ray calls “critical senility,” an over-emphasis on the careers of aging Sixties stars that is at least one consequence of the utter lack of interest in the work being done by younger, contemporary artists. Moreover, only someone biased against folk music would make such a claim anyway -- note the condescending tone suggested by the use of the word “folkie.” At the very least, Dylan's popularity increased as a result of The Byrds' success, whose cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” reached No. 1 on the pop music charts weeks before the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

To be true to Dylan's “rebel” nature, one ought to feel free to ask improper questions. For me, the far more interesting question, one that wasn't addressed during Tuesday night's History Detectives program, is why Dylan chose to play a Fender guitar. Why didn't he choose to play a Gibson, or Gretsch, or Rickenbacker? Famously, a Rickenbacker was played by The Byrds' Roger McGuinn. Guitars made by these manufacturers were popular among electric guitarists at the time, so why did Dylan choose to play a Fender? According to L.A. Times journalist Randy Lewis, citing electric guitar specialist Andy Babiuk, in January 1965 -- seven months before the Newport Folk Festival -- Leo Fender “sold his company to CBS for the then-king’s ransom price of $13 million.” According to Lewis, it is highly probable that CBS encouraged artists on its Columbia Records label “to use and promote the instruments coming out of what was then the largest music instrument and equipment manufacturing operation in the world.” Lewis goes on to write:

In his definitive 1995 book about the history of Fender, Fender: The Sound Heard Round the World, Richard Smith highlighted these ads and wrote, “One almost surreal  endorsement for the Jazz Bass came from Bob Dylan. He was to jazz what Lionel Hampton was to protest music.” I checked with Smith this week to find out whether there was an active campaign in the CBS era of Fender (the company was sold by CBS to a group of private investors in the 1980s) to cross-promote the products among musicians signed to CBS labels and he said, simply, “Yes.”

Coupled with the fact that “Like a Rolling Stone” was released by Columbia Records on 20 July 1965 -- coinciding almost to the day with Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival -- in retrospect Dylan's appearance at the Festival playing a Fender guitar and performing, among other songs, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is not so much a transformative event as it was a shrewd act of promotion by CBS and Columbia Records.

Bob Dylan did not transform himself into a “rebel genius” at Newport. To understand why not, I recommend that readers refer to my earlier entry on prophetic cool, a form of cool, following Michael Jarrett, “characterized by barely harnessed rage.” Exemplary figures of prophetic cool are the young Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Ice-T. In contrast, figures such as Jack Kerouac epitomized “philosophical cool,” which might also be called existential cool -- the self as an effect of performance. In addition to Kerouac, exemplary figures epitomizing existential cool are Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and the old Bob Dylan. The Bob Dylan that appeared at Newport on 25 July 1965 playing an electric guitar remained as he had been before that night: a model of prophetic cool.

John Lennon's White Rolls-Royce . . . And Its Phantom Double

Having established in our last entry that for nearly four decades John Lennon's white 1965 Phantom V Rolls-Royce, chassis No. 5VD63, has been in the possession of the Klein family and is currently being faithfully restored, it remains for us to dispel some of the confusion concerning the real identity and history of a notable impostor.

In January this year, self-made multi-millionaire and real estate developer, Stephen Tebo made international headlines when he acquired the historic Cadillac hearse that transported President Kennedy's body from Dallas Parkland Memorial Hospital to the airport in November 1963. Virually every news item that reported this latest addition to the Tebo Auto Collection also made mention of “a 1965 Rolls-Royce custom made for John Lennon” that resides among the 400 other cars in his collection. When and wherever the Tebo Rolls is put on show, a well known photo of The Beatles in 1969 beside Lennon's genuine Phantom V is proudly displayed.

The juxtaposition of the sign with the impressive  white limousine is intended to convince the spectator that this is indeed the same car as the one in the “Ballad of John & Yoko” video. Visitors to the Tebo Auto Collection are left with no doubt that they have seen at close quarters the very car that John Lennon and Yoko Ono travelled everywhere in during the late 1960s.
Leaving aside the fact that we know for sure that the authentic John Lennon white Phantom V, chassis No. 5VD63, has never left England and that it has been in the Klein family at least the last 35 years, let's take a closer look at Tebo's Rolls-Royce.

The most obvious difference between the two Phantoms is the steering. The genuine Lennon/Klein Rolls-Royce is right-hand drive (RHD), whereas the car in Tebo's collection is left-hand drive (LHD) and was built for the American market. (Click on images to enlarge.)

LHD Tebo Phantom (left), RHD Lennon Phantom (right)

The next most apparent difference is the interior upholstery and carpeting. Immediately after purchasing 5VD63 in 1966, John Lennon spent a small fortune by totally transforming the exterior from black to white and replacing the interior furnishings with white carpets and fabric. In addition, tinted polarized glass windows, mobile telephone and 8-track stereo system were installed. A glance inside Tebo's Rolls-Royce tells you that either someone has stripped all of Lennon's custom modifications or that this is not the same car.

Front interior Tebo Phantom (left), Lennon Phantom (right)

The interior of Tebo's Rolls-Royce is beige. In contrast, Lennon's Phantom V has white carpet and fabric front and back.

Interior Tebo (left), Lennon (right)

And where has the distinctive antenna on the roof of the real white Phantom V gone? The Tebo Auto Collection Rolls appears to have only a standard radio aerial behind the right side wing mirror.

Tebo Phantom V (left), Lennon Phantom V (right)

As is clear, the antenna on Lennon's Rolls (right) is missing on Tebo's car. Another obvious difference is the size of the two air vents at the front of both vehicles. Stephen Tebo's Phantom has narrow, standard air inlets whereas, in the late 1960s, Lennon added a pair of large intakes directly beneath the quad headlamps.

Tebo Phantom V (left), Lennon Phantom V (right)

Tebo's car lacks the custom air intakes on Lennon's Rolls (right).

One of the rarest features of Lennon's 5VD63 is the white steering wheel. It is probably the only Phantom V which has one, the rest would have been black.

The Tebo Rolls-Royce (left) has a standard black steering wheel. Somewhat eccentrically, Lennon insisted that his Phantom V was fitted with a custom white steering wheel (right). Then there is the fact that someone has painted John Lennon's signature on the driver's side door of the Tebo Auto Collection's Phantom V.

Why would anyone feel the necessity do this, unless it is meant to further convince the public that this was Lennon's car? Isn't this a bit like an art forger copying the signature of an old master?

The most important distinctions between Tebo's Rolls-Royce and the original white Rolls owned by the Klein family are not visible without a detailed inspection. These are the manufacturer's ID numbers for the chassis, the engine and the body. The serial numbers for John Lennon's white 1965 Phantom V are: Chassis No. 5VD63; Engine No. D31PV; Body No. V.327/20076. Our research convinces us that the serial numbers for the Phantom V in the Tebo Auto Collection are: Chassis No. 5LVD15; Engine No. D7PV; Body No. 20062. The coachwork of both vehicles was made by Mulliner Park Ward, Design No. 2003.

The Rolls-Royce in the Tebo Auto Collection was completed in June 1964, not 1965 as is always stated. One can only assume that this confusion is intentional, as it is public knowledge that the black Phantom V that John Lennon bought second-hand in 1966 was first delivered to Patrick Barthropp Ltd. in May 1965. 

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TEBO AUTO COLLECTION ROLLS-ROYCE  

Tebo Auto Collection Phantom V with original paint, as shown in Sotheby's 1984 sale catalogue 

The original owner of Mr. Tebo's 1964 Phantom was Ben B. Bodne. Proprietor of one of New York's most prestigious old hotels, The Algonquin, Bodne took possession of his left-hand drive, latest model Rolls-Royce Phantom V (pictured above) in 1964. Its original color was sable brown with matching interior. Until the late-1970s, Bodne's giant Phantom would have been a familiar sight cruising through New York's theatre district, or parked outside the entrance to the Algonquin. Exactly when and how its next owner acquired it has not yet been established, but Yoko Ono presumably bought Bodne's brown Phantom some time after John Lennon's assassination, probably around 1981-82.

As executor of her deceased husband's estate, Yoko decided to auction over 100 items in her possession though Sotheby's in New York on June 23, 1984. (Click on the link to see "For Sale: John and Yoko," Evening Independent (Ann Kolson) 26 June 1984. Go to page 4). The last lot to be sold was her beautiful sable brown Rolls-Royce. An unidentified woman and a phone bidder pushed the auction price past the reserve of $100,000 to $184,250, the proceeds going to Yoko Ono's children's charity, The Spirit Foundation. It must be said that she did nothing to correct news reports before and after the sale that her brown Phantom V was a “1965” model and that it had belonged, not just to her, but to “John and Yoko.” The long distance telephone buyer who outbid all other rivals was a shopping mall developer based in Pensacola, Florida. A long-time Beatles fan with an impressive collection Napoleonic memorabilia, Wallace C. Yost was nothing if not ambitious. At the height of his career he employed over 200 people and owned Mariner Mall shopping centers in Pensacola, Fort Walton Beach, Crestview and Panama City, with a luxurious home in Gulf Breeze. 

At some point, perhaps in the late 1980s, Yost ordered his sable brown Rolls-Royce to be re-painted and re-upholstered to resemble John Lennon's famous limo. For a year or two, his imitation Lennon Rolls was put on display in the Mariner Mall as a public attraction until, that is, he went into hiding owing his creditors over $44 million. As FBI agents began a six-year hunt for the absconder, his re-painted Rolls-Royce was acquired by the banks and promptly auctioned off.

In 1997, Wallace Yost was captured and sentenced to 18 months jail. After having passed through several auction houses, his now white Phantom V went under the hammer at a Barrett-Jackson auction in January 1999 for $118,000. The buyer was Stephen Tebo. Though advertised by Barrett-Jackson as coming with all the necessary documentation, in fact there was no actual provenance proving that the car had once belonged to John Lennon, as the catalogue implied. The honest Mr. Tebo had made an honest mistake and found himself the owner of a convincing fake. While it gives us no pleasure whatsoever to debunk Mr. Tebo's claim to be the owner of one of the most famous limousines in rock music history, we believe we have a public duty to do so. John Lennon gave the world so much of himself through his music and his  public anti-war demonstrations--for which he paid the ultimate price--that any form of counterfeit activity involving his name and image is simply wrong.

Should Mr. Tebo or anyone else wish to provide proof that any the assertions published in this blog are inaccurate, we would be only too willing to correct our research and publish a sincere apology.