I have been meaning to write a blog about the book Lennon, the Mobster and the Lawyer by Jay Bergen since I saw the author speak here in Nashville last year. As an obsessive Beatles fan, I find that one of the most interesting chapters in John Lennon's life concerns his convoluted involvement with Morris Levy.
To recap, Levy, the notorious mobster who had far-reaching connections in the music business (owning among other entities, Roulette Records, Birdland and the Strawberries record store chains, as well as numerous publishing companies) sued Lennon for copyright infringement for "borrowing" a bit of Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" in the song "Come Together". (As an aside, I always wondered if that claim would have had any chance of success at trial).
Lennon did not want to litigate the case, and as a settlement, he offered to record several of Levy's other copyrights on an upcoming oldies album he was planning to record with Phil Spector. Spector proved difficult to work with and eventually absconded with the master tapes, and Lennon had no choice but to delay the album while he finished a new album, Walls and Bridges (which included a bit of a Levy copyright ("Ya Ya ") but in an incomplete version. Levy was apparently not happy.
Lennon and Capitol Records eventually retrieved the tapes from Spector, and Lennon began to arduously rework and finalize the recording Spector had started. Without spoiling the plot, Levy decided he could somehow market the recording (sourced from an unfinished reel-to-reel tape Lennon had given him) as a sold-on-television-only album – which he did – despite the fact that Lennon was unquestionably signed exclusively to Capitol Records as a recording artist. The saga of the Roots album, John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits, with its cheap incongruous photo of White Album period Lennon on the cover, continues to perplex Beatles fans to this day.
