‘Magical Misery Tour’: When the National Lampoon delivered the greatest John Lennon parody in 1972
There’s a magnificent moment in the annals of Liam Gallagher’s interview archives when he explains how overjoyed he is to be a rock star. He takes drunken aim at all the alternative stars who are ‘in pain’ and quips, “My fucking ears are in pain”.
The image of the mopey, woe-is-me rock ‘n’ roll star with everything that they themselves ever wished for is a common trope. As the years progressed, John Lennon began to embody that more and more. He even went so far as to offer up the truly horrible quote, “Happiness is just how you feel when you don’t feel miserable”. Fuck off, mate.
National Lampoon editor Tony Hendra – probably best-known as Ian Faith, the irritable, incompetent manager of Spinal Tap – created the fucking funniest John Lennon parody of all time with a similar disdain to that reflected above.
Technically, ‘Magical Misery Tour (Bootleg Record)’ isn’t a parody so much as it’s a pointedly vicious satire. Hendra used direct quotes from John Lennon’s infamous 1970 Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jann Wenner (later published in book form as Lennon Remembers) for this hysterical bit.
At the time of Lennon’s Rolling Stone sitting, he was undergoing Primal Scream therapy with Dr Arthur Janov, and he really let it rip, shitting on his own fans, Mick Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney and several others. It was as though the therapy had made him too open.
All Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue did was handpick the best parts and arrange them into lyrics. Still as funny today as when it was released on the classic National Lampoon Radio Dinner LP in 1972, this put-down, hoisted mopey artists with their own petard, stretching beyond merely Lennon as a portent to all other would-be woe-is-me millionaires.
Hendra does an absolutely boffo Lennon impersonation here, razzing the former Beatle’s very public bitching and moaning. The music’s by Christopher Cerf, it was arranged by Christopher Guest and that’s Melissa Manchester making a cameo appearance as Yoko Ono at the very end.
In his 1987 memoir Going Too Far, Hendra tells the tale of an FM radio disc jockey playing ‘Magical Misery Tour’ for a visiting John and Yoko. Allegedly, the colour drained from Lennon’s face, and he just got up and left. To be fair, though, he said this stuff.
Therein lies the complexity of Lennon: the silly walking joker who couldn’t laugh at himself. But oddly, he was self-aware of his own stubbornness. As he famously said, “If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.”