A close-up of Lennon off the merry-go-round

LONG before paparazzi became telephoto lens-wielding stalkers, John Lennon’s life played out in front of the cameras. From his time with the Beatles to “bed-ins” and talking peace and revolution on “The Dick Cavett Show,” the British musician did much of his living in the eye of a cultural hurricane. Arguably, he was the world’s first reality TV star.

Generation-shaping music, countless hours of concert and candid film footage -- and carefully orchestrated media events -- helped elevate Lennon beyond the realm of pop phenomenon into a sort of Jesus of hip. His 1980 murder only enhanced his status as a “spokesman for a generation,” a legacy lovingly -- and profitably -- tended by his widow, Yoko Ono.

With the passage of time, Lennon’s life has taken on an increasingly beatific aura. But it’s easy to forget that the myth is not the man. Of course, Lennon was complicit in the myth-making, so the line between what was real and the “reality” of what we see has been consciously blurred. Was it possible for John Lennon to be himself without being “John Lennon”?

The answer is yes, at least for a brief period. The new book “Instamatic Karma: Photographs of John Lennon” captures 18 months of his life -- coinciding with a 1973 separation from Ono -- when he was just another footloose rock star having a good time. This candid collection of photos of Lennon, shot by his assistant-turned-lover May Pang, isn’t about a statue in Central Park, inspirational songs or an agitprop superhero. Pang documents a joyously disarming visual travelogue of a guy stepping off the merry-go-round and embracing life. The guy just happens to be John Lennon.

Pang isn’t a professional. Her photos are intimate, sometimes blurry snapshots of a life-in-progress, one unfettered by the forces that had defined him: the Beatles and Ono. His relationship with her, in particular, was a love story documented through a series of performance art installations.

But by the summer of 1973, their marriage on the rocks, Ono chose Pang, who was working for them as a personal assistant and production coordinator, to be her husband’s lover.

Pang already has documented her relationship with Lennon in the 1983 memoir “Loving John,” reissued in 1992 as “John Lennon: The Lost Weekend.” But this casual photographic record of their time together speaks volumes. It was a period in which Lennon drank, took drugs and hung with pals. But he also produced an album for Harry Nilsson (“Pussy Cats” in 1974) and recorded the most commercially successful music of his solo career, including “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” the 1974 song that was his only No. 1 U.S. solo hit while he was alive. The late musician’s friend Larry Kane writes in the introduction to “Instamatic Karma” that Lennon told him this period was among his happiest.

Pang and Lennon spent their time in New York and, more notoriously, in Los Angeles, which in the early 1970s had become a decadent playpen for self-exiled English rock stars, including Ringo Starr and Who drummer Keith Moon. There was a collective early mid-life crisis going on, and the expat Brits wallowed in it together, a gang of overgrown kids with too much money and too much time on their hands.

The couple rented a beach house owned by Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford that a dozen years earlier was said to have been a love shack for Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy brothers. It became a clubhouse for out-of-their-head musicians Moon, Starr, Nilsson and others, all appropriately pictured in “Instamatic Karma.”

The revolutionary man of peace became a party animal, wearing a sanitary napkin on his forehead at the Troubadour nightclub and getting tossed from the same club for brandy Alexander-fueled heckling. Along the way, Lennon visited Palm Springs (tagging along with Nilsson on a doctor’s appointment); Las Vegas, where he and Pang caught a Fats Domino show at Caesars Palace; Disneyland and Disney World with Lennon’s son Julian by his first wife, Cynthia. The photos of father and son pack the most wallop, capturing the anxiousness and affection of their first visits together in several years.

Although the text is thin, Pang recounts a few eyebrow-raising tidbits. She says Lennon asked her to attend a 1974 Beatles fan convention to buy up all copies of his 1968 album with Ono, “Two Virgins.” According to Pang, Lennon had become embarrassed by the album’s infamous cover, which features a full frontal nude portrait of him and Ono.

Pang also reveals Lennon’s nostalgia for the Beatles. A vocal advocate of the band’s 1970 breakup, he had softened his stance and, sans Ono, rekindled a friendship with Paul McCartney (Pang captures the songwriting duo chatting in 1974), and even hung out with his former bandmate in L.A., where they participated in an inebriated jam session (with Nilsson and Stevie Wonder) that has been bootlegged as “A Toot and a Snore.”

Lennon had big plans for 1975, Pang writes. He was about to make an offer on a house in the Hamptons to share with her; he also wanted to surprise McCartney and his new band, Wings, in New Orleans, where they were recording “Venus and Mars.”

But the day before Lennon’s scheduled flight in early 1975, he visited Ono at his old Manhattan apartment in the Dakota and simply never left. He dropped out of sight and retreated into the man of myth: investing in Holstein cows, baking bread as house-husband and dad to infant son Sean and taking a five-year sabbatical from recording.

In “Instamatic Karma,” Pang, who experienced a side of Lennon few others did, allows us a rare glimpse of the man beneath the impenetrable layers of legend.

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Eric Himmelsbach is a writer and television producer.