by Tim Riley
Lennon did stints sailing on Long Island Sound off Glen Cove, which gave him an appetite for a more ambitious venture. When he met up with David Scheff, the Playboy interviewer, in the fall of 1980, he told him about his sailing trip to Bermuda. With Yoko’s encouragement, he chartered a Rhode Island yacht out of Newport, called the Megan Jaye, and planned to meet up with Sean in Bermuda.
His first time at sea was typically overambitious—three thousand miles, from Rhode Island to Bermuda, in seven days. “I’d always talked about sailing but my excuse was that I never had lessons,” Lennon said. “Yoko’s attitude was: ‘Put up or shut up.’ So she sent me on this trip and I went.” So instead of getting sailing lessons, he simply hired a boat with crew and pointed himself toward Bermuda. He already had a sense that Ono had an ulterior motive: “We had talked about making music again,” he said later, “but she knew I would fight creating again, even though I said that I wanted to. . . . She sent me specifically to open up my creativity, though she didn’t tell me that. She knew I’d have fought it.”
After a couple of days at sea, Lennon and the two skippers hit a huge storm, which lasted three harrowing days and made the crew so ill that Lennon had to take over the wheel. “They were sick and throwing up and the captain says to me, ‘There’s a storm coming up. Do you want to take over the wheel?’ I said, ‘Do you think I can?’ I was supposed to be the cabin boy learning the trade, but he said, ‘Well, you have to. There’s no one else who can do it.’ I said, ‘Well, you had better keep an eye on me.’ He said he would.”
Five minutes afterward the captain went below to sleep, saying, “See you later.” So there was Lennon, steering the boat for six solid hours. “You can’t change your mind. It’s like being on stage—once you’re on, there’s no getting off.” Once they arrived safely in Bermuda, Lennon became convinced that the trial had rejuvenated his muse. “I was so centered after the experience at sea that I was tuned in, or whatever, to the cosmos. And all these songs came!”24
Almost as soon as there were songs that summer of 1980, Lennon got back in touch with Jack Douglas, the Spector engineer turned producer who had worked on most Lennon projects, beginning as second engineer on Imagine. Douglas, now in demand as a celebrated orchestrator of albums from Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, had worked on classic material like the Who’s Who’s Next and introduced Wisconsin’s Cheap Trick to the world. He eagerly took Lennon’s call and swore on to a secret project.
“He flew me in a seaplane out to Glen Cove,” Douglas says. “I picked up all these cassettes from John. He narrated every number, like for ‘Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna give this one to Ringo.’ And like on others he’d say, ‘This is sort of a calypso number,’ or whatever. He just wasn’t sure whether he had anything going on that people might be interested in. So he wanted to keep it all under wraps until he knew it was going to reach a certain level.”25
Under stern orders to keep things quiet, Douglas began rehearsing musicians in Manhattan. “The whole project was shrouded in secrecy,” he remembers. “Everything was clamped down, even the studio staffers didn’t know what I was working on. For two months during rehearsal and preproduction, I was rehearsing musicians on this material and nobody knew whose project this was. I’d play [rehearsal] tapes back for John in his bedroom, and he made suggestions, and I’d go back and we’d try different things. Some of the musicians guessed, but even then they kept their mouths shut.
“Then, only on the last day of rehearsal, that evening I told the players to meet me at the corner of 72nd and Central Park West, then some of them figured it out. It wasn’t until John was sure that this record was really good, and that he could do it, that he turned to Yoko and said, ‘Mother, tell the world we’re making a record.’ ”
Much as with the surviving song demos for The White Album (the “Esher Demos”), Douglas pondered how to arrange numbers that seemed born complete. “And you know,” he continues, “this material, I’d sit and listen to these cassettes, and think, ‘What can I do with this?’ It was all there. I mean, I did some arrangements, orchestrated things slightly, but it was all there, it didn’t really need a producer.”
Shortly after Lennon handed Douglas his homemade cassettes, Ono wedged Douglas into one of their marital contests, almost as if she saw herself as the new Paul McCartney. “Then another time I’m out in Glen Cove,” Douglas recalls, “Yoko hands me this huge stack of five-inch reel-to-reel tapes, and she says, ‘This is my stuff. Now don’t tell John, but I’m gonna have some stuff on this record . . .’ So now there’s already this very complicated situation, with the studio and the players all learning this stuff in secret, there’s all this intrigue, John’s making a comeback record, and I’m supposed to keep Yoko’s involvement from her own husband! It was ridiculous.”
Some of this material came together quickly; other stuff needed work. “When I hired the musicians,” Douglas says, “John would say, ‘Make sure they’re contemporaries of mine,’ because he would use an oldies jam to get them in a mood for a certain song. This was part of how he got himself comfortable in the studio, singing old songs, but it was also how he cued his players to the groove he wanted on a track.”
Douglas decided on Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and guitarist Rick Nielsen to flesh out “Losing You.” To reach them, he called George Martin, who was now producing Cheap Trick’s fifth record, All Shook Up, at his AIR Studios in Montserrat. “I had to call Martin at his island studio to book my players,” Douglas remembers. “I called him and said, ‘Can I borrow some of my guys to play with your guy?’ ”
After three tart, ambitious power-pop records, Cheap Trick’s Dream Police reached Billboard’s top five album chart during the summer of 1979. This followed up a huge radio hit, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” that sprang from Cheap Trick at Budokan. During release season, the band worked the road constantly that summer to boost its numbers. Coincidentally, Cheap Trick’s whopping live cover of “Day Tripper” had been slapped onto a 1980 EP, Found All the Parts, and they began hearing about airplay of the Beatles song in Phoenix. Bun E. Carlos remembered getting the call that June: “Jack Douglas called, and they had a song they were having trouble getting a version of, and did I want to play on this thing, and I said sure, you know, like yeah . . .” Carlos continues:
Then we went in and he introduced us to John Lennon, and he said, “Oh you’re the guys from Cheap Trick, they told me your name but they didn’t tell me what band you’re in,” so we thought that was kinda neat. . . . We told him, “You know we wanted you to produce our first record,” and Lennon said, “I woulda done that no one told me!” We sat around the control booth and Jack played us the acoustic version of “Losing You,” and Lennon turned to us and said, you know, “You got any ideas?” In Cheap Trick we did “Cold Turkey,” and “It’s So Hard,” and we did some other Beatles tunes, “Day Tripper,” stuff like that. In the band, we’re all big Plastic Ono Band fans, we’re always saying, “Well, how would Plastic Ono Band have done this?” Or like, “If this were the next song after ‘Cold Turkey,’ how would it go?”26
Lennon’s collaborative approach impressed Nielsen and Carlos, just as it had Tex Gabriel back with the Elephant’s Memory Band. When they asked him what tempo he wanted, Lennon simply said, “Whatever you think it should be.” They cut the track live with Lennon on rhythm guitar to Nielsen’s lead, and then Nielsen overdubbed a second guitar track as they gathered in the booth. “It kind of happened so quickly you didn’t have time to really pinch yourself,” Carlos says.
Cheap Trick had a hit record on the charts, so hustling between gigs to keep sales going and banging out sessions for John Lennon’s secret project were all a part of the new status the band enjoyed. “And John was like, hey you wanna smoke a joint? And we were like ‘Sure!’ ’Cause we’d been in Canada all week, Cheap Trick, they didn’t have pot up there back then,” Carlos says. “Lennon got out his guitar and he said, ‘T
his is my “Day Tripper” guitar,’ and he had had it refinished and stuff, and we made some wisecrack like ‘Oh that’s number ten in Phoenix this week.’ ” Lennon shot them a look. No, Carlos and Nielsen insisted, “we have an EP and it’s on there.” And then, Carlos remembers, “Lennon’s eyebrows kinda went up at that a little, like he hadn’t heard, and wasn’t sure whether to believe us or not.”
After Nielsen’s second guitar part, Lennon invited them along for dinner, but Carlos had to beg off: “I told him, ‘I gotta go home to Chicago, we’re going to Japan tomorrow for three shows and then coming back next week to do another track,’ and he goes ‘Ah! I married one of the emperor’s daughters!’ ”
Like a lot of touring musicians, Carlos did a good deal of this invisible work, banging out tracks only to be replaced by studio players down the line. He certainly never expected to make the final cut on a Lennon comeback album. “We came in to find a version for the song the other guys couldn’t get a version for,” he says simply. “We weren’t surprised when it wasn’t on the record, they just used us as a demo version.” Even though Douglas had thought of his Cheap Trick players as perfect for Lennon’s tracks, Ono intervened. “Yoko decided Cheap Trick would be riding on Lennon’s coattails. Her attitude was ‘Who are these people, I’ve never heard of them! We’re not gonna give these guys a free ride,’ ” Douglas says.
Yoko’s own track, “I’m Movin’ On,” took shape with the same musicians. Douglas had them revive a drum part from their first album that they hadn’t used, and Yoko provided some sheet music with words and chords, which Nielsen wrote some riffs around. Then, Carlos says, “John got on the mike and said, ‘Mother, dear, why don’t you do Tony’s first verse and then do the boys’ arrangement,’ ’cause he was calling me and Rick ‘the boys.’ ” And Yoko shot back: “Fuck you very much, John,” and everyone dissolved with laughter. “We just cracked up with that, ’cause it was pretty obvious, you know, they were a team.”
Carlos admits that “Our playing wasn’t great on Yoko’s track, the feel never quite coalesced. But there were things like, Yoko’d be in the booth and say, ‘Does anyone want some granola?’ or whatever she had, and it looked like animal feed. And John would be like down the hall with the roadies, you know, sneaking a slice of pizza.”
Jack Douglas flew Carlos and Nielsen back for another session some weeks later, but Lennon had decided to start mixing what he had (they originally laid out enough material for a double set), thanked them for their help, and signed autographs. Once the tracks were finished, Douglas set about sequencing and mastering, and John and Yoko took meetings with record labels. David Geffen, who had wooed Dylan away from Columbia earlier in the seventies and then lost him, was busy starting up a new label: Geffen Records. Donna Summer and Elton John signed on as his first artists. But the label hadn’t released any records yet. He sent Yoko Ono a telegram when he heard there might be a Lennon record, and took a meeting with Ono in her ground-floor Dakota office.
“Well, why should we go with you?” Yoko asked him. “Because I will be very sensitive to who you are and deal with you straight and do a good job,” Geffen shot back. Ono pressed him to find out what he knew about her music, and Geffen admitted he didn’t know her work, and was even spotty on Lennon’s solo career. And Ono reminded him that he hadn’t even launched his label yet. But Geffen assured her he would treat them right.
Geffen walked out of the Dakota thinking that he had just sat through the strangest meeting ever. “She had a poker face, very aloof,” he remembers. After she ran “his numbers” (a combination of his birthday, address, phone number, and “who knows what”), Ono invited Geffen over to meet John. Without ever hearing the record, Geffen agreed to her terms:
“Don’t you want to want to hear the music first?” I said, “No, I’ll wait until whenever you want to play it for me.” And she said, “Well, if you wanted to hear the music before you made the deal, we wouldn’t have gone with you.”27
When Geffen met up with John in the studio, they reminisced about the L.A. scene where they had crossed paths in the mid-seventies. Lennon told him how excited he was for Yoko’s career, how the earlier hostility toward her seemed to be dropping away.
Like many of the musicians who worked with John and Yoko, Geffen came away with a telling insight as to how they leaned on each other’s strengths. “When Yoko’s alone, she’s Yoko Ono and she takes care of everything. But when she was with John, she deferred to him. She had an incredible respect for what he thought and what he wanted and what he aspired to. She influenced him a great deal and he influenced her a great deal.”28 This adds a new level to our understanding of the creative partnership: Lennon depended on Yoko to handle business negotiations; Yoko relied on Lennon for the personal leverage and mass appeal. Their professional stature depended on a mutual need, much the way the Beatles had developed their ensemble politics.
Jack Douglas had different memories of how they interacted. “I don’t mean to sound anti-Yoko because I’m not,” he says now, “but there was always some kind of minor war going on. In the end, Lennon would always fold to ‘Mother,’ he just didn’t want the grief. Like when it came time to do the song sequence for Double Fantasy, John said, ‘Okay, boys, let’s make an order. You guys make your order and put it in this hat, and I’ll make an order and put it in the hat.’ So we drew up our song lists, and my order and John’s were fairly similar, they all had John songs on side A and Yoko’s songs on side B. And then Yoko looked at these layouts and said, ‘No way! If you want to hear John, you’ve got to hear Yoko, too!’ And so we laced them together, first John and then Yoko, throughout the record. But with her, it wasn’t really a negotiation, it was like, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ ”
Double Fantasy went into production for release on November 17, 1980. Once they put the record to bed, John and Yoko booked press for the first time since 1975. The publicity appeared slowly at first, with articles in Newsweek and the New York Times, for exchanges with reporters that turned out to be far more enjoyable than Lennon remembered from the past. These expanded to several lengthier interviews as Double Fantasy turned into a hit, transforming Lennon’s comeback into a major event. The long, compelling Playboy interview with David Scheff, taped in September for release in the January issue, hit newsstands in mid-November. Long-form sessions booked with Rolling Stone, the New York Times Sunday magazine, and several British radio outlets found slots in early December.
In all of these quotes, Lennon held forth with a new confidence, proud of his new songs and unabashedly sentimental about his new home life. For Robert Palmer’s New York Times profile, which ran on November 9, Lennon went on about his time off and fatherhood, recasting his late career as a salvation narrative. “I was a machine that was supposed to produce so much creative something and give it out periodically for approval or to justify my existence on earth. But I don’t think I would have been able to just withdraw from the whole music business if it hadn’t been for Sean. . . . When I look at the relative importance of what life is about, I can’t quite convince myself that making a record or having a career is more important or even as important as my child, or any child.”
Another Lennon quote that Palmer used finally came clean about some of the “working class” myths Lennon often fudged:
Going back to the beginnings of rock and roll, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and so on were working-class entertainment; they were working class. The Beatles were slightly less working class; for Paul McCartney and me at least, going to university was a possibility. I had all this artsy stuff in me anyway, so we put a little more intellect into our music, just because of what we were. And gradually, expectations for the Beatles became educated, middle-class expectations. And I tended to get too intellectual about pop music, I had this sort of critic John Lennon sitting over me saying, “You did that already, you can’t do it again. You can’t say it that simply.” Now the music’s coming through me again.29
That’s a bra
cing clarification of Lennon’s own symbolic stature, broken down for two cultural audiences: in Britain, being working class at the time meant the impossibility of a higher education. In America, such distinctions get lost amid foreign accents and zany humor.
Douglas remembers Lennon feeling recharged by the album’s sales and media interest: “He was so proud of Double Fantasy turning into a hit, he was going to take the material on a huge world tour. He had already done sketches of the production, hired the musicians, like drummer Andy Newmark, bassist Tony Levin, and guitarist Hugh McCracken.”
With “(Just Like) Starting Over” as its parodic lead single, Double Fantasy found traction on the charts, goading big plans. Douglas remembers a lot of conversation about Lennon’s old partners, about Lennon returning to Britain, where he hadn’t been since 1971, and even beyond the tour, reaching out toward other projects. “There was a Ringo album coming down the pike, and a reunion, at least by the three of them (Harrison, Lennon, and Starr), that was all planned out. That was going to be Lennon’s next move after the world tour,” Douglas continues. “He talked fondly about McCartney every night, and he always wanted to redo certain Beatles songs, but he really spoke more like he really loved those guys. The only person that he was pissed at was George, because George put out this memoir [I Me Mine] and John was really, really pissed about that. I remember him saying, ‘How do you write about your life and not talk about the guy whose band you were in?’ ”