31

John Lennon's bloodied glasses [above]. Unlike other evidence in the crime [John's bloodied clothes wouldn't be returned to Yoko Ono until after his assassin's trial was completed in August 1981. The clothes were returned in a paper bag. "It's like they were saying, 'Here's your husband in a bag'," Yoko remembered], the glasses were retrieved by Dakota doorman Jay Hastings, and returned to Yoko upon her return from the hospital after John was declared dead on arrival.

On this anniverary of John Lennon's murder (this being the 31st anniversary; to give you an idea of how long ago that was, consider that - in 1980, the year he died - someone celebrating their 31st anniversary would have been married in 1949) - tradition holds that the blog post is about John.

Not that I've tapped that reservoir, but I'm not sure I can outdo these past blogs:

http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/day-in-life.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-i.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-ii.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-iii.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-iv.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/final-interview-part-v.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-vi.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2009/12/last-interview-part-vii.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/video-review.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/for-other-half-of-sky.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/double-fantasy-stripped-down-part-i.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/double-fantasy-stripped-down-part-ii.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/double-fantasy-stripped-down-part-iii.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/10/double-fantasy-stripped-down-part-iv.html
http://boythewayglennmillerplayed.blogspot.com/2010/12/30.html

RIP, John

copyright 2009-2011 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

HORSEHOCKEY, KLINGER!

Rest in Peace, Colonel

Harry Morgan
1915-2011

copyright 2011 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

10

George Harrison
February 25, 1943-November 29, 2001


See Yourself


It's easier to tell a lie than it is to tell the truth
It's easier to kill a fly than it is to turn it loose
It's easier to criticize somebody else
Than to see yourself

It's easier to give a sigh and be like all the rest
Who stand around and crucify you while you do your best
It's easier to see the books upon the shelf
Than to see yourself

It's easier to hurt someone and make them cry
Than it is to dry their eyes
I got tired of fooling 'round with other people's lies
Rather I'd find someone that's true

It's easier to say you won't than it is to feel you can
It's easier to drag your feet than it is to be a man
It's easier to look at someone else's wealth
Than to see yourself


copyright 1976 George Harrison; 2011 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

The Surly Bonds of Earth - 25 Years Later

The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, from their official November 15, 1985 photograph. In the back row from left to right: Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, and Judy Resnik. In the front row from left to right: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ron McNair.

"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

President Ronald Reagan
Address to the Nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
January 28, 1986

copyright 2011 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

30

Yoko Ono, center, is aided by a policeman and David Geffen, right, of Geffen Records as she leaves Roosevelt Hospital in New York late Monday night, Dec. 8, 1980 after the death of her husband John Lennon.

It was, of course, impossible that I would not write today about John Lennon. With Yoko's much-welcomed focus on John's 70th birthday - as opposed to today's 30th anniversary of his murder - John has been in the news a great deal this fall, and that is good. I saw recently the incredibly well-done documentary by filmmaker Michael Epstein [no relation - despite the irony - to Beatles manager Brian Epstein]. Among the many fantastic things about LennoNYC is how Lennon's murder is handled. While acknowledged - and how could it not be - there is no mention of Mark David Chapman, nor any mention of the shooting with the exception of Yoko's incredibly poignant, "He was an artist. Why would you kill an artist?"

Still, the reality is that there is no way to consider John's life in its entirety without recounting that night 30 years ago. Unfortunately, for a good number of those who have ever lived - particularly the famous - their lives are largely seen through the prism of their deaths. Just off the top of my head I can think of Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Michael Jackson, Liberace, Rock Hudson, John Belushi..... When you think of their lives, invariably it is through the lens of how their lives ended moreso than how those lives they were lived. That is just the way it is.

So, on this 30th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination [and, let's be clear, that's what it was. Many mistakenly believe that 'assassination' is only the murder of political leaders. The Webster's definition of 'assassination' is, "to kill suddenly or secretively; to murder premeditatedly and treacherously"], I'm compelled to write about December 8, 1980.

I've written before about the last day of John Lennon's life. The last hour of his life, however, is the focus of today's post.

The evening of December 8, 1980 was about to become a painful one for Alan Weiss. Weiss was working for WABC-TV in New York City and won two Emmy's before his 30th birthday. After a long day at work, he jumped on his motorcycle and headed home.

The evening of December 8, 1980 was the end of a 30-hour shift for Dr. Stephan Lynn, head of the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room in New York City. He was exhausted and looking forward to sleep. He headed home for a quick hug of his wife and two young daughters and a nice warm bed.

The evening of December 8, 1980 was just beginning for New York City Police Officers Pete Cullen and Steve Spiro, who did the night shift on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Not necessarily a 'cush' job, but better than 99% of the other ones available to a New York City cop in 1980.

The night of December 8, 1980 was a typical one for Jay Hastings, working as a doorman at the Dakota. Earlier that night, a friend of one of his highest profile residents, John Lennon, had stopped by to drop something off for the former Beatle. Hastings had seen Bob Gruen with John Lennon just a few days ago, so he took the package and promised Gruen that he would give it to John when he returned that evening. Police would later open the package - as part of their investigation - to find it containing some tapes of the The Clash that John had asked Gruen to make for him [Gruen had told John that he would love The Clash and John "wanted to take a listen"], as well as some of the negatives from a photo session Gruen had done with John and Yoko two days earlier. All of that would be later, however. For now, though, all was quiet as Hastings watched Monday Night Football on a tiny black and white television propped up on the counter of the front desk.

The lives of these five men would converge unexpectedly and suddenly in a violent collision with the last night of John Lennon's life.

The night of December 8, 1980 was the completion of a task Mark David Chapman had set out to accomplish a month earlier. He'd come to New York in November 1980 to kill John Lennon but got cold feet and returned home to Hawaii. He was back now and determined to finish what he'd set out to do. It was an unusually warm evening for early December in New York City. Despite that, Chapman stood patiently in the dark outside the Dakota wearing a winter's coat - attire not suited for Hawaii but perfect for the conditions that he thought he'd find in December on the East Coast. Chapman carried a well-worn copy of The Catcher In the Rye, the J.D. Salinger tale of disaffected youth. In his pocket was a five-shot Charter Arms .38-caliber revolver - the ammunition provided by an unsuspecting old friend of Chapman's from Alabama, whom the 25-year old Chapman had suddenly visited in October 1980.

The evening of December 8, 1980 was a pleasant and accomplished one for John Lennon. The day had been hectic - a photo session with photographer Annie Leibovitz, a three-hour interview with R.K.O. Radio, and a five-hour session at the Hit Factory Record Studios to tweak a song by Yoko called "Walking on Thin Ice".

As John and Yoko's rented limousine stopped on 72nd Street at the ornate gate of the Dakota [John had told the driver to stop there rather than inside the courtyard - and past Chapman - which was more the standard route on a cold December evening....which this was not], Lennon grabbed the reel-to-reel tapes of the evening's sessions, placed them under his arm, and followed Yoko out of the car. It was 10:50 pm.

Yoko had wanted to stop for a bite to eat at The Stage Deli, but John wanted to go home. So, as they emerged from the limo, John strode ahead of Yoko as they entered the gate. He was eager to check in on his 5-year old son, Sean. While the boy would [hopefully] be asleep, John hadn't seen him for a few days, as Sean had spent the weekend with his nanny's family in Pennsylvania. After that, John would go into the kitchen to get a bite to eat - knowing that, as usual when the kitchen door opened, his three cats would come bounding forward to greet him.

There is some dispute as to whether Chapman really said, "Mr. Lennon?!" as he stepped out of the shadows about five strides after John had passed him unseen. For years that was the story; recently, though, Chapman has said he said nothing. It is possible, in fact, that he is right. John never stopped walking, nor did he turn around - headed instead in the direction of the door some 50 feet away. Had his name been called so loudly and unexpectedly in the dark of night, one would assume that the startled Lennon would have turned to face the sound.

What is indisputable is that Chapman now stood in a combat stance a few feet from Lennon and Ono with his handgun leveled at the back of John's midsection. Very quickly, Chapman fired four bullets, three of which which pierced John from the back through the lungs, the chamber around his heart, and his shoulder. The fourth missed John and hit the glass window by the the front door of the complex.

Although at first in shock, John immediately knew what had happened and screamed, "I'm shot!" Despite a massive loss of blood - even in just the few seconds that had passed - John started to jog forward toward the door. He stumbled up the steps and fell face first onto the marble lobby floor in the foyer, breaking his glasses. Somehow, the reel-to-reel tapes he'd been carrying had stayed lodged under his arm. They now crashed to the floor beside his glasses.

Startled by the broken glass - initially he'd assumed the firing of the gun to be a car backfiring - doorman Hastings ran from behind the desk just as Lennon came stumbling through the door. Despite the blood and his own shock, Hastings knew immediately that the grievously wounded man at his feet was John Lennon, as Yoko quickly came to the door at a gallop screaming. Hastings rang the alarm that connected the Dakota to the police. He then went back to John and instinctively removed his jacket and placed it over John's crumpled torso. Also instinctively, although he was unarmed, Hastings ran out the door to approach the shadowy figure 50 feet away who was still in a combat position. Although the gun was still in Chapman's hands, he'd lowered his arm to his side with gun pointed toward the ground. Incredulous, Hastings approached Chapman and screamed, "Do you know what you just did?!".

"I just shot John Lennon," Chapman replied softly.

Within minutes after Chapman opened fire, Officers Cullen and Spiro were the first to answer the report of shots fired at the Dakota. As he got out of the patrol car, Cullen was struck by the lack of movement: the doorman, a Dakota handyman who had run out of his basement apartment at the sound of Lennon's body hitting the floor above him, and the killer, all standing as if frozen.

"Somebody just shot John Lennon!" the doorman finally shouted, pointing at Chapman.

"Where's Lennon?" Cullen asked. Hastings pointed to the nearby vestibule in which John - with blood pouring from his chest - lay dying. Cullen ran to Lennon's side as Spiro threw Chapman against the stone wall and cuffed him.

Two other officers soon arrived to lift John up and take him to a waiting police car. As they did, one of the officers would recall his stomach sickening as he heard the unmistakable cracking of Lennon's shoulder blade as they lifted him up, the bones shattered by a bullet. As they were carrying him to the waiting police car, Lennon vomited up blood and fleshy tissue.

With Lennon placed gingerly on the backseat of the patrol car, one of the officers jumped into the back to hold his head while the other two officers jumped in the front seats and sped downtown to Roosevelt Hospital, located exactly one mile away. In the midst of the chaos, Cullen spotted Yoko Ono. "Can I go, too?" she asked as her husband disappeared. A ride was quickly arranged.

Cradling Lennon's head, the officer in the backseat of the speeding patrol car looked into John's glassy eyes. Breathing heavily, with the gurgling of blood audible to all in the car, Lennon was fading. The officer tried to keep Lennon conscious, screaming at him. "Do you know who you are?!?! Are you John Lennon?!" John - who, with the other Beatles had popularized the 'yeah, yeah, yeah' phrase 16 years earlier - uttered what would be his last word: "Yeah...." He then lost consciousness and his breathing stopped.

Meanwhile, back at the Dakota, Officers Spiro and Cullen were trying hard to remain professional. Avid Beatles fans, both had often seen John, Yoko and Sean walking the neighborhood. Although they'd never spoken to John, both felt as though this was a family member or friend that Chapman had just shot. Trying to control the urge to hit Chapman, Spiro thought of the only thing he could think of: "Do you have a statement?!" Chapman pointed with his cuffed hands down to the ground nearby where his copy of Catcher in the Rye lay. Spiro opened the book and saw the inscription, "This is my statement." Spiro fell into a brief shocked daze at the scrawl. He was startled back into reality when Chapman - answering a question that hadn't been asked - said, "I acted alone."

Cullen and Spiro then roughly loaded Chapman into their car for a trip to the 20th Precinct. "He was apologetic," Cullen recalled in a 2005 interview - but not for shooting Lennon. "I remember that he was apologizing for giving us a hard time."

Nearby, unnoticed and - for the next 12 hours, untouched - was the copy of Double Fantasy that Lennon had signed for Chapman 6 hours earlier. Chapman had placed it in a large potted plant at the side of the gate, where it would be inadvertently discovered by one of the scores of officers who would be called to the Dakota for crowd control as word of Lennon's shooting spread.

Thirty minutes earlier, Dr. Stephan Lynn's 30-hour shift had ended at 10:30 p.m. He had literally just walked through the door and sat down on the sofa when his phone rang. Picking it up, a nurse asked him if he could come back to the hospital to help out. A man with a gunshot to the chest was coming to Roosevelt.

Lynn walked back out the door and hailed a cab to the hospital.

Meanwhile, at Roosevelt Hospital at that moment, TV producer Weiss was lying on a gurney wondering how his night had turned so shitty so quickly. An hour earlier, Weiss' Honda motorcycle had collided head on with a taxi. Somehow, Weiss seemed to have escaped with what he suspected to be cracked ribs. It was as he was lying on the gurney in an emergency room hallway contemplating his ruined evening and awaiting x-rays that Weiss was about to get the news scoop of a lifetime.

BOOM! The doors of the hallway where Weiss lie burst open with a gunshot victim on a stretcher carried by a half dozen police officers, who passed Weiss as they brought the victim into a room nearby. As doctors and nurses flew into action, two of the police officers paused alongside Weiss' gurney. "Jesus, can you believe it?" one officer rhetorically asked the other. "John Lennon?!"

Weiss was incredulous. He immediately rose from the gurney and grabbed a nearby hospital worker. Realizing he couldn't walk, Weiss shoved $20 into the man's hands and told him to call the WABC-TV newsroom with a tip that John Lennon was shot. As it turned out, the money disappeared, and the call was never made.

Five minutes passed. Weiss was suddenly doubting the news instincts of the bribed hospital worker. As he was contemplating this, Weiss was started by what he later described as a strangled sound. "I twist around and there is Yoko Ono on the arm of a police officer, and she's sobbing," Weiss recalled in a 2005 interview.

With the sight of Yoko, Weiss decided he had to make the call to WABC-TV himself. He finally persuaded a police officer to help him up and walk him to a hospital phone, under the ruse that he had to call his wife to tell her he was in the hospital. Instead, out of earshot of the officer, Weiss reached the WABC-TV assignment editor with his tip around 11 p.m. Before hanging up the phone with Weiss, the editor on the other end of the phone was able to check and confirm a reported shooting at Lennon's address.

All the while, Lynn and two other doctors were working on the victim. The man lying on the table had no pulse, no blood pressure, and no breathing. Lynn did not know that the man on the table in front of him was John Lennon. "We took his wallet out of his pocket," Lynn recalled in 2005. "The nurse immediately chuckled and said, 'This can't be John Lennon'. Because it didn't look anything like John Lennon."

Whether or not it was Lennon, Lynn was not quite sure. What he did know, though, was that, "He was losing a tremendous amount of blood," Lynn remembered. "And he had three wounds in his chest. We knew we had to act quickly. We started an IV, we transfused blood. We actually did an operation in the emergency department to try to open his chest to look for the source of the bleeding. We did cardiac massage - I literally held his heart in my hand and pumped his heart - but there was complete destruction of all the vessels leaving his heart."

After 25 minutes, the three doctors gave up. The damage was too great. Lennon was dead. Lynn recalled that Chapman's marksmanship was extraordinary. "He was an amazingly good shot," Lynn recalled. "All three of those bullets in the chest were perfectly placed. They destroyed all of the major blood vessels that took the blood out of the heart to all of the rest of the body." As a result, "there was no way circulation of blood could take place in this man and there was no way that anyone could fix him."

Weiss continued watching in disbelief as the doctors frantically worked on Lennon. It took him a moment to realize the song that was playing on the hospital's Muzak system - the Beatles' "All My Loving."

Meanwhile, Dr. Lynn made the long walk to the end of the emergency room hallway where Yoko was waiting in a room with record mogul David Geffen, who had rushed to the hospital after receiving a call that John had been shot. It was now Lynn's job to deliver the word that John Lennon, Yoko's soulmate and spouse, was dead.

"She refused to accept or believe that," Lynn recalled. "For five minutes, she kept repeating, `It's not true. I don't believe you. You're lying."' Lynn listened quietly. "There was a time she was lying on the floor, literally pounding her head against the concrete, during which I was concerned I was going to have a second patient," Lynn remembered. "Many, many times she said, 'You're lying, I don't believe you, he's not dead,' " he added. "[Geffen] was helpful in getting her to calm down and accept what had happened. She never asked to see the body, and I never offered. She needed to get home [to tell Sean], and she did."

By the time Yoko left the hospital, Weiss' tip had been confirmed and given to Howard Cosell, who told the nation of Lennon's death during Monday Night Football.....which was still on the screen of the little black and white television on doorman Hastings' front desk counter.

This brought a throng of reporters to Roosevelt Hospital, leaving Lynn to inform them that Lennon was gone. "John Lennon...," Lynn began before pausing for a moment. He then went on, "....was brought to the emergency room of St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital...He was dead on arrival." With that, a collective groan emanated from the normally cynical assembled media.

After finishing with the media, Lynn returned to the emergency room. Thinking remarkably clearly - and with great foresight - Lynn arranged for the disposal of all medical supplies and equipment used on Lennon - a move to thwart ghoulish collectors. "I said, 'Not a piece of linen with Mr. Lennon's blood is to leave this department except in a special bag,' " Lynn recalled. "I had to tell the nursing staff that they could not sell their uniforms, which might have been stained with John Lennon's blood." He personally supervised the disposal of everything.

By the time Lynn was done, it was 3 am. He decided to walk home, heading up Columbia Avenue. "I was afraid that someone would run up to me and say, 'You're the doctor who didn't save John Lennon and allowed him to die,' " Lynn said.

On the 25th anniversary of the murder, Lynn stated that he believed that - despite medical advances in the previous quarter century - John's gunshot injuries would still be untreatable today. "There was no way of repairing that damage then and, to my knowledge, there's no way to repair that amount of damage today," Lynn said. "There was absolutely nothing we could do."



For days afterward, up in Apartment 72 of the Dakota, whenever the kitchen door opened, three cats came bounding forward to greet a man who was no longer there.....


copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Double Fantasy Stripped Down Part IV

The cover sleeve for the 45-single "Woman" (above). The song was the second of three singles ["(Just Like) Starting Over" and "Watching the Wheels" being the others] from the album Double Fantasy.

BEAUTIFUL BOYS

This song, Yoko's ode to her two 'boys' John and Sean, is was and always will be the most haunting on the finished album, Double Fantasy. I say the finished album because - as we'll see in a moment - there is a song on Stripped Down that actually out-haunts it. But, for now, we'll focus on this one.

The song - featuring John on Spanish guitar - features three stanzas: one to Sean, one to John and one to both of them. Unlike the album version, the Stripped Down version does not include that Jack Douglas-inspired Star Wars laser conclusion. It also differs in that the middle musical interlude that appears on the finished product instead opens the track on Stripped Down. After John's beautiful guitar playing, the song begins:

You're a beautiful boy
With all your little toys
Your eyes have seen the world
Though you're only four years old
And your tears are streaming
Even when you're smiling
Please never be afraid to cry

You're a beautiful boy
With all your little ploys
Your mind has changed the world
And you're now forty years old
You got all you can carry
And still feel somehow empty
Don't ever be afraid to fly

All you beautiful boys
Creating multiple plays
You like to fence in your world
And settle down when you're old
You can run from pole to pole
And never scratch your soul
Don't be afraid to go to hell and back
Don't be afraid to go to hell and back
Don't be afraid to be afraid


DEAR YOKO

John's love of old-time Blued Grass American country music mixes with a rocked-up love letter to Yoko. Much like "Crippled Inside" (1971)and "I Know" (1973)- two earlier country-type Lennon tracks - "Dear Yoko" features John with a faux-American southern twang at points throughout the song. The tune - written in Bermuda while John and Sean were on vacation while Yoko remained in New York [although John never knew it, Yoko sent them to Bermuda because she had become addicted to heroin and needed them gone to detox at home] - features the English concertina, in this case used to mimic the Blue Grass staple of the accordion.

The album version of "Dear Yoko" ends with John on a verbal riff saying, "It was a sunny night in the fishing boat. It really hit home, you know what I mean? When you come over next time don't sell the cows, spend some time with me and Sean you'll like it. Get in the water". The spoken riff on Stripped Down is different, although in the same vein: it's a postcard John has written home to Yoko back in New York. On the Double Fantasy version, he's chastising her - albeit tongue-in-cheek -for not "getting into" Bermuda the way he and Sean have. He even throws in a mention of Yoko's famous investment in Holstein cows that netted the Lennon's a nifty $120,000 profit. [Unfortunately, the press that the investment received was one of many things that supposedly angered Mark Chapman, who considered it another example of John being a sell-out]. As you'll read in a moment, the spoken riff on Stripped Down is more light and humorous.

The song begins with John trying to figure out what key guitarist Hugh McCracken is in. They have just completed a run through of the song, and John wants to immediately do it again, as he is pleased with what they've just done.

"Huey, Huey? Ah. Ok, let's do it again, right away. A one, two, three, four!"

A-wella, hella, hella...
Even after all these years
I miss you when you're not here
I wish you were here my dear Yoko
Even if it's just a day
I miss you when you're away
I wish you were here today dear Yoko

Even if it's just one night
I miss you and it don't feel right
I wish you were here tonight dear Yoko
Even if it's just one hour
I wilt just like a fading flower
Ain't nothing in the world like our love dear Yoko

Oh, a-hoh Yoko
I'm never, ever, ever, ever, ever gonna let you go
Oh a-hoh Yoko
I'm never, ever, ever, ever, ever gonna let you go
No sir!

Even when I'm miles at sea
And nowhere is the place to be
Your spirit's watching over me dear Yoko
Even when I watch T.V.
There's a hole where you're supposed to be
There's nobody lying next to me dear Yoko

Oh a-ho Yoko
I'm never, ever, ever, ever, ever gonna let you go
Oh a-ho, a-ho Yoko
I never, ever, ever, ever, ever gonna let you go

Even after all this time
I miss you like the sun don't shine
Without you I'm a one track m-m-m-mind dear Yoko
After all is really said and done
The two of us are really one
The goddess really smiled upon our love dear Yoko

Well, well, well, well, well.
Yoko!
Yo-ho-ho-ho-ko !

"I'm here in Bermuda, having a lovely time
Bought all sorts of clothes.
Went down to the restaurant, and had a great meal.
Then threw it up because I felt sick.
Swimming every day.
The water's 190 degrees.
The houses are all pink and blue, and the street's very quiet.
And there's no dirt anywhere.
And it's really quiet.
Anyway, and it's just a lot of ships and things.
And you're right by water.
And you can really see a fantastic view.
And anyway, I thought I'm gonna have this painting painted of me and Sean.
But I'm not gonna tell you 'till I get home.
So I won't write this on the postcard.
But by now you'll have found out
Because I've already had it done.
It's hanging up in your office, Right?
That's true, but on the other hand I'd just like to mention it here.
For the folks back home.
Thank you."

EVERY MAN HAS A WOMAN

This song - which John envisioned as being the follow-up single to "(Just Like) Starting Over" but which Yoko held back in the aftermath of John's death - is a real upbeat tale of eternal love on the album version. On the Stripped Down version, however, it is haunting, slower and almost other-worldly. It's almost as if Yoko is singing it on Earth and John from the heavens in the aftermath of his murder. None of the upbeat synthesizers are on this version. Instead, it is a foggy, out of space-feel. John and Yoko sing in harmony throughout the song, as these are the same vocal tracks eventually used on the album version.

Every man has a woman who loves him
Rain or shine, or life.
Or death
If he finds her in this life time
He will know
When he presses his ear to her breast

Why do I roam when I know you're the one?
Why do I laugh when I feel like crying? [John: Yeah!]

Every woman has a man who loves her
Rise or fall of her life.
And in death
If she finds him in this life time
She will know
When she looks into his eyes

Why do I roam when I know you're the one?
Why do I run when I feel like holding you?

Every man has a woman who loves him
If he finds her in this life time
He will know [John: oh, oh, oh, oh......]


HARD TIMES ARE OVER

In the aftermath of John's murder, of course, this song took on a morbid and ironic meaning never intended. Yoko would point out, though, that she wrote the song with the addendum - "over for a while" - to the celebration that "hard times are over". Not forever. Not maybe even tomorrow. But for a while, anyway.

As he did with the 1971 Christmas [now classic] "Happy X-Mas (War is Over)", John brought in a choir for this track [the Harlem Boys Choir completed the joyful spirit of "Happy X-Mas"]. The difference, of course, is that Yoko wrote and sings lead on this one, leading John to cry joyously to David Sheff at one point, "I've invented Asian soul music!" Interestingly, at the recording session, which Sheff attended, John and Yoko had the choir sing "One world, one people! One world, one people!" as a fade out of the song. For some reason, however, they opted not to use it and it doesn't appear on Stripped Down,

The album version is a great completion to Double Fantasy. The Stripped Down version, is even better because the choir - the Benny Cummings Singers-Kings Temple Choir - is even clearer, as is John's backing vocal [which includes typical Lennon tongue-in-cheek banter]. On the album version, the song begins with the choir praying. This came as a result of a quick observation by Douglas as he watched the choir warm up, "Get that!" Douglas yelled an engineer. The result is the now-familiar "We thank you for the glory in our hearts, right now! We thank you right now! Thank you, thank you!" While that is missing from Stripped Down, the clapping and harmonies of the choir are more clear on Stripped Down. As is John's wicked enjoyment of the two worlds - Japanese vocals and American gospel - colliding. The result is classic John Lennon.

John: "Ah!"
It's been very hard
But it's getting easier now
Hard times are over, over for awhile
The leaves are shining in the sun
And I'm smiling inside
You and I watching each other on a street corner
Cars and buses and planes and people go by
But we don't care
We want to know
Wanna know in each other's eyes
That hard times are over, over for some time [John: "Yeah!"]

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile
[John: Hard times are over. Hear ye, hear ye. Come what may!]

It's been very rough
But It's getting easier now
Hard times are over, over for awhile
The streams are twinkling in the sun
And I'm smiling inside
You and I walking together 'round the street corner

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile
[John: A collection will be taken. It's an offer you can't refuse. Heh, heh, heh]

Hard times are over
Hard times are over [John: Hard times are over!]
Hard times are over, over for awhile
[John: Yeah, yeah, yeah]
Hard times are over
[John: In an unfortunate mocking of "Happiness is a Warm Gun", When I hold you - in my armchair...]

Hard times are over, over for awhile!
[John: Heh, heh,. heh. D'Oh! That's all folks, hah, hah, hah]


copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Double Fantasy Stripped Down Part III

The jacket cover for the single "Watching the Wheels" [above] featured a photo actually taken by one of the 'Dakota Groupies', a band of loonies and ne'er-do-wells who would wait around the Dakota's entrance for a glimpse of John. This photo happened to be taken on August 4, 1980, just as John and Yoko were heading out to the first recording sessions for Double Fantasy. While initially annoyed with the fan photographer, John loved this photo and wanted to use it for the "Watching the Wheels" single. Unfortunately, that same fan would take another picture - four months later - that would become infamous. The fan who took the picture above was Paul Goresh, the same man who would photograph John signing an autograph for Mark Chapman on December 8, 1980.

WATCHING THE WHEELS

This song is my favorite of favorites. It may be the most autobiographical song in the history of rock music, actually. The song - as with much of that period - is touched with a special sadness because of the role it played in convincing Mark Chapman to kill John Lennon. With his infatuation with Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield, the one scene in the book that resonated the most with Chapman said was when Holden's little sister, Phoebe, is riding the merry-go-round and worrying that she will fall off [i.e. grow up]. When Chapman first played "Watching the Wheels" and heard the lyrics, "...no longer ridin' on the merry-go-round. I just had to let it go." Chapman said that was the final sign he needed to remove the few doubts he still had as to whether or not he was really meant to kill John Lennon.

While it is unlikely that sound of a merry-go-round in the song made it any more likely that Chapman would kill Lennon, there is an interesting back story as to how that sound - created by an instrument called a Hammered dulcimer - ended up in the song. While walking one day in Greenwich Village, producer Jack Douglas and engineer Lee DeCarlo literally stumbled upon a street musician playing a Hammered dulcimer on the corner. The sound immediately made them think of a merry-go-round and the lyric in John's song.

Struck by the sound, the two men went up to the street musician - Matthew Cunningham -- and asked him whether he was interested in taking part in a paying gig at a professional recording session. Cunningham naturally agreed but interestingly enough never asked who was making the recording. At the studio - still not knowing for whom he was playing - Cunningham set up by sitting down with his Hammered dulcimer in a yoga position, with his legs folded under him. At this point, Douglas came down from the production control room with John joining them. Douglas and Lennon then told Cunningham exactly where they wanted him to play on the song. He played wonderfully, getting the exact sound John wanted on one take.

As he waited to get paid, Cunningham started staring into the control room. Finally, he pointed to John and said, "What's your name?" Amused, John replied, "I'm John." After a pause, Cunningham said, "Hi, John." It would be months before he'd learn that he had played on John Lennon's last album.

On Stripped Down, what is most noticeable about the song is that there is only John on one piano. On the recorded version on Double Fantasy, John played a second piano tracked to mirror the first one. It makes a different sound, to be sure, and actually highlights the part of the chorus where John mimics the Hammered dulcimer to add to the merry-go-round effect.

People say I'm crazy
Doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings
To save me from ruin
When I say that I'm o.k.
Well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you're not happy now
You no longer play the game

People say I'm lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine
Watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy
You're no longer on the ball

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go

Ah, people asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem,
Only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me
As if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry
I'm just sitting here doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round, you see
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go


YES, I'M YOUR ANGEL

There are very few differences between the song as it appeared on the finished product and as it does on Striped Down. Missing, though, is the enjoyable interlude between "Watching the Wheels" and "Yes, I'm your Angel". After the final drum roll ending the former, the latter begins with the sounds of a street busy with life. We hear a homeless man [John] on a corner with a hat collecting money, and as each passer-by drops in a coin John says, "Thank you, thank you; you've got a lucky face. Thank you, thank you." We then follow a man after he drops a coin in the beggar's hat as he is walking down the street. He stops inside a drinking establishment as we hear the swinging saloon door squeak closed behind him. Glasses are clinking and people are talking as the lady at the piano is warming up. When she begins, they applaud politely as Yoko performs in this imaginary nightclub in the 1940s.

Yes, I'm your angel
I'll give you everything
In my magic power
So make a wish
And I'll let it come true for you
Tra, la, la, la, la

[John whistles]

You're my fairy
You give me everything
I ever wanted from life
Have I made a wish
And is that why I have you
Tra, la, la, la, la

[John whistles]

We believe in pumpkins that turn into princess
And frogs that turn into prince
We believe in moons that smile to us
When we hurry home before the midnight strikes
Tra, la, la, la, la

[John whistles]

Yes, I'm so pretty [John whistles a cat-call]
You're so dizzy
And we're so happy every day
Let's make a wish
And let it come true for us
Tra, la, la, la, la

I'm in your pocket
You're in my locket
And we're so lucky in every way
We make a wish
And let it come true for us
Tra, la, la, la, la

[John whistles]

We believe in houses built in the sky
And love that lifts us high
We believe in the sun that looks over our shoulders
And brings our shadows together
Tra, la, la, la, la

[John whistles]

Yes, our hearts are one
Our bodies, too
And it's so good (hmmm) everytime
We make a wish
And let it come true for you, too
Tra, la, la, la, la

Happy birthday, my love
I'm your angel
I'll give you everything
In my magic power
So make a wish
And I'll let it come true for you
Tra, la, la, la, la, la


WOMAN

The track begins with John strumming a note on the guitar before asking quizzically to the musicians, "Where we goin' fellas?" This was a phrase John would use with the other three Beatles in the early days of their careers, playing at clubs, dance halls and bars. He'd say, "Where we goin' fellas?" They're response was, "To the top, Johnny?" John would then say, "And where's that, fellas?" To which they'd replay, "To the toppermost of the poppermost!"

The version on Stripped Down is quite beautiful and the song's origins as a tune for guitar are more easily gleaned as it is only John, a bass and a drum. After asking them where they're going, John counts in, "two, three, four"

For the other half of the sky...
Woman I can hardly express
My mixed emotions at my thoughtlessness
After all I'm forever in your debt
And woman I will try to express
My inner feelings and thankfulness
For showing me the meaning of success

Oooooh, well, well
Doo, doo, doo, doodle, doo
Ooooh, well, well
Doo, doo, doo, doodle, doo

Woman I know you understand
The little child inside the man
Please remember my life is in your hands
And woman hold me close to your heart
However distant don't keep us apart
After all it is written in the stars

Oooooh, well, well
Doo, doo, doo, doodle, doo
Oooooh, well, well
Doo, doo, doo, doodle, doo
Well

Woman please let me explain
I never meant to cause you sorrow or pain
So let me tell you again and again and again

I love you, yeah, yeah
Now and forever
I love you, yeah, yeah
Now and forever
I love you, [deep breath] yeah, yeah
Now and forever
I love you, [deep breath] yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

NEXT: The Final Four

copyright 1980 John Lennon and Yoko Ono;
copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Double Fantasy Stripped Down Part II

If I had a dime for every minute of my early adolescence that I stared and studied the back cover of my Double Fantasy album [above] I'd be millionaire many times over. Most touching - to me, anyway - was the note from John and Yoko [you can barely see it, in white text, in the lower right quadrant of the album cover above]: "With special thanks to all the people, known and unknown, who helped us stay in America, without whom this album would not have been made. love John & Yoko."

GIVE ME SOMETHING

With her second track on the album, Yoko comes back with another rocker featuring John and Hugh McCracken on two strong guitar solos, not unlike the ones John, Paul and George used on "The End" from Abbey Road. While "Kiss Kiss Kiss" shows the couple in bliss, "Give Me Something" starts a set of three tracks where things are rough between the two lovers. Yoko has said that she wrote much of this song and "I'm Moving" on in 1973-74 when she and John were separated.

The beginning of the track starts with the familiar "Ah-oh, ah-oh" that we hear on the album, but in a slightly different rhythm.

Ah-oh, a-oh
Ah-oh, a-oh OH!
Oh.......................

The food is cold
Your eyes are cold
The window's cold
The bed's cold

Give me something that's not cold, come on, come on
Give me something that's not cold, come on, come on
Give me something that's not cold, come on, come on
Give me, give me, give me

The chair's hard
Your voice is hard
Your money's hard
The living's hard

Give me something that's not hard, come on, come on
Give me something that's not hard, come on, come on
Give me something that's not hard, come on, come on
Give me, give me, give me

Here Hugh McCracken begins his guitar solo and is soon joined by John .

I'll give you my heartbeat
And a bit of tear and flesh
It's not very much but while it's there
You can have it, you can have it


I'M LOSING YOU

One of the great unheralded songs on the album. There is also a back-story to this one. Jack Douglas had previously produced Cheap Trick and convinced John that bringing in some of the band members would give a special edge to both "I'm Losing You" and "I'm Moving On". Finally, John agreed. There was a problem, however: Cheap Trick were also in recording sessions at the same time. Their producer? George Martin. Yes, that George Martin of Beatle fame. Douglas would later joke that he called Martin and said, “You’ve got my band and I’ve got one of yours, can I borrow my band for a few tracks?”

Martin naturally agreed. Cheap Trick drummer Bun E Carlos arrived with guitarist Rick Nielsen at The Hit Factory recording studios. Nielsen almost didn't make it: his wife went into labor and gave birth to their third son that morning. Knowing how badly her husband wanted to play with John Lennon, however, Nielsen's wife consented to allow him to go to the session. Nielsen would later remember, “I don’t think I would have missed being at the hospital for anyone else except for John Lennon!”

With their arrival, the Cheap Trick pair joined regular session bassist Tony Levin and George Smalls on keyboards for the recording of “I’m Losing You”. Douglas, John and all of the musicians were amazed at the sound generated by Lennon and Nielsen trading guitar licks. “It really rocked,” Douglas later said. “John was thrilled.”

Indeed, John was so impressed with Nielsen that at one point he turned to Bun E Carlos and said, "Man, I wish I’d had him on ‘Cold Turkey’ – we had Clapton on that and he froze up and could only play this one riff.”

There was a problem, though. While John may have been pleased with the track, Yoko was not. She would give no reason and Douglas remembered that there was nothing that he could do or say to persuade her that Cheap Trick wasn’t some unknown band wishing to trade on the Lennon name. “And of course John didn’t argue with Yoko,” Douglas said. As for Cheap Trick, they were unaware of any problems in the studio. “Yoko was great to us when we were there – and she said great stuff about us when the track was finally released 17 years later [Yoko released the Cheap Trick version of "I'm Losing You" on the 1998 John Lennon Anthology 4-CD box set],” said Nielsen. “We were thrilled that we got to play on it and when it came out all those years later I felt kind of vindicated as I always thought our version was better than the one on the album.”

The track begins with John telling drummer Andy Newmark, "Count it, Andy." "Is the tempo good?" Newmark asks. "Beautiful, beautiful," John gushes. With that, Andy starts the 'counting'

One, two, one, two, three, four and Andy's familiar drum roll begins the song as John moans,

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Whoa.

Here in some stranger's room
Late in the afternoon
What am I doing here at all?
Ain't no doubt about it
I'm losing you
I'm losing you

Somehow the wires have crossed
Communication's lost
Can't even get you on the telephone - no mamma
Just got to shout about it
I'm losing you
I'm losing you

Well, here in the valley of indecision
I don't know what to do
I feel you slipping away
I feel you slipping away [John counts, "one, two, three, four"]
I'm losing you
I'm losing you

Well now, you say you're not getting enough
But I remind you of all that bad, bad, bad stuff
So what the hell am I supposed to do?
Just put a Band-aid on it!
And stop the bleeding now
Stop the bleeding now

Welllllll. Whoooo. Ah.... Humph. Humph, Humph. Ahhhhha Way-hoooo!

Hmmmm. I'm losing you
Oh, I'm losing you
Well, well, well

I know I hurt you then
But hell, that was way back when
Well, do you still have to carry that cross? Drop it!
Don't want to hear about it
I'm losing you
I'm losing you
Don't want to lose you now
Welllllllll!

At this point as the song begins to fade out, the assumption has always been that John sings, "Long, long, long gone." With Stripped Down, though, we learn that he is really singing an old traditional song called. "Long Lost John". He finishes that up by slipping into Joe Williams' 1935 standard "Baby Please Don't Go". So back to our fade out...


....Wellllllllllll!
Long, long lost John. [Makes a sound like someone who is gasping for air]
Long, long lost John. [Gasping]
Long, long lost John. [Gasping]
Ah, oh, baby please don't go. Baby please don't go.....


I'M MOVING ON

One of my favorite tracks on the entire album. The guitar work by McCracken and Lennon make it a tight ball of energy as Yoko basically tells the mid-1970s John to take a hike.

While on the album there is a natural fade into the song from the conclusion of "I'm Losing You", here we hear the familiar counting before the guitars begin, and Yoko starts to lay into John:

Save your sweet talk for when you score
Keep your Monday kisses for your glass lady
I want the truth and nothing more
I'm moving on, moving on you're getting phony

You didn't have to tell a white lie
You knew you scarred me for life
Don't stick your finger in my pie
You know I'll see through your jive
I want the truth and nothing more
I'm moving, moving on we're getting phony

When you were angry you had love in your eyes
When you were sad you had dream in your voice
But now you're giving me your window smile
I'm moving on, moving on it's getting phony

I'm moving on. Moving on. Moving on. Moving onnnnnnnnnn!

BEAUTIFUL BOY [DARLING BOY]

A song that has such meaning for me. For years when it looked as though I might never have children, this song brought a deep sadness. Even years before those adventures, the sadness of John singing, "I can hardly wait to see you come of age" - knowing what we know but he did not - made it painfully beautiful. The song, though, is not just powerful to me, but I think to every father. I saw a BBC documentary with Paul McCartney on YouTube recently, from 1982. Paul had apparently recently discovered "Beautiful Boy" after months of being unable to play the album following John's murder. On the documentary, Paul is talking about John and says, "Everything you need to know about John is on this record." With that, Paul plays the song for the interviewer. Soon, Paul's eyes well with tears as he mouths silently 'Beautiful, man. Beautiful.' That's how powerful the song is.

The song on Stripped Down is not much different from the studio version, although it is even more poignant in that - without the overdubs - the feelings John has for Sean come through even more clear on this version.

Not to make it too heavy, though, John jokes just prior to beginning his guitar strumming, saying "We'll change the rhythm around a little and do something a little more slow. Sit down, there."

Close your eyes
Have no fear
The monster's gone
He's on the run and your daddy's here

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy

Before you go to sleep
Say a little prayer
Every day in every way
It's getting better and better

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy

Out on the ocean sailing away
I can hardly wait
To see you come of age
But I guess we'll both just have to be patient
'Cause it's a long way to go
A hard row to hoe
Yes it's a long way to go
But in the meantime

Before you cross the street
Take my hand
Life is what happens to you
While you're busy making other plans

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy

Before you go to sleep
Say a little prayer
Every day in every way
It's getting better and better

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy
Darling, darling, darling
Darling Sean

Whispering: Good night, Sean. See you in the morning. Go back to bed.....


I always needed an emotional break after listening to that song before turning the record over to side 2. And so it shall be with this entry. Next time, I'll be emotionally ready for side two.

copyright 1980 John Lennon & Yoko Ono
copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Double Fantasy Stripped Down Part I

The cover of the jacket sleeve for the single '(Just Like) Starting Over' [above]. Kiss Kiss Kiss made up the 'B' side. Remember b-sides?

(JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER

In the talk-up to the start of the song, John whispers, "This one's for Gene [Vincent] and Eddie [Cochran] and Elvis..." Then, as if he suddenly remembers, "...and Buddy [Holly]!" John considered this song an ode to the 'old' rock and roll, hence his dedication to four of the greats of rock and roll. John was partially inspired, he said, by "Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen, which he thought was an excellent nod to the past done in a modern way.

With John's introduction, we hear the familiar beginning with only John's vocal and his strumming on the guitar:

Our life
Together
Is so precious
Together
We have grown,
We have grown.
Although our love
Is still special
Let's take a chance and fly away
Somewhere
Alone.

Next comes the familiar backing musicians. The difference is a much clearer piano [John] throughout the piece, as well as an absence of the background singers [Michelle Simpson and Cassandra Wooten] who appeared on the released track. With that, John sings on:

It's been too long since we took the time
No one's to blame, I know time flies so quickly.
But when I see you darling,
It's like we both are falling
In love
Again
It'll be
Just like starting over, starting over.

Everyday we used to make it, love
Why can't we be making love nice and easy?
It's time to spread our wings and fly
Don't let another day go by
My love
It'll be
Just like starting over, starting over.

Why don't we take off alone?
Take a trip somewhere far, far away
We'll be together all alone again,
Like we used to in the early days.

Well, well darling
It's been too long since we took the time
No one's to blame, I know time flies so quickly.
But when I see you darling,
It's like we both are falling
In love
Again
It'll be
Just like starting over, starting over

Look out.

Our life
Together
Is so precious
Together
We have grown,
Hmmmm, we have grown
Although our love's
Still special
Let's take a chance and fly away
Somewhere.............

Here, as on the record, the silence pauses and John returns for the song's fade out. This version is the full version of his riff, however. On the original album, only snippets of a riff John proceeded to go on were actually used to make the fade out that we're all familiar with. Stripped Down has the full version of the riff. John times his return to singing with "Ch-ch-ch-ch". He then comes back from the pause with:

Ooooooooooh
Doooowho.
Starting over....
Starting over...
Over and over
Hoooowe who

Hooowe who, who, who, who

Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow
Starting over
Starting over
Over and over, ov-ve-ve-ver

John then indicates to the musicians that he's done - they have enough for the fade out - by saying, "Ok, boys, print it!"

He then plays a piano 'stage exit' riff and finishes with, "Thank you, thank you."


KISS, KISS, KISS

The second track, Yoko's first song, begins as does the record version, with her speaking Japanese in a 'whisper' almost sensually. As with "(Just Like) Starting Over", the sound is purer, with John's guitar far more audible.

Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss me love
Just one kiss, kiss will do
Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss me love
Just one kiss, kiss will do

Why death
Why life
Warm hearts
Cold darts

Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss me love
I'm bleeding inside

It's a long, long story to tell
And I can only show you my hell

Touch, touch, touch, touch me love
Just one touch, touch will do
Touch, touch, touch, touch me love
Just one touch, touch will do

Why me
Why you
Broken mirror
White terror

Touch, touch, touch, touch me love
I'm shaking inside

It's that faint faint sound of the childhood bell
Ringing in my soul

Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss me love
Just one kiss, kiss will do.

Here Yoko - as on the album - goes into her voice gyrations and sounds. The difference is that - on this version- you can here on the play out that background singers Simpson and Wooten are singing:

Oooooh kiss
Oooooh, kiss me
Oooooh kiss
Oooooh, kiss me
Oooooh kiss
Oooooh, kiss me

CLEANUP TIME

While it is clear on the studio version that John leads into this song with something that sounds like a version of "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble", on Stripped Down we hear what he really says:

Bubble, bubble
Toil but NO trouble

Whoo, hoo, hoo
Well, well, well
Moonlight on the water
Sunlight on my face
You and me together
We are in our place
The gods are in the heavens
The angels treat us well
The oracle has spoken
We cast the perfect spell

Here is the first change. A backing track of John's voice - as if played through a megaphone - sings, which I'll denote in parentheses:

(Now, now, now)

Now it begins - let it begin
Cleanup time
(Ring-a, ring around the world)
Hey, cleanup time
(Ring-a, ring around the world)
Well, it's cleanup time
(Ring-a ring around the world)

Well, well, well
Well, well, well, well

Hmmm, the queen is in the counting house
Counting out the money
The king is in the kitchen
Making bread and honey
No friends and yet no enemies
Absolutely free
No rats aboard the magic ship
Of perfect harmony

(Now, now, now)
Now it begins
Let it begin
(well, well, well, well)
Cleanup time
(C-c-clean up, clean up)
Cleanup time
(C-c-clean up, clean up)
Cleanup time
(C-c-clean up, clean up)

Well, well, [backup guitarist High McCracken yells, "Whew!"] Well....

(Tweedily dum, tweedily dum, tweedily dee, tweedily dee
Tweedily dum, tweedily dum, tweedily dee, tweedily dee
Tweedily dum, tweedily dum....)

However far we travel
Wherever we may roam
The center of the circle
Will always be our home

Yeah. yea, yeah,
Dooo, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo....

Yeah, cleanup
(Clean up)
Cleanup time
Cleanup time
Cleanup time
Cleanup time
Cleanup time
Cleanup time
It's Christmas time, it's that time of year again
It's party time, it's that time of year again
It's party time, show those mother's how to party.....



NEXT UP: The remainder of "Side One" [remember when there were such things as 'sides'?!].

copyright 1980 by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

For the Other Half of the Sky....

After begging off numerous requests from his mother, Sean Lennon finally agreed to sketch the cover of Double Fantasy (above) for the 2010 Double Fantasy Stripped Down project. Sean's reluctance, Yoko hints at in the liner notes, stemmed from his association of the album with the deep psychological scars left in the aftermath of his father's murder.

It would probably be impossible to overstate the impact on my life of a gift I received for my 12th birthday. A few months earlier, I had discovered some old record albums in my mother's closet - Beatles' records. Like every kid in the late 1970s, I knew Paul McCartney from Wings. Never heard of George Harrison. I'd heard some 'old' Ringo Starr songs [from 'a-way' back in the early 1970s] but thought no more about them than I did the Partridge Family's Greatest Hits. John Lennon? Never heard of him.

Until that point where I discovered the old Beatle records, remember, Lennon had been out of the music industry for much of my 'formative' years of listening to popular music. By the time I was semi-regularly listening to pop music - I'd put it mid-to-late 1974 - John was pretty much gone from the music scene. So, I suppose, it's not that surprising that in the fall of 1980 I would not know John Lennon by name - as amazing as that is to think about today.

Shortly after I started listening to the Beatles songs, of course, John was murdered. I've written before about the effect - for whatever reason; I long ago gave up trying to figure it out - John's murder and its aftermath has had on me. I've written before about waking up that Tuesday morning, opening my bedroom door in our duplex apartment [not in the sky, folks; I said duplex, not deluxe] and seeing my parents on either side of our television [we finally got color during that summer of 1980, by the way]. On the screen - just fading out - was the text 'John Lennon 1940-1980' with a photo of a guy who looked a lot like Elvis did back in the 1950s [later I recognized that they'd used a photo of John from Hamburg in 1960 for that memorial fade-out on TV]. I'd seen my mother before with that sad look on her face, but it was my father's reaction that struck me and that I remember to this day: he looked lost. Not sad, but confused as if you'd just told him that I wasn't his son, or that my mother wasn't his wife. The kind of 'lost' that said, "What the hell just happened here?"

So, by the time my birthday rolled around a few months later, I'd become totally immersed in Lennon and the Beatles. I wanted for my birthday - very badly - to get Lennon's last album - the one he'd been promoting in the final days of his life - Double Fantasy, done with his wife, Yoko Ono. One reason I wanted the album - a small reason, but a precursor/warning to the puberty-hell that was about to rip my life to shreds - was that my buddy Donnie Kellerman [some buddy; asshole gave me chicken pox...but more on that in a moment] had gotten a hold of Double Fantasy [Donnie's family had money; which, in my world, meant that his mom and dad could afford the $9.99 it cost to buy Double Fantasy] and told me that on one of the songs Yoko Ono "had sex". It's hard for me to remember what that meant to me in the winter of 1980-81, but I do know that I knew it was something I'd never seen and was not meant to see.

Of course, what Donnie had heard was the second track on the album, Yoko's "Kiss Kiss Kiss", which includes throughout the track Yoko mimicking an orgasm. Donnie was more advanced than me, because when I finally did get the album and did hear "Kiss Kiss Kiss", her orgasm sounded awfully painful rather than titillating.

Anyway, I wanted that album. So, when it finally got into my hands it was as a 12th birthday present from my Aunt Ida. Ida was - and is - an interesting character. She loved, loved, loved the Beatles..... pre-1967. Anything they did after that was - with a few exceptions like "Hey Jude" - Bohemian. To her, something bizarre had happened to John [and the rest of them, but it had particularly addled John, in her mind] and he'd gone nuts. That bearded hippie singing "Give Peace a Chance" was not John Lennon as far as she was concerned. Unlike most, Aunt Ida never blamed Yoko. "He was just always nuts," was Ida's opinion. It just took Yoko to bring it out of him, she said.

It was kind of ironic, then, that Aunt Ida was the bearer of this gift, this record that would have such an effect on my life. Ida couldn't figure out why everybody was all upset about John Lennon's death. "How does it effect my life" was her response. Plus, it drove her nuts the way Lennon's music was EVERYWHERE in the months after his death. "If I hear "Watching the Wheels" one more time I'm gonna vomit," Ida said.

Yet, for her little nephew B, she'd have scaled the walls of the Dakota to get me an autograph of John [pre-death, obviously] if I'd asked her. So, Ida, who could afford the $10, went against her better judgement and got me the album.

Now, a chain of events transpired right around this time that contributed to this whole love affair with the record. A few days before my birthday, I was taking off my shirt to get into my pajamas when my mother shrieked, "What's that!" Apparently, I had red spots on my lower back and - now that I looked closer - on my stomach, too. At almost literally that moment, Donnie Kellerman's mother called. Guess what she found on Donnie's back and stomach? And on his little sister's, too? In case you haven't guessed - which I sure as hell couldn't have - all three of us [Donnie, me and his twerp sister] had chicken pox. For Donnie and me, we were screwed. At 12, that was awfully old to be getting chicken pox. The disease - now, apparently, almost totally eradicated - is quite painful at that age, in addition to being an itchy hell.

At almost the exact same time as Double Fantasy and chicken pox fell into my life came a medical warning intended - as most of these are - to scare the shit out of people for no good reason. The Centers for Disease Control [CDC] began cautioning physicians and parents about the association between the use of aspirin and the outbreak of something called Reye’s Syndrome, particularly in children with chicken pox or virus-like illnesses. While generally a harmless virus in adults, in children about 30% with Reye's Syndrome died. With that confluence of 'aspirin', 'Reye's Syndrome', 'chicken pox', my mother went into full panic mode.

Needless to say, there'd be "NO ASPIRIN FOR YOU!" Instead, to deal with the pain from chicken pox, I got Tylenol, which was about as useful as cat piss in the fight against pain from chicken pox. [As an aside, the folks at Tylenol loved Reye's Syndrome and the CDC in early-1981. They immediately went on the airwaves with commercials touting the fact that Tylenol did not result in Reye's Syndrome. Of course, in a few months, Tylenol would be faced with something a helluva lot more devastating to their bottom line than Reye's Syndrome was to the aspirin folks, as some still-unknown asshole started putting poison in Tylenol in a tampering terror that changed the way all of us looked at each other, let alone our medicines].

So, all of these things converged at the same time: my birthday, chicken pox, Double Fantasy and Reye's Syndrome. What it meant was that I'd be suffering in bed on my 12th birthday on simple Tylenol [rather than aspirin, which would have actually helped], in misery with the fucking chicken pox. But what I did have was hours and hours and hours of time to play that Double Fantasy album over and over and over and over again. No school with chicken pox, and no sleep with only Tylenol to fight the pain, folks. As I look back, had I not had the opportunity to - literally - listen to Double Fantasy almost uninterrupted for 24 hours a day for 10 days straight, who knows whether it would have had the effect that it did.

I'm not sure if I can explain in words why Double Fantasy means what it means to me. I listened to it, obviously, knowing that it would be Lennon's last. All of that had been set up for me, making the lyrics more poignant than John would have ever intended them. But there was a feel to the album, a joy. I may have been the only 12-year old in the world who even liked Yoko's songs on the album. I thought they were really, really good. I now know that one of the reasons I felt that way is because John's guitars, pianos band backing vocals are all over Yoko's tracks. Indeed, he delivers backing vocals on two of my favorite Yoko songs on the album ["Every Man Has a Woman" and "Hard Times Are Over"]. But it was also because Yoko's lyrics on Double Fantasy really had something to say. Indeed, the whole album - as both John and Yoko intended - is really a dialogue between husband and wife. And - with a few exceptions - Yoko's contributions were actually, as John would say in one of his last interviews, "Bloody good pop songs, folks."

There was also the issue of John and Yoko's five-year old son, Sean. At five, I'd lost my grandmother who had been very close with me. So, I know on some level John's death resonated with me for that reason as well. I also felt a 'kinship' of sorts with Sean, although obviously the differences between the two of us and our situations were monumentally different. Indeed, until I had my own children, one of the things that I think convinced me that I wanted to be a parent was the joy with which John wrote, spoke and sang about fatherhood on that album and in the promotional interviews.

Later, the album and my love of it took on more meaning and deeper feelings. First, I read Playboy writer David Sheff's All We Are Saying: The John Lennon Playboy Interview Tape. The book was a full transcript with back-stories of Sheff's August 1980 22-day set of interviews that made up the January 1981 Playboy interview with John Lennon. [One of the bazillion ironies about the whole evening of John's murder is that - for literally millions of Americans - they learned about John's death while listening to their newly purchased Double Fantasy records while reading the newly delivered - that very day - January Playboy magazine that featured the Lennon interview].

The interviews and transcripts were amazing because Sheff had literally unfettered access to John over a period of the first three weeks of the making of Double Fantasy. There were sessions where John and David sat on the floor of one of a bathroom in the Dakota for hours on end as Sheff would call out the titles of Beatles songs and John would tell Sheff of his recollections of who wrote what, how it came about, everything. Then there were trips to John and Yoko's favorite restaurant, Cafe Fortuna, for coffee, pastry, cigarettes and conversation. There were also long nights talking in the living room of the Dakota. In one of those late-evening chats, there is a really, really creepy moment where John is speaking and - from down in the courtyard below - someone screams in obvious pain. John stops in mid-sentence and, not missing a beat, laughingly says, 'Oh, another murder in the Rue Dakota'. The interviews were really behind-the-scenes, day-by-day looks at how the album was made. Later, I would buy a bootleg copy of some of the Sheff tapes [John's copies] that were part of the trove of materials stolen by Lennon aide Fred Seaman on the night of his murder. The bootleg - A Heart Play - was like sitting down and having your own conversation with John and Yoko.

Then, a few years later, a friend of mine got me a bootleg of outtakes from some of the recording sessions of Double Fantasy. I later found out that this, too, was part of the cache of tapes stolen by Seaman. That bootleg was - despite the illicit nature by which it came out - just amazing. It consisted of conversations and recording jams that made you feel as though you were sitting in on the recording sessions of Double Fantasy yourself. One of my favorite moments on the bootleg include John quipping to someone who asks him if he wants to see playback of a video that had just been taken [and has never been released] of him singing 'I'm Losing You', "No, I don't need to see it. I know what I look like. Like a fucking bird."

Then there are the jam sessions. As John says at one point to guitarist Hugh McCracken when the latter starts calling out 1960s songs he wants to jam on, "Hughey, I don't back to the sixties, I go back to the fifties, man." Then there is the hysterical version of '(Just Like) Starting Over', as John sings it for the sessions musicians to learn:

Why don't we do it in the road?
A little hotel, where we used to screw.
A little motel, down in Montauk,
Just you, me the cooks and the servants too.

So, I think I've covered the point that I love Double Fantasy. Each song means something to me. It reminds me of 1981, where I was and what I was thinking, and all of the subsequent moments over the last thirty years where the album has been prominent in my life.

Yoko takes a lot of shit about the fact that over the past thirty years she's released countless outtakes, remakes, and repackaging of of John's stuff. She's painted as an opportunist bitch who just wants to make money off her dead husband. Generally, this opinion is held by those who felt that all Yoko wanted to do was make money off her husband while he was alive. I don't buy it. Instead, I think Yoko knows that - for lunatics like me - John is very much alive. And these vignettes of new stuff that we get every few years helps to keep him so. With them, John is never really completely gone because Yoko will come up with something we've never heard before. Where others look at this with disgust, we are grateful to Yoko for making that possible.

Such was the case in the celebration of what would have been John's 70th birthday. Of all of the things Yoko released a few weeks ago, nothing attracted my interest as much as a 'stripped down' version of Double Fantasy. With the exception of his first album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John would never allow his voice to be put on an album without overdubs, double-and-triple tracking and other 'touches' because he never liked his voice. Indeed, his relationship with Phil Spector and the latter's horrible productions of some of Lennon's solo work was a direct result of the fact that John liked how Spector 'buried' John's voice deep enough to John's satisfaction.

While the overdubs were nowhere near as heavy on Double Fantasy as they had been on Spector's butcher-jobs of Mind Games, Rock and Roll and even to some extent Imagine, they were there in 1980. Yoko decided that John's voice was so good on Double Fantasy, without the double tracking and overdubs, that it deserved to be heard. She has said she really wrestled with this because John was so sensitive about his voice. She has said she was afraid that she was wrong to be going against John's wishes in releasing a 'stripped down' Double Fantasy. In the end, though, she said she liked to think that by age 70 had he lived, he would have been comfortable enough to allow himself to be heard undubbed.

What follows in the next post [or posts] is a breakdown of Double Fantasy Stripped Down. I've included the lyrics, but also the new talk-ups to various tracks and some differences between this original version and the version that John and Yoko released in 1980.

For anyone who loves Double Fantasy as much as I do, I know you'll enjoy.
copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN. WOULD THAT YOU COULD BE HERE....

copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Video Review

Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn [left] interviews John Lennon [right] on October 10, 1980. Video of the interview surfaced on YouTube in 2007.

On October 10, 1980, Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn interviewed John Lennon in the Hit Factory Studios where John and Yoko Ono were recording and mixing Double Fantasy. At some point that evening, John's personal assistant, Fred Seaman, had set up on the console in front of Hilburn and Lennon a new RCA video camera and began filming. It is the only video interview of John in 1980. Intentionally or otherwise, John and Yoko only did radio interviews in promotion of the album by the time of his death.

The quality of the video - remember, this is 1980, folks, is horrid. One can barely make out the images of Hilburn and John. The sound, however, is pretty good. Good, that is, with the exception of the fact that album co-producer Jack Douglas is playing an excerpt from Star Wars at an incredibly loud volume, splicing the audio from a laser fight into Ono's Beautiful Boys. Unfortunately, during many periods of the interview, John and Hilburn are inaudible because of the sound.

Seaman, along with Toshihiro Hamaya, were John's closest assistants in the last two years of his life. Seaman had access to just about every facet of Lennon's life, including writings, songs, videos and photos. On the night of John's murder, Seaman went to the Dakota and stole many items, including Lennon's diaries, some stereo equipment and photos. When he was arrested later, he claimed that he was acting on John's orders to him to make sure that Julian Lennon receive the diaries. Since Seaman couldn't explain why the stereo equipment disappeared [presumably, Julian had his own], the judge didn't buy it and convicted him. He only received probation, and by that time had already reproduced many of the photos, diaries and videos. I used some of those photos last year in The Last Interview series. I did so with mixed feelings, as they were private and possibly [we'll never know] never meant for public consumption. Nonetheless, I used them because they were often touching, personal snapshots of the last years of his life.

The October 10, 1980 video is one of the items that Seaman either took from the Dakota the night of John's murder, or had already copied earlier for some nefarious reason. A few years ago, the video turned up on YouTube. Whether Seaman himself put it there or he had sold the video [or given a copy] to someone, I don't know. I first saw it in 2007 and was mesmerized, even though the video quality is awful. It was intriguing, however, because I'd never heard of it [let alone seen it].

On this, what would have been John's 70th birthday, I thought I would reproduce a transcript - as best as I can thanks to Star Wars - of the interview. In the interview, it is clear that John - one day after turning 40 - is subdued and possibly even a little depressed. Unlike most of the other public interviews he gave that fall, he is not "on", meaning positive, up and looking toward the future. There could be many reasons for this, of course. Knowing how I felt the day after I turned 40, I can certainly relate. It could also be because Hilburn - at least in the portions Seaman videotaped - asked questions about the past as opposed to Double Fantasy.

There is an interesting moment in the tape where John sees the camera and mistakenly thinks Seaman has left the lens cap on. The camera was RCA's latest video camera, which for the first time came with a video monitor for viewing [as opposed to simply looking through a lens]. John is amused to discover that "there's a little TV" as opposed to a lens.

During those periods where the audio is, well, inaudible because of the Star Wars battles, I have simply written [Inaudible]. So, as a birthday tribute, here then is my best attempt at a transcript of the October 10, 1980 interview of John Lennon by Robert Hilburn.

As the video begins, John and Hilburn are looking at photographs taken the day before of the skywriting message Yoko had written over New York City, with birthday wishes for John and his son Sean, who had turned 5. There was also a message about world peace in 1981. Hilburn has just handed John a photograph of the message:

John: ”Well, that's quite far away [the photo], ‘Cause when I saw it it was, the image was that big, look [John holds the photo up high to the ceiling]. It was sort of, it was that fat."

Hilburn hands John another photo:

John: “I like that.”
Hilburn: “It’s just hard to get the whole thing because the wind…”
John: “Yeah, and it was too wide [the message], anyway."
Hilburn: “…it [the writing] started to fade…”
John: "’Cause it’d say 'Happy' you know, ‘Peace [19]81 and Sean' on The Plaza [presumably from where the photo was taken]. You know, like ‘Happy Birthday John and Sean'."
Hilburn: “Yeah, it was like half the city, it was really cool.”
Yoko to John, “Is Toshi [production assistant Toshihiro Hamaya] there?”

John talks into the microphone that allows those in the control room to communicate to those down into the studio below.

John: “Toshi?”

John then speaks Japanese to into the microphone. At that moment, the video goes fuzzy. Just prior to the video resuming, Seaman whispers faintly, ‘John Lennon’, as if for some reason he had to identify who he was recording. As the video resumes, Hilburn has just asked John about Paul McCartney.

John: “Paul? My dear one.”

At that moment, we first hear the Star War battles. While the sound makes it impossible to hear Hilburn's exact question, it has to do with Magical Mystery Tour. Presumably, Hilburn has asked something along the lines of, ‘Whose idea was it?’.

John: “It was originally Paul. Here’s another one [example] when he’d call me up and say, eh, ‘We’re going to be up at the studio..” [Inaudible]“'…we’re gonna make a movie, so just write a bit.’ So I just wrote dreams that I had…” [Inaudible]“….and try to recreate them. The one bit, the only bit I like [in the movie] – that I contributed to –is the dream sequence where the... where they’re eating and the very fat lady and this English or Scottish guy... [Inaudible] …he’s sayin’ something or other to her…It was a real dream of mine. [Inaudible] And people are walkin’ on the tables, and there’s an elevator that comes down – this is in the dream – that comes down – like one of those French ones you’ve seen? And there was a midget in it, and it comes down and lands right on a table and comes out. And people are comin’ out of the elevator and walkin’ across the room…but the waiter is me. Only most people didn’t recognize me. I dressed like me father, me stepfather, ‘cause they were both waiters. And they greased their hair back and these little pencil….[miming a mustache] those cheap little Valentino …like in the forties…and, you know this greased hair, and this crazy [John removes his glasses and makes the face of a demented person...John then stands up and mimes as if he is shoveling] and I’m shoveling the food on the table, like this, with all this spaghetti, and the fat woman’s just eating it. And they're talkin’ as if I’m not doin’ anything. And I’m just doin’ it – like John Cleese, in fact."
Hilburn, “That’s a great scene…”
John: “Yeah, well, that was my dream , ya know, but…he [Paul] had it [the movie] kinda mapped…’cause they [The Beatles] were gonna go on this tour, ya know? And it’s on a bus, and …[John holds out his hand like he’s holding a piece of paper, showing how Paul held up the map of the script], and here he says, ‘This quarter, you have to fill in'. So, I says, ‘Well, how long have a I got?’ ‘You got two days.’ ‘Oh, I have? Okay.’ [John laughs]. So I got two days, so I’m tryin’ to fill in…. He’s [Paul]...he’s got an hour written like that [showing his hand again]….”
Hilburn: “So, would each of you do one quarter, or…."
John: “Well he was dividing it a bit like a record, you know? But the fact is, he’d written like ten songs and I had nothing [laughs]. [I Am The] Walrus is the only one in that film, I mean, that’s entirely me. I contributed to the Mystery Tour songs [Inaudible]…runnin’ down the steps...Your Mother Should Know [Inaudible]. So ‘Walrus’, I filmed that part, too. And they had all these policemen on the top of the [Inaudible] studio, so the guy got us an airplane hanger to film in, you know. And they had these big concrete blocks [Inaudible] the planes in the war. [Inaudible] confuse meself [Inaudible] so, whatever, we’ll dress up in these funny [Inaudible] and all these eggheads …”

At this point, again, the video goes fuzzy. It resumes:

John: “…cause I didn’t know anything [Inaudible] editing. And it’s out of frame for TV. You know, so I said, ‘Ok' [Inaudible] and the frame comes back over the top. And I said ‘Well print the bit down below'. See, if you ever see it [the movie], you’ll see the sky – well it’s surreal again - the sky, and the cops are all dancing beneath the group, whose playing with all the lunatics walking. And that’s how that was made.”
Hilburn: "When it [the movie] was finished, what did you think of it when you saw it?"
John: “Oh, I loved it. You know, because it was a trip. So everybody was down on it, but it was...it’s alright. Pretty average. So what? So was the first [Beatles] album. But there’s too much 'nothing' happening. Just nothing happening at all. But there’s some nice moments, the dream sequence . Your Mother Should Know’s a nice sequence. Comin' down [the stairs] with all those silly suits on you know. …”
Hilburn: “Did the [negative] reaction [to the film] surprise you?”
John: “Uh, yeah, but they were gunnin’ for us before then. And what the BBC – the stupid idiots – did was they showed it in black and white first. Can you imagine? ‘Round Christmas on BBC2. So, it doesn’t look well in black and white. Color you can just about manage it. And all the kids would’ve been alright in color, but they put it in black and white and then they reviewed it in black and white on the BBC2. And so by the time it came to be on in color…well, I don’t know if it ever got on in color. But that was the end of it. It’s like reviewing a mono version of a stereo record."
Hilburn: "Was that the most…was that the kind of...the most criticism the band got from the outside…”
John: “Oh, I don’t think so. The review of From Me to You is ‘Below par Beatles'..in the NME [New Musical Express, a British music magazine]. So it started then. ‘Below par’. We’d only had two bloody singles out! [laughs].
Hilburn: “Cause everyone thinks it’s all acclaim…”
John: “Well NOW they think its all acclaim. You know, and Chaplin and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. But look of the reviews of the day [Inaudible]. Not all acclaim at all. Some very nasty bits."
Hilburn: “After a point though wasn’t it…”
John [dejectedly], “No. Never was easy…”

At this point the video goes fuzzy again. It resumes:

John: “…live in dreamland. ‘Give me a Beatle and I’ll make a million'. It doesn’t work like that or ever [Inaudible]..you’ve gotta have product. Yellow Submarine bombed out didn’t it? It’s a great movie…”
Hilburn: “I don’t think people were critical…”
John [sounding incredulous]: “Are you kidding?! It was ripped to shreds.”
Hilburn: “By critics?."
John: “Yeah, well, the answer was by everybody that it was because…the people, the kids like it. Sean loves it now – all the little children do. Because they [the critics] expected the real Beatles to be in the movie [as opposed to being animated] and they felt tricked [Inaudible]."
Hilburn: “Have you ever seen it again?”
John: “Oh, sure I seen ‘em [the Beatles movies] again. I see ‘em different every time I see ‘em. ’Cause I’m changin’ all the time."

At this point the video goes fuzzy again. It resumes:

John: “...I’m not so hard on meself with the group."
Hilburn: “Did the reaction to A Hard Day’s Night surprise you when you got such good reviews…”
John: “Oh no. In those days we expected everybody to just fall …"

The video goes fuzzy again. When it resumes, the topic has turned to John’s solo career and his first album, John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.

John: “…I didn’t need to sell 20 million [albums] to feel good you know? I was proud of it. I knew it was alright. But some people [critics] got very upset about it. I think it’s because it made ‘em feel. It made them uncomfortable about their own mothers and their own fathers sand their own childhood and their own [Inaudible] and they reviewed their own emotions.”

At that moment – seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s giving an interview - an engineer yells, “John!”

John [continuing, and ignoring the engineer]: “...about what that album …it makes you feel… you can’t listen to it in the background. You can’t have it goin’ on like the Stones you know. You have to either listen to it or forget it. And you can’t listen to it every other day, 'cause it’s all too much. It’s like goin’ to see some heavy play. You don’t want…you’re not in the mood. It’ll just destroy you.”
Hilburn: "When you went in to do Imagine , how did…did reaction to the first album effect you at all?"
John: “Yeah, I guess it did. Well, that was sort of, sort of after Imagine was sort of a success. And then I got a bit bitter sayin’, ‘Oh, well it’s [Imagine] just Mother with chocolate on it. You [the critics] couldn’t take it pure'. Also, I felt like makin it [Imagine] like that …”

At this point, Hamaya has spotted Seaman and the camera. Looking into the camera Hamaya says, "Busy bee. Busy bee." Seaman then pans the studio while John continues the interview. When he turns the camera back onto John and Hilburn, the conversation has turned to Some Time in New York City.

John: “…meaning, ‘don’t expect the typing [on the liner notes] to be all right [correct]. [Inaudible]...and it’s [the album] the rush edition. And it’s uh, there’s no finesse on it. It’s a newspaper it’s not a magazine. So….”
Hilburn: “By Mind Games…you were talking earlier today about…that it was hard for you…”
John: “Because then I was in confusion, you know? I mean? Jesus…”
Hilburn: “Did you know it at the time?”
John: “Oh, I knew I was confused, alright, because every time I tried to clear it [make the album have a central theme] it wasn’t coming out clear. Like, ‘rewrite, rewrite, rewrite'.”
Hilburn: "But did you think at that time, ‘Might I just wait another year'…”
John: “Oh, I never dreamt of waiting [laughing]. No, are you kiddin’?”
Hilburn: "You felt you just had to have…"
John: “It’s like bein’ on stage and thinking 'Well, it’s not a good night, I better stop', you know? You can’t do that. You just do it anyway, right? You see, the Mind Games single is fine. There’s just no energy to sustain through the album, and there was no clarity of vision. There’s a few pieces that are alright, but as a whole piece there’s no clarity. And the guy [John himself] is there on the front [of the album] with a little bag and she’s [Yoko] the mountain and, and the whole thing says it. That cover says more to me than the record."
Hilburn: “So, when you finished that record, did you think it was not up to what you’d done the first two times? [Inaudible]...when you went into Walls and Bridges ,how did you feel, was your confidence [Inaudible]..."

John: “I’m excited every time I make [a record], I’m always excited. I was not not excited about any of them. I was always excited. I was always pretty high on ‘em, but you can be excited but still be soft on it [afterward], right? [Inaudible]…”
Hilburn:"Well, when you finished with Walls and Bridges did you know you were going to take a break then or..."
John: “No idea. But I’ll tell you what's funny: at the end of the Rock And Roll album, I was doin’ Just Because which Phil [Spector, who produced the record], [Inaudible]...So I'm saying, ‘And so we say farewell from Record Plant….’ It just came into my consciousness - ‘Am I sayin’ goodbye to everything? Is this, the Rock and Roll and the picture from Hamburg ..is this it?' It just flashed in my mind for a split second, but I didn’t consciously think it."
Hilburn: “Was that on the record?”
John: “Yeah. It was the last track [Inaudible]. ‘And so we say farewell from Record Plant [Inaudible] '…is that’s what happening? Is this the beginning of the end?' [Inaudible]. No, I was ad-libbing like I do on many records but [Inaudible]. I was hearing it like somebody else was saying it. Thinking, ‘Is he sayin…is that what he’s saying?’ But then he [himself] didn’t meant that because it wasn’t consciously conceived. [Inaudible] I had no idea of not really doin’ it [making music]. Do you understand? So, it was like a dream [Inaudible], and then it's gone, you see? It doesn’t occur to me again until something happens and you say, ‘Is this de ja vu?’ So when I did it [go back in the studio for Double Fantasy] I started remembering that [his fade out ad-lib from Just Because ], thinking, ‘Jesus, is that ...it’s like the Mind Games cover, ‘Is that what it was? Is that what it was saying? Is it a premonition of my own self'?"
Hilburn: “But, when you go back six months [after making a record] and listen to it can you learn things from it?"
Johns: “I never do that. I always play the one [record I made] before...just before I go in again [to the studio]. Like, I played Walls and Bridges just before I came in here [to record Double Fantasy] to see what state of the art I was at then. And, uh, it was not bad. It’s just miserable."
Hilburn: “The memory of when you were doin’ it..”
John: “Yeah, yeah, just brought all the misery back. But, so, Mother can bring all the misery of that back. It does tend to.”

At this point, there’s an actual fade out of the video, as if it was intentional.It fades back in again:

Hilburn: “Do you keep up with Paul’s albums at all?”
John: “No, I dropped out ‘round about the one with the rose in his mouth…”
Hilburn: “Red Rose Speedway?”
John: "Yeah. But I hear the singles. If it's on the radio I hear it. And uh, I thought that Coming Up was great. And I like the freak version that he made in his barn better than that live Glasgow one. You see? I…”
Hilburn: “The one with the speeded up voices…”
John: “Yeah, I think…if I’d have been with him I’d have said, ‘That’s the one to do’. And I thought the record company had a nerve changing it ‘round on him, but I know they want to hear the real guy singing but I like the freaky one. Stevie Wonder does it and nobody moans at him."
Hilburn “When you stopped listening to Paul, You weren’t bitter…”
John: “Well, he was putting so much stuff out, I couldn’t compete with all that 'tingly-tingly' stuff going on albums, you know, just dribbling on….”
Hilburn: “How about at the beginning...[Inaudible]"
John: "I was so full of meself - centered. I didn’t give a shit what he [Paul] was doing.”
Hilburn: "Full of what?”
John: “Full of meself. Centered, you know? There’s no comparison [between Paul] to me because…"
Hilburn: “Do you mean artistically, or sales-wise?"
John: “Oh, sales-wise forget it. He was..he always had more fans than me, even in The Cavern. So there’s no comparison on that level. And on the other [artistic] level doesn’t…I don’t think it counts. I think it's like comparing...I dunno [Rene Francois Ghislain] Magritte and, uh [Pablo] Picasso if you want to put it on that level, or whatever. You know? How can you compare it?”
Hilburn: “Was there any sense [Inaudible]...did you try to come up with songs that were…did you feel he [Paul] wrote better songs than you….”
John: “What, when we were together [in The Beatles]? [Inaudible]...it was always competititve, all of us. For space and...and time."
Hilburn: “.. [Inaudible] were you impressed…”
John: “If I’m impressed [with a song he hears] I run away and write one. [Laughs]. You know?”
Hilbburn: "If you’re impressed…"
John: “Oh, if I’m impressed by a record on the air [on radio] I immediately, I want to write. Warren Beatty said it about movies. 'A great movie is one that makes you want to make a movie'. ‘I wish I’d made that’. ‘Shit, I’d go right out and make it', you know?” [Inaudible]. I don’t know what it is, but he [Beatty] is right: when I hear a great record I want to make it. ‘I'll make one like that.’"
Hilburn: “Was there one of Paul’s songs, that he came in [to the studio] with [while in The Beatles] that you were surprised that he could write something that...good, or...”
John: “No, he never surprised me because, like, can you be surprised by your brother? From age 15 on? Not surprised, but I’d think, 'Hmmm. Well, if he’s goin’ there, then I’m goin…’ [Inaudible]. It’s hard to detail it."

At this moment John stops. He sees what appears to be a cap over the lense of the camera and speaks to Seaman.

John: [Inaudible]“You’ve got a paddle over the front of it [the camera]. How can you see? It [the lense] says RCA. On the window [of the lense]. [Inaudible] Oh! That’s a little TV in there. Oh! The old cameras you used to actually see through, right? That [Inaudible] one you got me you could film in the night?"
Seaman: “No, that had a TV in it.”
John: “Oh."
Seaman [practically whispering]: “Movie cameras [Inaudible]..."
John: "What?"
Seaman: "Movie cameras [Inaudible]..."
John: “I should’ve known [about the video monitor], but I didn’t. I thought, 'Oh the silly bugger’s left the cap on the lense', you know?
Seaman [now mumbling]: [Inaudible]
John [growing annoyed at being unable to hear Seaman]: “What!?!"

Seaman says something about a tape. Presumably, he’s saying that he’s shot some good video tape or that John will like the tape when he sees it.

John: “I will? Do it. File it under ‘good tape’."

Seaman then once again pans around the studio where producer Jack Douglas and others are mixing and remixing the Star Wars piece into Beautiful Boys.
The video goes black and then resumes with Seaman creepily filming Yoko as she somehow sleeps on a cot in the studio.

Next, Douglas makes a comment along the lines of the laser war he’s just recorded is the quickest war he’s ever seen.

John: “What do they call them? They have a name for those short wars, don’t they? What, what…they have some kind of name for very quick short wars."
Hilburn: “Like skirmishes?”
John: “Yeah, like ‘Three-day war’ [Inaudible] border skirmish.
John: [speaking to Douglas]: "Is Hal [horn player Howard Johnson] gonna do some tricks now?”
Douglas: “Pretty soon.”
John: “Oh, you have to, to tell him first, right?”
Douglas: “Yeah”.
John: “Is it absolutely boiling [hot] in here [the studio] again?"
Douglas: “It feels warm.”
John: “It’s the lights [for the video camera]. Dim the lights, Toshi. …Oh, no…"
Seaman: “No, I’m going."
John: “Oh, ok. [To Hamaya] He’s goin'."
Seaman: “It’s a good cue.”
John: “Well, give me the video. You’re not goin’ off with it in the city..”
Seaman: “No, no, no, no.”
John: “You wouldn’t do that.

Apparently, though, in less than two months, he would….

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