April 27, 2020 • 34 mins
Decades after his death, John Lennon is still one of the most well-known artists of all time. His life and work went through many changes, but perhaps no influence was more impactful than his relationship with Yoko Ono.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Media. The Beatles
have been famous in a way that few others can
even imagine, existing in a rapidly changing time period when
a new era of growing globalization and increased communication. Where
it is with the old system of media gatekeepers who
(00:22):
controlled music distribution, the pressures were almost unimaginable. This is
the second part of this two part look at John Lennon.
So if you haven't heard the first part, I suggest
you find that now. My guest once again is Jordan Runtug,
one of the two hosts of the podcast Rivals, a
show about the greatest music rivalries in history. Check it out.
(00:44):
But now we'll dive back into John's story. At this point,
the Beatles are just starting to become world famous, but
in the meantime, John has been dealing with the death
of his mother, a crumbling relationship with his first wife,
and trying to be a father while traveling the globe
as an international music megastar. All this time he is
(01:06):
writing music, right, he is writing. And I think you know,
if people look back at even the songs, then they
all sound cheery and upbeat and love me do and
so on. But there are songs like Help. You know,
there are songs that clearly belie some of this emotional
longing and emotional difficulty and trauma along the way. Yeah,
(01:27):
it's funny going through John's story kind of in a
lot of ways. The most boring period, when you actually
get down to the emotional graph of it, are the
Beatlemania years, because he actually just felt like he was
asleep for most of it. A lot the ways he
was he said, he just was miserable, and he would
cite Help is the first real song he ever wrote,
because it was actually coming from him, was a cry
for help, not just he would call his fat Elvis period,
(01:55):
when he just was indulging in all the food, all
the women, all the drugs, all the drink, everything you
can imagine. He got into rock and roll to avoid
convention and structure, and suddenly he was more structured and
reigned in than a normal person. Through fame. It's a
common thing to hear celebrities now, but at the time
there was really no precedent for fame on that global scale.
And maybe Sinatra and Elvis and Glenn Miller or something
(02:16):
like that, but they didn't know the part that you
can't leave your house. You you're you're stuck. They would
get a hotel suite and they'd all be in the
bathroom because it was the only room that they could
get any real peace. You know. They'd all just would
hide in the big bathroom of their hotels suite and
just to hang out and be together. So it was
really tough for him. He found himself in a life
that he didn't really want. He somehow wound up in
(02:38):
what was called the London suburb they called the Stockbroker's Belt,
which is where all the rich people would get mansions
outside of London, which is not you know, I think
of John Lenny, you don't think of stock brokers. And
he had this boring house and a boring suburb of
a sorry pretty boring wife. Paul McCartney would later say, yeah,
Cynthia at the time would tell me that she really
wanted him to just calm down and settle down and
(03:00):
the pipe and slippers, and he said, that was when
alarm bells went off on my head because I know
that's not the John Lennon that well, she wanted him
to stop doing drugs. She definitely wanted him to start
being around his son. But yes, she was. She was
not sort of intellectually and artistically perhaps a good match
for him. He didn't like performing and having this public
public life on the one hand. On the other hand,
(03:22):
it did give him some structure, some reason I could
get up in the morning and do something, as opposed
to later. After you know, they stopped and he was
really rudderless and and didn't know what he was going
to do with his life. But then there's this important
juncture where their fame grows so huge that at some
point John makes the statement, Wow, the Beatles were like
(03:44):
bigger than Jesus. And this is not taken well internationally speaking. No,
he was talking to a journalist who was a very
close friend of his. He was being sarcastic, he was.
He was kind of saying, well, what's wrong with the
church there? You know, the Beatles are bigger than Jesus.
Right now, they got to do more. It was printed
in in a very large interview in England in March
(04:07):
of sixty six, and no one picked up on it.
It was just one wine in a very very massive interview,
and then it got printed in the United States out
of context, and an American teen magazine. It was called
deep book out of context. The Beatles are bigger than Jesus,
obviously pretty inflammatory without everything around that kind of describing
his argument and his point. It kind of hit right
when the band We're going on tour in the United
(04:29):
States in nineteen sixty six, and of course that would
take them right through the South, the whole Bible Belt,
and it was really pretty horrific. You had klansmen out
front of the arena, they had death threats, they had
people lighting firecrackers in the middle of their shows, and
there's footage of I think in Memphis, somebody lit a
firecracker on stage and you see all the Beatles turned
(04:50):
to one another to see who got hit. There'll be
bullet holes in the fuselage of the planes they were taking.
It was really really terrifying, and of course John had
to be show doubt from they would landed in in
some southern city and where it said send John out first,
he's the one they want, and and he had been.
And then they went to the Philippines, where, of course,
I mean, you know that this was a dictatorship, a
(05:12):
completely Christian country. People were horribly upset, and well, that
was actually unrelated that they that was before the whole
Jesus thing that was actually a few months before, and
they went and they inavertently snubbed the Marcus from then
Marcus for some whatever reason, they didn't attend this lunch
with Fernando and Amelda Marcus. And you don't turn down
an invitation from the dictator. And so all of a sudden,
(05:34):
all the police support, which they desperately needed because of fans,
was removed. Creepy things like they'd arrive at the airport
and right when they get on the escalator, the escalator
be turned off. Angry, very you know, pro Marcus people
would attack them at the airport, and of course they
had no police support, so they were just covering themselves
with guitar cases. John did not enjoy performing when there
(05:57):
was so much shrieking and screaming that he could really
not even hear himself. Oh yeah, he used to say,
we could have been wax works for all the good
we did. No, couldn't nobody heard anything. It was a
freak show, and he felt like a performing flee instead
of an artist, or not even an artist, not even
a musician, just a sort of freak, which is something
he probably felt all through his childhood in Liverpool, and
(06:20):
I don't think he really relished feeling that way. Again, well,
you know, it's interesting. He did feel like a freak
in the sense that he made many comments about saying
that he saw the world differently than anybody else he knew.
And I think he describes that both in an alienating way,
like I feel so alone because no one else sees
things the way I do. But it also gave him
(06:41):
a sense of specialness. Oh yeah, you would always as
a kid, he said, he always used to wonder am
I insane? Am I a genius? And he would read
biographies of Van Gogh and James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
and Dylan Thomas and it would make him feel better
because he his psychedelic visions were reality to me. And
so when the whole LSD thing hit, it was kind
of comforting to him because that was more of how
(07:02):
he saw the world than the average person about interesting
And so this being under a microscope and being the
life of the band, on the one hand, being recognized
as being special again right, and being loved in this
overwhelming way probably filled a certain psychic need for him.
But at the same time, being dogged every moment. It's
(07:24):
a double edged sword. The other side of intense love
or overvaluation is devaluation and hate, and that is a
good part of what happens sort of in the later
life of the Beatles, that there was a lot of
devaluing and hating and and attacking and in a frightening
way for someone who has seen a lot of mortality
(07:44):
of young people in his young life, so it must
have been really terrifying, Oh, I'm sure. And it contributed
in a major way to them stopping touring, which removed
a lot of stress from his life. But he was
also completely ruderless. He spend his days at his suburban
state just wake up in the middle of the afternoon.
He said, he would just be eating LSD like it
(08:05):
was candy. He had a mortar and pestle by his
bed that he would just grind up random pills and
make an uber pill and just take it to see
what would happen. And he would just watch TV and
just kind of zone out. And a crucial song of
this period I think is um good Morning, Good Morning
on Sergeant Pepper, because it's just it's about him watching TV.
Good Morning, good Morning was a corn Flakes theme, and
(08:27):
it's just about him watching afternoon soap operas and uh,
nothing to do to save his life, nothing to do
to save his life. His wife. Then it's a very
interesting song when you actually look at the lyrics and
know what it's about. It's just it's almost like nowhere, man,
it's just a guy. It's a nihilistic song about a
guy who's nothing to say. But it's okay. So it's interesting.
(08:49):
So in reference that time period and Sergeant Pepper, many
people have tried to understand what Lucy and the Sky
with Diamonds? What? What what was that about? And what
really informed that? Of course, there are millions of theories
and so on, But he himself says, even though people
keep saying, oh, Lucy in the Sky with diamonds, obviously LSD,
this must be about l. S D. This song, he
(09:17):
was using a lot of LSD at that time, But
he says the song is not about l. S D.
He says that specifically, he says that his son Julian,
at age four, you know, gave him this drawing of
a girl floating in the sky, said she was Lucy.
That caught his imagination um and that that was involved
in the writing of that song. What he doesn't talk
(09:39):
about and is interesting, and you know, psychobiographers have gone
back and looked at the words specifically. It's probably a
conglomeration of a number of these things. I mean, certainly
there's reference to psychotic thinking, I mean, floating in the
sky and so on, all of these things that probably
are somewhat references to trips on LSD. But the girl
(10:00):
in the sky that you want to be with but
you can't get to does seem to refer to his
mother in some way, that she's there but he can't
really get to her. There are a lot of words,
if you break them down in in the song that
do refer to separation. Particularly separation is the big theme
really of his whole life, but certainly of his whole
(10:22):
growing up, and that it came from Julian who is
Julia plus John specifically, and that it also makes a
lot of references to words that were in the Lewis
Carol poems that he read as a boy that we're
hugely important to him and specifically refer to his boyhood times,
(10:43):
times when he had his Julia or his Mimi or
the woman in his life who was being sort of
the mother figure to him. Yeah, now that I had
never thought of that, and it's it's funny, he would
later say. From when they stopped touring through to maybe
the White album period from like late sixty six to
early sixty eight, he didn't write a lot. Paul was
(11:03):
kind of the one who would say, Okay, it's now
time to make an album, and Paul would have all
these songs and he would have to scramble stuff together.
If you look at his contributions to Sergeant Pepper, they're
all kind of meditations on the mundane. You've got good Morning,
Good Mornings, you said about just basically him watching TV.
You've got a day in a Life, which was just
him reading the newspaper propped up on the piano, and
I read the newsday boy and all the stories in
(11:24):
it about potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and then losing this
guy with diamonds, just his little boy brought home a
painting from school. It's funny how as a guy who
didn't like writing story songs as he called them, like
Paul did, like eleanor Rigby or Penny Lane or things
that that were a bit more of like a novelist.
(11:45):
He always prided himself on writing from him. It's very
telling what he's writing in this period. And there's a
line that I noticed in UM, good morning, good morning,
you go to the show you hope she goes, which
I mean, I'm probably reading far too much into it,
but I always wanted to. That was a very very
very very very early reference to Yoko Ono, who had
met in November sixty six, right when he was in
(12:07):
the midst of this very rudderless period. Let's take a
quick break here. We'll be back in a minute. So
John had a lifetime of emotional trauma he was dealing with,
coupled with the fact that he was now an international
(12:29):
superstar and the pressures that come with that. It was
perhaps partly due to this that he spent years in
and out of a haze of drugs and alcohol. But
a huge event that would change his life happened in
November of nineteen sixty six. He met Yoko Ono. He
went to the Indica Art Gallery where she had a
(12:49):
show going on. A mutual friend was was putting on
her show, and he went. He'd been up, I guess
for three days before, just tripping and so he arrived
and really he was just fried. He was so out
of it that he spent an hour in the car
out front trying to get a nerve. Just leave the
car and go in. He was he was not doing
well at the experien and he went in. He had
not really had much exposure to conceptual art, which was
(13:11):
Yoko's medium, and so he walked in and there would
be things like an apple on a pedestal for two
hundred pounds, which is a lot of money now but
a lot of money then, and nails on a plexiglass
box or something, and he the hell is this? What
is this? Yoko was led over and she was introduced,
and she had him a little car that said breathe,
and he thought, oh, this is interesting. She sent him notes.
(13:32):
She was senting notes in India. This is before they
were officially together. And actually it's important to know. When
John was asked about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
didn't have anything to do with Yoko, he said, well,
I hadn't even met her yet, which was untrue. He had,
whether he remembered or not, he had met her at
this art gallery that you're talking about, exactly that night,
and that was very recent, so they weren't together. He
(13:54):
had just gone to see it, but they had talked
and he had had this interaction with her and her
art right as she was writing basically Lucy and the Sky.
Yoko came along at a time when he is rudderless,
He's not feeling good. He sounds depressed. Actually, right, did
you look at pictures of him, He looks town away, right,
he just looks like achingly sad. So he's achingly sad,
(14:14):
but he's not able to outwardly talk about or process
or grieve whatever is making him sad. Instead, he's just
doing a lot of drugs. When you look at what
is bubbling up in the music and what is bubbling
up in the words, and whether that also either further
informed this desire to be attached to Yoko Ono, who
(14:36):
he's just met, who presents, as you said, unlike Cynthia
right as this really the opposite, right, this artistic and
sees the world differently than anybody else's he does. That
would be a time that he was really longing for
someone who would be you would understand him and be
his someone even maybe even more than understand him. Attached
(15:00):
to him and mother him and be with him, and
in fact he goes on to call her mother what
he calls her mother and the beginning of their relationship.
Literally she is with him seven and also an important
thing to bring up about immediately prior to them getting
together in a serious way. Brian Epstein died suddenly, probably
have a drug overgain. But yeah, they're some people say
it was suicide. I don't think it was. I think
(15:21):
it was just an accidental mixing boozing pills, very sudden,
although he'd been depressed, and maybe it wasn't the world's
biggest surprise, but to them it came out of the blue.
It was a huge shock from a friends standpoint, from
a business standpoint too, and a lot of that his death.
If you could point to one thing that I think
kind of herold the end of the Beatles, I would
say it would be that because it made Paul take
(15:43):
on a more dominant role, which annoyed certainly John and
even the rest of the band, and it it made
them have to take control of their own finances and
managerial stuff which had never really been good at or
had much of an interest in doing, and suddenly they
were squabbling over business stuff. That had never really been
something that they dealt with. I mean, obviously there's other
things like just growing up and wanting to be an individual.
So it probably would have happened anyway. If you think
(16:04):
about the public psyche, that they couldn't bear the idea
that these brothers would break themselves up, that that was
just a sort of an unbearable thought. Instead, they really
they blamed Yoko Ono for being the one to come
in and break things up, but it did have a
lot to do with the Beatles themselves. Yoko became a
constant presence in John's life, including in the studio, which
(16:26):
was unheard of the studio, it was a sacred space
for the four of them, off limits to really anybody.
Not even Brian Epstein would ever really come there. You'd
only come in occasionally. And so suddenly Yoko was brought
in without really a word to the others, and she
would follow him up into the control room to talk
to the producer. She follow into the bathroom, which just
literally m people fans in later years will blame her
(16:49):
for breaking up the people who do you think asked
her to do that, or allowed her to do exactly
incited her to do that. I mean this man who
had left his son, he left his why he could
leave anybody, but he allowed that were he allowed that,
He demanded that, and she would later say like it
was kind of his thing. Well, the band were in
India studying transcendental meditation, as you mentioned, which is important
that they chose to study. I mean John was looking
(17:12):
for something, right, and transcendental meditation is a form of
meditation still today, in fact, probably the most practiced forms
still today that does relieve anxiety and improve mood for
many many people. Whether it was defined as such for
John when he went to learn it, no, I think
it was more like a hippie and right giving the
exactly wanted the answer, but he didn't want the answer.
(17:34):
I mean, he really was a man in search of
all kinds of things, all kind of answers. But and
he wanted it now. But it was a relief from
his suffering, and he clearly was suffering tremendously, and so
he was looking for that. He did practice that. Whether
that was a help to him, it may have been.
It may have been a help to him, because you
definitely see a shift. But two things are happening. He's
practicing transcendental meditation. But he's also getting together by letter
(17:58):
and then physically with Yoko Ono. But you do see
a change in his mood and in his writings. Yeah,
and the key song of the period, and you mentioned
earlier was Julia mentioned Ocean Child, which is the English
translation I believe for for Yoko, he said in interviews
(18:22):
later it was a fusion of his mother and the
love of his life in that moment. There's a lot
to be read into that. It was kind of a
saying goodbye to Julia and welcoming this new person. Who
really could I think he transferred Julia onto this new person,
And yoga was this combination for him of lover or mother,
which you know, as you mentioned about Julia, he was
(18:45):
never really able to make that distinction area. So he
gets together with Yoko and they start collaborating, if you will,
and they also do something else. He reads a book
about primal screamed arapy and he asks the author to
come treat him. The author does. The end result is
(19:05):
you're supposed to scream or physically and vocally release your
suffering and the agony that you feel. But in that
you are made to think about deliberately and talk about
and process and consciously register the things that were traumas
for you and that make you incredibly sad. And so
(19:25):
all of this material about his mother and feeling abandoned,
and his father and feeling abandoned and the chaos and
the loss was something for the first time he was
not only allowed to confront, he was made to confront
and think about and then have this release and screaming.
It's important because I think that the first album that
(19:46):
he puts out with Yoko Ono, the Plastic Van, does contain,
you know, the song mother, Mother, you had me, but
I never had you. I wanted you, you didn't want me,
So I I just got to tell you goodbye goodbye,
(20:06):
same verse about the father, and then children don't do
what I have done. I couldn't walk and I tried
to run, So I just got to tell you goodbye, goodbye.
And then this wailing of Mama, don't go, Daddy come
home for the whole end of the song, and of
course also the song Julia specifically his mother. So he emotes,
he processes, and he releases these painful, painful feelings. I
(20:30):
would say it's like the first psychotherapy you know that
John Lennon has in a way to really process what's happened.
And it was tough because the primal scream therapy. Of course,
it required I believe, several months, and they had to
go out to California to be treated, and midway through
he was ordered to leave the country so that the
doctor would later say we took him part, we didn't
put him back together, and so he was incredibly raw
(20:54):
and the result was this album, which is just some
of the most nakedly vulnerable music you know I've ever heard.
I mean, it opens with a funeral bell and goes
right into mother as you just said, and it closes
with a song called My Mommy's Dead, which is made
on a children's tape recorder, and it's just him kind
of plain song singing it with a plastic guitar, my
(21:17):
Mom's Dead, So it's been so many years My Mommy's Dead.
Track after track, he was a song called Working Class Hero,
where he basically just eviscerates at Mimi and her ilk
and all the people that tried to put him in
a box when he just wanted to be free to
think in a moat. A song called God. God is
(21:38):
a concept by which we measure our pain. And then
he basically goes through and the whole song, majority of
the song is him saying thinks he doesn't believe in
and he just don't believe in Elvis. I don't believe
in Bob Dylan. I don't believe in Jesus, I don't
believe in the Buddhas. All these things that he put
(21:58):
all of his faith into and it let him down.
And finally it ends in this big crescendo climax. I
don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko
and me. And that's reality. Very difficult to listen to,
but worth hearing for so many reasons. Incredible piece of art,
a lot of pain that he was processing in that period,
and his father actually chose that moment to re enter
(22:21):
his life, and Yoko encouraged that for them to reconnect,
although it was a chaotic reconnection with a kind of
comings and goings and move in with me. You know
it's not going to work. They'd been in contact when
John was first got famous, and John, of course, you know,
alarm bells went off. They can like, oh geez, are
you looking for you know, looking for money? They've been
(22:43):
off and on tents every couple of years they would
he would kind of re enter his life. He was
like fifty something and he married a nineteen year old
Like they lived with them for a time. It was
it was definitely a strained I don't want to call
it a relationship. It was just a strained coexistence. And
at some point his father like writes a song yeah,
which is also bizarre, bizarre to John right, like I'm
(23:05):
John Lemon's dad, I'm gonna be pop star, you know,
made him mad to no end. They ended up towards
the end of I guess John found out that his
dad was sick. I think he had I forget if
it was cancer or something. And they kind of struck
up a phone relationship, and so when he died in
nine seventy six, they had made his Yeah, they were
(23:28):
at peace with each other, I think as much as
they were ever. We're going to be. Let's take a
quick break here, we'll be back in a minute. John
has reconnected with his previously estranged father and he's been
working on music with the Plastic on No band, But
(23:50):
he's still abusing drugs and trying to find an equilibrium
with the world. Meanwhile, with Yoko on No, they're right
constantly together. He's encouraging her writing and her production, um
and their production together. Then you know, essentially is a magic.
Really the next album is next album, and he basically
said that he put a little honey in it. He
(24:11):
said that it was still the same sense of anger
and frustration. There are songs on There's a song but
the relief that I mean, you wanted to write if
he had some relief in pouring all of this out
and processing it, if that allowed him to write a
song about peace and love and you know, seeking that,
if that could have been sort of the next stage
in development for him in a way. Yeah, I mean,
(24:33):
certainly that's true. And then there are a few moments
on a song called how do You Sleep About as
nasty as some of the ones in the Plastic Going,
O'Bannon's directed at Paul and all the resentment that he
had towards him, adding insult to injury. He got George
Harrison to play guitar on it, so it's just ganging
up on Paul. But for the most part it was
definitely a much more sedate affair. That whole album Shawn's
(24:55):
birth occurs before after after Sean was born in nineteen
seventy six, I think on John's birthday, but prior to that,
he and Yoko had a separation. John called it his
lost weekend. It's confusing about exactly whose idea was. The
official sort of reason is that Yoko basically said, you know,
I think we've been spending too much time together. I
(25:17):
feel like the passion is starting to go. You should
go take some time and so you're wild oats. Essentially
her go sell them with my assistant Pang exactly. Yeah,
I mean she basically kicked him out. I mean, that's
that's not she kicked him out, but she also set
up off with the keep an eye on right with
the assistant, who she fully anticipated without his sexual relationship
(25:37):
with him, but at least knew who it was, I guess,
and that they had some sort of a deal. He's
reported as being very remarkably stable during this time. He
was drinking a fair amount. He was kicked out of
clubs and stuff. It was like one of the rare
moments of John being a tabloid fodder kind of situation
where he was kind of in rough shape and he
was partying with Alice Cooper and Harry Nilson during this time. No,
(25:59):
there's some songs. There's an outtake of a song he
was singing called Just Because, an old cover, and he's
drunk out of his mind and most of these sessions
and he's just wailing at the end. So for him,
this is just a re enactment again of mom kicking
you out or abandoning you or dropping you by the way. Unfortunately,
(26:21):
this whole pattern of alcohol and drugs, which you know,
ultimately do a lot of destruction in his life. When
people start drinking before the age of sixteen, the likelihood
that you will be an alcoholic is like fivefold. Unfortunately,
also having this kind of psychological difficulty to deal with
and no other outlet, the likelihood for men, particularly that
(26:44):
they will abuse substances as a sort of self medicating
or a way of checking out, is also greatly greatly increased.
So he really pretty much all of his life struggled
with alcohol and drug use. And when he was with
Yoga Oh No, he moved from LSD, which causes both
(27:05):
this feeling of sort of oceanic as he refers to
in his songs boundary lists at one with the world feeling,
but also is very reportedly ego destroying, the feeling of
sort of I am nothing, I am no one, I
am disappeared, and so there can be terrible mood problems
on LSD, and of course there's a psychotic hallucinogenic thinking
(27:27):
that goes on, which interestingly incorporated into his music in
ways that we say we feel are very creative and artistic.
And also the mood states also got brought into his
music in very artistic and creative ways. But Yoko Ono
moved him away from LSD and into heroin, and the
two of them end up using heroin together, which has
(27:49):
very different effects than LSD. Heroin is more about feeling
like this fantastic high immediately that is reportedly like better
than an orgasm, and then sort of being out of
it in a blissful state, but not hallucinatory. The negative
is the withdrawal, you know, that occurs afterwards. He at
some point recognizes he's not in good shape, really not
(28:12):
in good shape, and tries to pull back someone, and
that seems to be the nature of the way things
go in the later part of his life, sort of
using and trying to use less he's certainly aware of
people who died from overdoses and so on, and he
tries to be present for this sun. They end up
getting back together in seventy four and he released his
last Well for a time, last musical album, and I
(28:34):
think seventy five and his contract was up. He was just,
I think, sort of done for a time. I think
he just wanted to take a break this beautiful period.
Inteen seventy six, he had had a problem with with
the U. S. Government. They were trying to deport him
because he was so outspoken politically. The Nixon government and
Jake Hoover had files on him, and we're just, you know,
(28:54):
using all sorts of techniques to try to get him
out of the Country's finally given his green card and
allowed the stay. Yoko became pregnant. She had had several
miscarriages prior relatively older, so it was it was very
special that she was able to conceive, and the child,
Sean sean On No Lennon I think it was his
full name, was born on I believe John's birthday in
ninety six, and he became in his word, as a
(29:16):
house husband. He stayed home to take care of Sean,
he started baking bread. He really enjoyed domesticity in a
way that he absolutely did not ten years earlier living
with with Julia had one on one bliss with this baby,
you know, the baby who I'm sure in some ways
he wanted to be with a father like he was
trying to be, and maybe some undoing of the things
(29:39):
that were done to him he could be a good
dad and undoing of the things that he did with Julian.
But clearly he was in a super present and very
engaged father with Sean in a very different way. And
you're right. He used to say, we're like twins were
born exactly the same day, which, yes, you're born on
the same day, but you're absolutely right. There is a
lot of transference there. I think, like a real blurring
(30:01):
of boundaries. Again, this is like repeatedly for John the
issue of having boundaries is scary because you can disappear.
But if we're at one, if we're one person, then
you're with me um something that he tried to have
at times with Yoko Ono. I mean that's part of
parenting some degree, right, is that your empathy towards your
baby is so intense that you're like one person, and
(30:22):
it seems that he you know, literally, you know, he
carried him around on his chest, and he seemed to
have been a positive period for him. There's just so
many stories of that period of sending polaroids of his
of the first bread that he banked. He was so
proud of that. And he and Paul were in contact
in that period, which they hadn't really been much of
the first half of the decade, and they would talk
a lot about having families. Paul had had his a
(30:44):
little earlier in the in the seventies, and so it
was a great way to bond and connect for these
two old friends, to finally sort of reconnect and put
all the business stuff behind them. And yeah, it was
a really special time for him, and he didn't really
care about music at all. You'd say that my guitar
was hung up above the bed for years, and I
had more important things that to deal with, like like
(31:04):
my son and my family, and stay that way for
a while. He then did start to reconsider writing and
being involved with music, and in fact was recording. Sadly,
right at the time of his death, he returned to
the studio to record an album called Double Fantasy. It
was a collaborative album with him and Yoko. They had
alternated songs and it had just been released in the
(31:27):
fall of eighty doing all sorts of press for you.
He's getting back into the groove of It was a
big comeback album for him. He was working on the
follow up. Left the studio on December eight and was
walking into Homessy Sean at the Dakota Apartment Complex and
Central Park West in New York. A fan, if you
could call him that, A man who sounds deranged. He
was not diagnosed at the time with schizophrenia or a
(31:49):
psychotic illness. He just he had some thoughts about needing
to do this Chapman who prison and shot him, and
and obviously devastating for the world, devastating for a family,
devastating for so many reasons. The fact that he appears
to have achieved some level of peace, he kind of
(32:10):
rebooted built through raising Sean. I think healed a lot
within himself and then reintegrated his great passion music into
it and seemed to be at a place that I
would have imagined he was probably happy. That he's been
in a long time makes it even more heartbreaking to me,
and it's also pretty clear from the album and where
(32:31):
he was with it that through the tragedies, through some
resolution of that for himself, through the use of a
lot of drugs which sometimes really do decrease one's ability
over time to cognitively function well, he seems to have
maintained this creativity in both his ability to compose and write.
(32:52):
It seems as though, you know, had he not died,
he would have continued to be creatively productive. Oh yeah,
he He had a whole wealth of music stored of Actually,
there are number of albums that released after his death
that were just things that he was working on. He
had a lot in the pipe. He's planning on maybe
going back on tour, which he hadn't done I think
since the Beatles, and I need to check that, but
(33:13):
I think, yeah, he was really feeling revitalized and excited,
which is nice to think of him that way and
remember him that way, or that at least he achieved
some of that before he died. Yeah, I mean. The
opening track of Double Fantasy, which came ten years after
The Plastic Donal Band, is a bell on Plastic Donal band.
It was a funeral bell in Double Fantasy, it was
(33:36):
a wishing bell. It was real high pitched ting and
the opening song is just like starting over and it's
just about him rekindling his love with Yoko, and it's
very sweet. It's a guy who turned forty, who's reevaluating
his life and is happy where he is and he's
at peace. It's a nice way to remember him, I think.
(34:00):
M H. That wraps things up for this episode. Thanks
for joining me today, and a huge thanks to Jordan
run Tug. If you haven't already, check out his show
Rivals to hear more about the fascinating world of the
music industry. If you're interested in more information about the
people we discussed on the show, you can check out
my book The Power of Different and you can follow
(34:20):
me on Twitter at Dr Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy
m D Until next time. Personology is a production of
I Heart Media. The executive producers are Dr Gayl Salts
and Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The
Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by
(34:42):
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Media. The Beatles
have been famous in a way that few others can
even imagine, existing in a rapidly changing time period when
a new era of growing globalization and increased communication. Where
it is with the old system of media gatekeepers who
(00:22):
controlled music distribution, the pressures were almost unimaginable. This is
the second part of this two part look at John Lennon.
So if you haven't heard the first part, I suggest
you find that now. My guest once again is Jordan Runtug,
one of the two hosts of the podcast Rivals, a
show about the greatest music rivalries in history. Check it out.
(00:44):
But now we'll dive back into John's story. At this point,
the Beatles are just starting to become world famous, but
in the meantime, John has been dealing with the death
of his mother, a crumbling relationship with his first wife,
and trying to be a father while traveling the globe
as an international music megastar. All this time he is
(01:06):
writing music, right, he is writing. And I think you know,
if people look back at even the songs, then they
all sound cheery and upbeat and love me do and
so on. But there are songs like Help. You know,
there are songs that clearly belie some of this emotional
longing and emotional difficulty and trauma along the way. Yeah,
(01:27):
it's funny going through John's story kind of in a
lot of ways. The most boring period, when you actually
get down to the emotional graph of it, are the
Beatlemania years, because he actually just felt like he was
asleep for most of it. A lot the ways he
was he said, he just was miserable, and he would
cite Help is the first real song he ever wrote,
because it was actually coming from him, was a cry
for help, not just he would call his fat Elvis period,
(01:55):
when he just was indulging in all the food, all
the women, all the drugs, all the drink, everything you
can imagine. He got into rock and roll to avoid
convention and structure, and suddenly he was more structured and
reigned in than a normal person. Through fame. It's a
common thing to hear celebrities now, but at the time
there was really no precedent for fame on that global scale.
And maybe Sinatra and Elvis and Glenn Miller or something
(02:16):
like that, but they didn't know the part that you
can't leave your house. You you're you're stuck. They would
get a hotel suite and they'd all be in the
bathroom because it was the only room that they could
get any real peace. You know. They'd all just would
hide in the big bathroom of their hotels suite and
just to hang out and be together. So it was
really tough for him. He found himself in a life
that he didn't really want. He somehow wound up in
(02:38):
what was called the London suburb they called the Stockbroker's Belt,
which is where all the rich people would get mansions
outside of London, which is not you know, I think
of John Lenny, you don't think of stock brokers. And
he had this boring house and a boring suburb of
a sorry pretty boring wife. Paul McCartney would later say, yeah,
Cynthia at the time would tell me that she really
wanted him to just calm down and settle down and
(03:00):
the pipe and slippers, and he said, that was when
alarm bells went off on my head because I know
that's not the John Lennon that well, she wanted him
to stop doing drugs. She definitely wanted him to start
being around his son. But yes, she was. She was
not sort of intellectually and artistically perhaps a good match
for him. He didn't like performing and having this public
public life on the one hand. On the other hand,
(03:22):
it did give him some structure, some reason I could
get up in the morning and do something, as opposed
to later. After you know, they stopped and he was
really rudderless and and didn't know what he was going
to do with his life. But then there's this important
juncture where their fame grows so huge that at some
point John makes the statement, Wow, the Beatles were like
(03:44):
bigger than Jesus. And this is not taken well internationally speaking. No,
he was talking to a journalist who was a very
close friend of his. He was being sarcastic, he was.
He was kind of saying, well, what's wrong with the
church there? You know, the Beatles are bigger than Jesus.
Right now, they got to do more. It was printed
in in a very large interview in England in March
(04:07):
of sixty six, and no one picked up on it.
It was just one wine in a very very massive interview,
and then it got printed in the United States out
of context, and an American teen magazine. It was called
deep book out of context. The Beatles are bigger than Jesus,
obviously pretty inflammatory without everything around that kind of describing
his argument and his point. It kind of hit right
when the band We're going on tour in the United
(04:29):
States in nineteen sixty six, and of course that would
take them right through the South, the whole Bible Belt,
and it was really pretty horrific. You had klansmen out
front of the arena, they had death threats, they had
people lighting firecrackers in the middle of their shows, and
there's footage of I think in Memphis, somebody lit a
firecracker on stage and you see all the Beatles turned
(04:50):
to one another to see who got hit. There'll be
bullet holes in the fuselage of the planes they were taking.
It was really really terrifying, and of course John had
to be show doubt from they would landed in in
some southern city and where it said send John out first,
he's the one they want, and and he had been.
And then they went to the Philippines, where, of course,
I mean, you know that this was a dictatorship, a
(05:12):
completely Christian country. People were horribly upset, and well, that
was actually unrelated that they that was before the whole
Jesus thing that was actually a few months before, and
they went and they inavertently snubbed the Marcus from then
Marcus for some whatever reason, they didn't attend this lunch
with Fernando and Amelda Marcus. And you don't turn down
an invitation from the dictator. And so all of a sudden,
(05:34):
all the police support, which they desperately needed because of fans,
was removed. Creepy things like they'd arrive at the airport
and right when they get on the escalator, the escalator
be turned off. Angry, very you know, pro Marcus people
would attack them at the airport, and of course they
had no police support, so they were just covering themselves
with guitar cases. John did not enjoy performing when there
(05:57):
was so much shrieking and screaming that he could really
not even hear himself. Oh yeah, he used to say,
we could have been wax works for all the good
we did. No, couldn't nobody heard anything. It was a
freak show, and he felt like a performing flee instead
of an artist, or not even an artist, not even
a musician, just a sort of freak, which is something
he probably felt all through his childhood in Liverpool, and
(06:20):
I don't think he really relished feeling that way. Again, well,
you know, it's interesting. He did feel like a freak
in the sense that he made many comments about saying
that he saw the world differently than anybody else he knew.
And I think he describes that both in an alienating way,
like I feel so alone because no one else sees
things the way I do. But it also gave him
(06:41):
a sense of specialness. Oh yeah, you would always as
a kid, he said, he always used to wonder am
I insane? Am I a genius? And he would read
biographies of Van Gogh and James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
and Dylan Thomas and it would make him feel better
because he his psychedelic visions were reality to me. And
so when the whole LSD thing hit, it was kind
of comforting to him because that was more of how
(07:02):
he saw the world than the average person about interesting
And so this being under a microscope and being the
life of the band, on the one hand, being recognized
as being special again right, and being loved in this
overwhelming way probably filled a certain psychic need for him.
But at the same time, being dogged every moment. It's
(07:24):
a double edged sword. The other side of intense love
or overvaluation is devaluation and hate, and that is a
good part of what happens sort of in the later
life of the Beatles, that there was a lot of
devaluing and hating and and attacking and in a frightening
way for someone who has seen a lot of mortality
(07:44):
of young people in his young life, so it must
have been really terrifying, Oh, I'm sure. And it contributed
in a major way to them stopping touring, which removed
a lot of stress from his life. But he was
also completely ruderless. He spend his days at his suburban
state just wake up in the middle of the afternoon.
He said, he would just be eating LSD like it
(08:05):
was candy. He had a mortar and pestle by his
bed that he would just grind up random pills and
make an uber pill and just take it to see
what would happen. And he would just watch TV and
just kind of zone out. And a crucial song of
this period I think is um good Morning, Good Morning
on Sergeant Pepper, because it's just it's about him watching TV.
Good Morning, good Morning was a corn Flakes theme, and
(08:27):
it's just about him watching afternoon soap operas and uh,
nothing to do to save his life, nothing to do
to save his life. His wife. Then it's a very
interesting song when you actually look at the lyrics and
know what it's about. It's just it's almost like nowhere, man,
it's just a guy. It's a nihilistic song about a
guy who's nothing to say. But it's okay. So it's interesting.
(08:49):
So in reference that time period and Sergeant Pepper, many
people have tried to understand what Lucy and the Sky
with Diamonds? What? What what was that about? And what
really informed that? Of course, there are millions of theories
and so on, But he himself says, even though people
keep saying, oh, Lucy in the Sky with diamonds, obviously LSD,
this must be about l. S D. This song, he
(09:17):
was using a lot of LSD at that time, But
he says the song is not about l. S D.
He says that specifically, he says that his son Julian,
at age four, you know, gave him this drawing of
a girl floating in the sky, said she was Lucy.
That caught his imagination um and that that was involved
in the writing of that song. What he doesn't talk
(09:39):
about and is interesting, and you know, psychobiographers have gone
back and looked at the words specifically. It's probably a
conglomeration of a number of these things. I mean, certainly
there's reference to psychotic thinking, I mean, floating in the
sky and so on, all of these things that probably
are somewhat references to trips on LSD. But the girl
(10:00):
in the sky that you want to be with but
you can't get to does seem to refer to his
mother in some way, that she's there but he can't
really get to her. There are a lot of words,
if you break them down in in the song that
do refer to separation. Particularly separation is the big theme
really of his whole life, but certainly of his whole
(10:22):
growing up, and that it came from Julian who is
Julia plus John specifically, and that it also makes a
lot of references to words that were in the Lewis
Carol poems that he read as a boy that we're
hugely important to him and specifically refer to his boyhood times,
(10:43):
times when he had his Julia or his Mimi or
the woman in his life who was being sort of
the mother figure to him. Yeah, now that I had
never thought of that, and it's it's funny, he would
later say. From when they stopped touring through to maybe
the White album period from like late sixty six to
early sixty eight, he didn't write a lot. Paul was
(11:03):
kind of the one who would say, Okay, it's now
time to make an album, and Paul would have all
these songs and he would have to scramble stuff together.
If you look at his contributions to Sergeant Pepper, they're
all kind of meditations on the mundane. You've got good Morning,
Good Mornings, you said about just basically him watching TV.
You've got a day in a Life, which was just
him reading the newspaper propped up on the piano, and
I read the newsday boy and all the stories in
(11:24):
it about potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and then losing this
guy with diamonds, just his little boy brought home a
painting from school. It's funny how as a guy who
didn't like writing story songs as he called them, like
Paul did, like eleanor Rigby or Penny Lane or things
that that were a bit more of like a novelist.
(11:45):
He always prided himself on writing from him. It's very
telling what he's writing in this period. And there's a
line that I noticed in UM, good morning, good morning,
you go to the show you hope she goes, which
I mean, I'm probably reading far too much into it,
but I always wanted to. That was a very very
very very very early reference to Yoko Ono, who had
met in November sixty six, right when he was in
(12:07):
the midst of this very rudderless period. Let's take a
quick break here. We'll be back in a minute. So
John had a lifetime of emotional trauma he was dealing with,
coupled with the fact that he was now an international
(12:29):
superstar and the pressures that come with that. It was
perhaps partly due to this that he spent years in
and out of a haze of drugs and alcohol. But
a huge event that would change his life happened in
November of nineteen sixty six. He met Yoko Ono. He
went to the Indica Art Gallery where she had a
(12:49):
show going on. A mutual friend was was putting on
her show, and he went. He'd been up, I guess
for three days before, just tripping and so he arrived
and really he was just fried. He was so out
of it that he spent an hour in the car
out front trying to get a nerve. Just leave the
car and go in. He was he was not doing
well at the experien and he went in. He had
not really had much exposure to conceptual art, which was
(13:11):
Yoko's medium, and so he walked in and there would
be things like an apple on a pedestal for two
hundred pounds, which is a lot of money now but
a lot of money then, and nails on a plexiglass
box or something, and he the hell is this? What
is this? Yoko was led over and she was introduced,
and she had him a little car that said breathe,
and he thought, oh, this is interesting. She sent him notes.
(13:32):
She was senting notes in India. This is before they
were officially together. And actually it's important to know. When
John was asked about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
didn't have anything to do with Yoko, he said, well,
I hadn't even met her yet, which was untrue. He had,
whether he remembered or not, he had met her at
this art gallery that you're talking about, exactly that night,
and that was very recent, so they weren't together. He
(13:54):
had just gone to see it, but they had talked
and he had had this interaction with her and her
art right as she was writing basically Lucy and the Sky.
Yoko came along at a time when he is rudderless,
He's not feeling good. He sounds depressed. Actually, right, did
you look at pictures of him, He looks town away, right,
he just looks like achingly sad. So he's achingly sad,
(14:14):
but he's not able to outwardly talk about or process
or grieve whatever is making him sad. Instead, he's just
doing a lot of drugs. When you look at what
is bubbling up in the music and what is bubbling
up in the words, and whether that also either further
informed this desire to be attached to Yoko Ono, who
(14:36):
he's just met, who presents, as you said, unlike Cynthia
right as this really the opposite, right, this artistic and
sees the world differently than anybody else's he does. That
would be a time that he was really longing for
someone who would be you would understand him and be
his someone even maybe even more than understand him. Attached
(15:00):
to him and mother him and be with him, and
in fact he goes on to call her mother what
he calls her mother and the beginning of their relationship.
Literally she is with him seven and also an important
thing to bring up about immediately prior to them getting
together in a serious way. Brian Epstein died suddenly, probably
have a drug overgain. But yeah, they're some people say
it was suicide. I don't think it was. I think
(15:21):
it was just an accidental mixing boozing pills, very sudden,
although he'd been depressed, and maybe it wasn't the world's
biggest surprise, but to them it came out of the blue.
It was a huge shock from a friends standpoint, from
a business standpoint too, and a lot of that his death.
If you could point to one thing that I think
kind of herold the end of the Beatles, I would
say it would be that because it made Paul take
(15:43):
on a more dominant role, which annoyed certainly John and
even the rest of the band, and it it made
them have to take control of their own finances and
managerial stuff which had never really been good at or
had much of an interest in doing, and suddenly they
were squabbling over business stuff. That had never really been
something that they dealt with. I mean, obviously there's other
things like just growing up and wanting to be an individual.
So it probably would have happened anyway. If you think
(16:04):
about the public psyche, that they couldn't bear the idea
that these brothers would break themselves up, that that was
just a sort of an unbearable thought. Instead, they really
they blamed Yoko Ono for being the one to come
in and break things up, but it did have a
lot to do with the Beatles themselves. Yoko became a
constant presence in John's life, including in the studio, which
(16:26):
was unheard of the studio, it was a sacred space
for the four of them, off limits to really anybody.
Not even Brian Epstein would ever really come there. You'd
only come in occasionally. And so suddenly Yoko was brought
in without really a word to the others, and she
would follow him up into the control room to talk
to the producer. She follow into the bathroom, which just
literally m people fans in later years will blame her
(16:49):
for breaking up the people who do you think asked
her to do that, or allowed her to do exactly
incited her to do that. I mean this man who
had left his son, he left his why he could
leave anybody, but he allowed that were he allowed that,
He demanded that, and she would later say like it
was kind of his thing. Well, the band were in
India studying transcendental meditation, as you mentioned, which is important
that they chose to study. I mean John was looking
(17:12):
for something, right, and transcendental meditation is a form of
meditation still today, in fact, probably the most practiced forms
still today that does relieve anxiety and improve mood for
many many people. Whether it was defined as such for
John when he went to learn it, no, I think
it was more like a hippie and right giving the
exactly wanted the answer, but he didn't want the answer.
(17:34):
I mean, he really was a man in search of
all kinds of things, all kind of answers. But and
he wanted it now. But it was a relief from
his suffering, and he clearly was suffering tremendously, and so
he was looking for that. He did practice that. Whether
that was a help to him, it may have been.
It may have been a help to him, because you
definitely see a shift. But two things are happening. He's
practicing transcendental meditation. But he's also getting together by letter
(17:58):
and then physically with Yoko Ono. But you do see
a change in his mood and in his writings. Yeah,
and the key song of the period, and you mentioned
earlier was Julia mentioned Ocean Child, which is the English
translation I believe for for Yoko, he said in interviews
(18:22):
later it was a fusion of his mother and the
love of his life in that moment. There's a lot
to be read into that. It was kind of a
saying goodbye to Julia and welcoming this new person. Who
really could I think he transferred Julia onto this new person,
And yoga was this combination for him of lover or mother,
which you know, as you mentioned about Julia, he was
(18:45):
never really able to make that distinction area. So he
gets together with Yoko and they start collaborating, if you will,
and they also do something else. He reads a book
about primal screamed arapy and he asks the author to
come treat him. The author does. The end result is
(19:05):
you're supposed to scream or physically and vocally release your
suffering and the agony that you feel. But in that
you are made to think about deliberately and talk about
and process and consciously register the things that were traumas
for you and that make you incredibly sad. And so
(19:25):
all of this material about his mother and feeling abandoned,
and his father and feeling abandoned and the chaos and
the loss was something for the first time he was
not only allowed to confront, he was made to confront
and think about and then have this release and screaming.
It's important because I think that the first album that
(19:46):
he puts out with Yoko Ono, the Plastic Van, does contain,
you know, the song mother, Mother, you had me, but
I never had you. I wanted you, you didn't want me,
So I I just got to tell you goodbye goodbye,
(20:06):
same verse about the father, and then children don't do
what I have done. I couldn't walk and I tried
to run, So I just got to tell you goodbye, goodbye.
And then this wailing of Mama, don't go, Daddy come
home for the whole end of the song, and of
course also the song Julia specifically his mother. So he emotes,
he processes, and he releases these painful, painful feelings. I
(20:30):
would say it's like the first psychotherapy you know that
John Lennon has in a way to really process what's happened.
And it was tough because the primal scream therapy. Of course,
it required I believe, several months, and they had to
go out to California to be treated, and midway through
he was ordered to leave the country so that the
doctor would later say we took him part, we didn't
put him back together, and so he was incredibly raw
(20:54):
and the result was this album, which is just some
of the most nakedly vulnerable music you know I've ever heard.
I mean, it opens with a funeral bell and goes
right into mother as you just said, and it closes
with a song called My Mommy's Dead, which is made
on a children's tape recorder, and it's just him kind
of plain song singing it with a plastic guitar, my
(21:17):
Mom's Dead, So it's been so many years My Mommy's Dead.
Track after track, he was a song called Working Class Hero,
where he basically just eviscerates at Mimi and her ilk
and all the people that tried to put him in
a box when he just wanted to be free to
think in a moat. A song called God. God is
(21:38):
a concept by which we measure our pain. And then
he basically goes through and the whole song, majority of
the song is him saying thinks he doesn't believe in
and he just don't believe in Elvis. I don't believe
in Bob Dylan. I don't believe in Jesus, I don't
believe in the Buddhas. All these things that he put
(21:58):
all of his faith into and it let him down.
And finally it ends in this big crescendo climax. I
don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko
and me. And that's reality. Very difficult to listen to,
but worth hearing for so many reasons. Incredible piece of art,
a lot of pain that he was processing in that period,
and his father actually chose that moment to re enter
(22:21):
his life, and Yoko encouraged that for them to reconnect,
although it was a chaotic reconnection with a kind of
comings and goings and move in with me. You know
it's not going to work. They'd been in contact when
John was first got famous, and John, of course, you know,
alarm bells went off. They can like, oh geez, are
you looking for you know, looking for money? They've been
(22:43):
off and on tents every couple of years they would
he would kind of re enter his life. He was
like fifty something and he married a nineteen year old
Like they lived with them for a time. It was
it was definitely a strained I don't want to call
it a relationship. It was just a strained coexistence. And
at some point his father like writes a song yeah,
which is also bizarre, bizarre to John right, like I'm
(23:05):
John Lemon's dad, I'm gonna be pop star, you know,
made him mad to no end. They ended up towards
the end of I guess John found out that his
dad was sick. I think he had I forget if
it was cancer or something. And they kind of struck
up a phone relationship, and so when he died in
nine seventy six, they had made his Yeah, they were
(23:28):
at peace with each other, I think as much as
they were ever. We're going to be. Let's take a
quick break here, we'll be back in a minute. John
has reconnected with his previously estranged father and he's been
working on music with the Plastic on No band, But
(23:50):
he's still abusing drugs and trying to find an equilibrium
with the world. Meanwhile, with Yoko on No, they're right
constantly together. He's encouraging her writing and her production, um
and their production together. Then you know, essentially is a magic.
Really the next album is next album, and he basically
said that he put a little honey in it. He
(24:11):
said that it was still the same sense of anger
and frustration. There are songs on There's a song but
the relief that I mean, you wanted to write if
he had some relief in pouring all of this out
and processing it, if that allowed him to write a
song about peace and love and you know, seeking that,
if that could have been sort of the next stage
in development for him in a way. Yeah, I mean,
(24:33):
certainly that's true. And then there are a few moments
on a song called how do You Sleep About as
nasty as some of the ones in the Plastic Going,
O'Bannon's directed at Paul and all the resentment that he
had towards him, adding insult to injury. He got George
Harrison to play guitar on it, so it's just ganging
up on Paul. But for the most part it was
definitely a much more sedate affair. That whole album Shawn's
(24:55):
birth occurs before after after Sean was born in nineteen
seventy six, I think on John's birthday, but prior to that,
he and Yoko had a separation. John called it his
lost weekend. It's confusing about exactly whose idea was. The
official sort of reason is that Yoko basically said, you know,
I think we've been spending too much time together. I
(25:17):
feel like the passion is starting to go. You should
go take some time and so you're wild oats. Essentially
her go sell them with my assistant Pang exactly. Yeah,
I mean she basically kicked him out. I mean, that's
that's not she kicked him out, but she also set
up off with the keep an eye on right with
the assistant, who she fully anticipated without his sexual relationship
(25:37):
with him, but at least knew who it was, I guess,
and that they had some sort of a deal. He's
reported as being very remarkably stable during this time. He
was drinking a fair amount. He was kicked out of
clubs and stuff. It was like one of the rare
moments of John being a tabloid fodder kind of situation
where he was kind of in rough shape and he
was partying with Alice Cooper and Harry Nilson during this time. No,
(25:59):
there's some songs. There's an outtake of a song he
was singing called Just Because, an old cover, and he's
drunk out of his mind and most of these sessions
and he's just wailing at the end. So for him,
this is just a re enactment again of mom kicking
you out or abandoning you or dropping you by the way. Unfortunately,
(26:21):
this whole pattern of alcohol and drugs, which you know,
ultimately do a lot of destruction in his life. When
people start drinking before the age of sixteen, the likelihood
that you will be an alcoholic is like fivefold. Unfortunately,
also having this kind of psychological difficulty to deal with
and no other outlet, the likelihood for men, particularly that
(26:44):
they will abuse substances as a sort of self medicating
or a way of checking out, is also greatly greatly increased.
So he really pretty much all of his life struggled
with alcohol and drug use. And when he was with
Yoga Oh No, he moved from LSD, which causes both
(27:05):
this feeling of sort of oceanic as he refers to
in his songs boundary lists at one with the world feeling,
but also is very reportedly ego destroying, the feeling of
sort of I am nothing, I am no one, I
am disappeared, and so there can be terrible mood problems
on LSD, and of course there's a psychotic hallucinogenic thinking
(27:27):
that goes on, which interestingly incorporated into his music in
ways that we say we feel are very creative and artistic.
And also the mood states also got brought into his
music in very artistic and creative ways. But Yoko Ono
moved him away from LSD and into heroin, and the
two of them end up using heroin together, which has
(27:49):
very different effects than LSD. Heroin is more about feeling
like this fantastic high immediately that is reportedly like better
than an orgasm, and then sort of being out of
it in a blissful state, but not hallucinatory. The negative
is the withdrawal, you know, that occurs afterwards. He at
some point recognizes he's not in good shape, really not
(28:12):
in good shape, and tries to pull back someone, and
that seems to be the nature of the way things
go in the later part of his life, sort of
using and trying to use less he's certainly aware of
people who died from overdoses and so on, and he
tries to be present for this sun. They end up
getting back together in seventy four and he released his
last Well for a time, last musical album, and I
(28:34):
think seventy five and his contract was up. He was just,
I think, sort of done for a time. I think
he just wanted to take a break this beautiful period.
Inteen seventy six, he had had a problem with with
the U. S. Government. They were trying to deport him
because he was so outspoken politically. The Nixon government and
Jake Hoover had files on him, and we're just, you know,
(28:54):
using all sorts of techniques to try to get him
out of the Country's finally given his green card and
allowed the stay. Yoko became pregnant. She had had several
miscarriages prior relatively older, so it was it was very
special that she was able to conceive, and the child,
Sean sean On No Lennon I think it was his
full name, was born on I believe John's birthday in
ninety six, and he became in his word, as a
(29:16):
house husband. He stayed home to take care of Sean,
he started baking bread. He really enjoyed domesticity in a
way that he absolutely did not ten years earlier living
with with Julia had one on one bliss with this baby,
you know, the baby who I'm sure in some ways
he wanted to be with a father like he was
trying to be, and maybe some undoing of the things
(29:39):
that were done to him he could be a good
dad and undoing of the things that he did with Julian.
But clearly he was in a super present and very
engaged father with Sean in a very different way. And
you're right. He used to say, we're like twins were
born exactly the same day, which, yes, you're born on
the same day, but you're absolutely right. There is a
lot of transference there. I think, like a real blurring
(30:01):
of boundaries. Again, this is like repeatedly for John the
issue of having boundaries is scary because you can disappear.
But if we're at one, if we're one person, then
you're with me um something that he tried to have
at times with Yoko Ono. I mean that's part of
parenting some degree, right, is that your empathy towards your
baby is so intense that you're like one person, and
(30:22):
it seems that he you know, literally, you know, he
carried him around on his chest, and he seemed to
have been a positive period for him. There's just so
many stories of that period of sending polaroids of his
of the first bread that he banked. He was so
proud of that. And he and Paul were in contact
in that period, which they hadn't really been much of
the first half of the decade, and they would talk
a lot about having families. Paul had had his a
(30:44):
little earlier in the in the seventies, and so it
was a great way to bond and connect for these
two old friends, to finally sort of reconnect and put
all the business stuff behind them. And yeah, it was
a really special time for him, and he didn't really
care about music at all. You'd say that my guitar
was hung up above the bed for years, and I
had more important things that to deal with, like like
(31:04):
my son and my family, and stay that way for
a while. He then did start to reconsider writing and
being involved with music, and in fact was recording. Sadly,
right at the time of his death, he returned to
the studio to record an album called Double Fantasy. It
was a collaborative album with him and Yoko. They had
alternated songs and it had just been released in the
(31:27):
fall of eighty doing all sorts of press for you.
He's getting back into the groove of It was a
big comeback album for him. He was working on the
follow up. Left the studio on December eight and was
walking into Homessy Sean at the Dakota Apartment Complex and
Central Park West in New York. A fan, if you
could call him that, A man who sounds deranged. He
was not diagnosed at the time with schizophrenia or a
(31:49):
psychotic illness. He just he had some thoughts about needing
to do this Chapman who prison and shot him, and
and obviously devastating for the world, devastating for a family,
devastating for so many reasons. The fact that he appears
to have achieved some level of peace, he kind of
(32:10):
rebooted built through raising Sean. I think healed a lot
within himself and then reintegrated his great passion music into
it and seemed to be at a place that I
would have imagined he was probably happy. That he's been
in a long time makes it even more heartbreaking to me,
and it's also pretty clear from the album and where
(32:31):
he was with it that through the tragedies, through some
resolution of that for himself, through the use of a
lot of drugs which sometimes really do decrease one's ability
over time to cognitively function well, he seems to have
maintained this creativity in both his ability to compose and write.
(32:52):
It seems as though, you know, had he not died,
he would have continued to be creatively productive. Oh yeah,
he He had a whole wealth of music stored of Actually,
there are number of albums that released after his death
that were just things that he was working on. He
had a lot in the pipe. He's planning on maybe
going back on tour, which he hadn't done I think
since the Beatles, and I need to check that, but
(33:13):
I think, yeah, he was really feeling revitalized and excited,
which is nice to think of him that way and
remember him that way, or that at least he achieved
some of that before he died. Yeah, I mean. The
opening track of Double Fantasy, which came ten years after
The Plastic Donal Band, is a bell on Plastic Donal band.
It was a funeral bell in Double Fantasy, it was
(33:36):
a wishing bell. It was real high pitched ting and
the opening song is just like starting over and it's
just about him rekindling his love with Yoko, and it's
very sweet. It's a guy who turned forty, who's reevaluating
his life and is happy where he is and he's
at peace. It's a nice way to remember him, I think.
(34:00):
M H. That wraps things up for this episode. Thanks
for joining me today, and a huge thanks to Jordan
run Tug. If you haven't already, check out his show
Rivals to hear more about the fascinating world of the
music industry. If you're interested in more information about the
people we discussed on the show, you can check out
my book The Power of Different and you can follow
(34:20):
me on Twitter at Dr Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy
m D Until next time. Personology is a production of
I Heart Media. The executive producers are Dr Gayl Salts
and Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The
Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing by
(34:42):
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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