Could there possibly be an upside to the long, stressful periods of isolation that so many people have endured during the pandemic lockdown of 2020? When we emerge, will we see the world in a new way? Could there even be a silver lining to these months of quiet living and self-reflection?
Four decades ago, I heard first-hand how a long period of solitude changed an extraordinary figure who was determined to make his life have meaning: John Lennon, who is being mourned by millions on Tuesday, the 40th anniversary of his murder.
There was no pandemic in late 1975 when Lennon and Yoko Ono, the most public of personalities, withdrew for what became a five-year hiatus from interviews and recording following the birth of their son, Sean.
But for Lennon there was plenty of existential angst, and actual fear.
He was living in New York City, still seeking a green card and fighting deportation. Though the Beatles had stopped making music, it would take years to dissolve legal ties, and the band’s shadow enveloped his life. Collections of classic Beatles songs were recycling the Fab Four’s greatest hits, leaving Lennon to worry if he could ever live up to the public demand that the Dream Band reunite. Paul McCartney soared up the charts with Wings, but Lennon hadn’t had a No. 1 album since Walls and Bridges in 1974, with Elton John’s assist on Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.
It was time for him to start over. He would later tell me that musically, his mind was cluttered, filled with static like a car radio. “The messages were as confused coming in as they were going out.”
In early 1976, he and Yoko went into a self-imposed lockdown. His movements weren’t limited, and his finances were secure, but he shut off the outside world to find his purpose again.
During those years, while Ono took over the business and dealt with the lawyers from her office at the Dakota, where they lived on the Upper West Side, Lennon was the ultimate homebody. Staff in the apartment on the seventh floor recall hearing him happily playing the white piano in the couple’s all-white living room overlooking Central Park, and singing Beatles songs, one after the other.
He was shaping his days around Sean, he said: up at 6am, “have a cup of tea — no caffeine — and plan what Sean’s going to have for breakfast, and he comes out, we communicate, and then I’m thinking about the next meal, like Mrs. Higgins, in Wisconsin”, he said.
His epiphany came in 1979 after Ono suggested he take a journey alone to Hong Kong and Singapore, to reconnect to the non-god — the person he had been. As he explained, the isolation not only inspired a breakthrough as an artist, but as a human being.
And in September 1980, as abruptly as it had begun, the pair ended their seclusion, returning to the studio to record a collaborative album. They granted me their first interview in five years, for Newsweek magazine, where I was a young pop music writer. (Ono asked for my birth date and said I checked out, numerologically.) Double Fantasy was full of Lennon’s vulnerable love songs (written to his wife and son) and Ono’s au courant dance rock.
“Hi, I’m Howard Garbo, or is it Greta Hughes today, mother?” Lennon quipped when Ono introduced us at the Hit Factory two months before his 40th birthday. He held out a plate of sushi in greeting. Over five days, munching eel and rice in the recording studio (where a picture of Sean’s beaming smile was ever-present), sipping “Zen-blended” coffee in a macrobiotic restaurant near Carnegie Hall, or sitting in the all-white Dakota living room, he talked about creativity, being a father, his collaborative album with Yoko, and being free of the Beatles.
“The air is cleared and I’m cleared,” he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversations, some of which appeared in Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered (1980, Bantam Books).
Why did you pull in your antennae and disappear from view for five years?
Sean will be 5 and I wanted to give five solid years of being there all the time. I hadn’t seen my first son, Julian, grow up and now there’s a 17-year-old man on the phone talkin’ about motorbikes. I was not there for his childhood at all. And my childhood was something else. If I don’t give him attention from zero to 5 then I’m damned well going to have to give it from 16 to 20 — they’re going to get that attention somehow.
Did you decide to withdraw from music-making itself or from the pressures of being John Lennon? The lawsuits, the immigration problems —
A bit of both. I’d been under contract since I was 22, and I was always “supposed to.” I was supposed to write 100 songs by Friday, supposed to have a single out by Saturday. It dawned on me that the reason I became an artist was freedom; because I couldn’t fit into the classroom, the college, the society. But suddenly I was obliged to a record company, obliged to the media, obliged to the public, obliged to go to court every time some [expletive] bumped into me on the street. I know freedom is in the mind but I couldn’t clear my mind. So it was time to regroup.
You’ve withdrawn before, and isolated yourself?
Once in the Himalayas with Maharishi and all the press wrote about was “look at those idiots”. But I was sitting still, as they call it in the I-Ching. Once when the Beatles got back from Hamburg, when we got deported, I didn’t contact the others for a month. I withdrew to think whether this was worth going on with. George and Paul were mad at me. But knowing when to stop is survival for me.
The fear in the music business is that you don’t exist if you’re not on the charts. I just wanted to remember that I existed at all!
At first it was very hard not to be doing something musical. It was a matter of no clarity and no desire to do it because I was supposed to. The real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding, comes to me and I’m just a channel. But in order to get that clear channel open again, I had to stop picking up every radio station in the world, in the universe. So my turning away for it is how I began to heal again.
There was a hard withdrawal period, what people must go through at 65, and then I started being a househusband and swung my attention onto Sean. And then I realised, I’m not supposed to be doing something, I am doing something, and then I was free.
“There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely,” Lennon said.
You didn’t feel you were missing something in New York by not going out …
[Snappishly] Picasso didn’t go to the museums. He was either painting, or eating or [having sex]. Picasso lived where he lived and people came to see him. That’s what I did. Did Picasso go down to some studio to watch people paint? The only person I ever went to see in London during the “Swinging Sixties” era was Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight.
I was too busy doing it to be watching other people. The competition doesn’t interest me unless it’s phenomenal and then it will be around longer than one night in a club.
For years the music industry had made you feel that your creative life had ended with the Beatles. Did that make you afraid to take risks?
What I did in the past five years was to discover that I was John Lennon before the Beatles, and I would be John Lennon after the Beatles, and so be it.
New York Times News Service
