Starting Over With a New Album and an Old Ideal (1980)

 

Starting Over with a New Album and an Old Ideal 

By Robert Palmer

News-Press

November 11, 1980

    "Is it possible to have a life centered around a family and a child and still be an artist?" John Lennon asked recently. For Lennon, who was widely regarded as the most intelligent and outspoken of the four Beatles during the 1960s and who dropped out of pop music entirely in 1975, the question isn't rhetorical. 

    Together with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their five-year-old son, Sean, the 40-year-old Lennon has been living a settled family life since his retirement, and now with Miss Ono, he's reentering the pop mainstream with a new album, Double Fantasy, which will be in the stores this week.

    In a series of candid conversations that took place in a recording studio during the making of the album and at the Lennons New York apartment after its completion, both of them talked at length about grappling with the central problem, the demands of making music versus the demands of a family.

     "In a way," Lennon said, "we're involved in a kind of experiment. Could the family be the inspiration for art, instead of drinking or drugs or whatever? I'm interested in finding that out."

      Lennon was sitting at a recording console in New York's  Hit Factory, bracing himself with a strong cup of coffee. He looked trimmer than he had in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in his black jeans, black work shirt and wire rim glasses, he looked more like John Lennon, pop star than a "house husband", as he's taken to call himself.

    Ono, a composer, singer, and founding member of the 60s performance art Vanguard known as the Fluxus movement (other particular participants include John Cage, La Monte Young, and Nam June Paik), was sitting at the console too. They were both listening to Lennon's song "Starting Over", which was to be the first selection and the first single from their new album. "I don't think you should put another voice on it, John," she said, as she lit a Sherman's cigarette. The song already boasted a rich mesh of voices, some provided by backup singers, and some by Lennon, whose reedy tenor and personal inflection are still immediately recognizable.

     "Mother", he said, in measured tones, he often calls Ono 'Mother', apparently, with a great deal of respect. "I don't want to double the same part. I'm hearing another harmony that I want to try." He put out the Gitane he's been smoking and turned to explain, "Back when we were doing Beatles records, I used to want to double-track my voice on everything, mostly to make it stronger. Now," He waved his arm to indicate the expanse of blinking, whirling equipment, some of it computerized. "You don't have to do that." He downed the rest of his coffee and walked out into the studio, glancing on the way at the large color photograph of Sean that hung from a monitor speaker. "I'll bet," he mused aloud, "that I miss him a lot more than he misses me. "

    Recording Studios have changed a great deal since the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts, Club Band on a four-track machine --for that matter, they've changed since 1975.  Helping the Lennons explore the possibilities of new technology were Jack Douglas, who's worked for them as an engineer in the early 1970s and now produces popular rock groups like Cheap Trick, and the engineer Lee DeCarlo, a burly Vietnam veteran with a dreamy, bearish smile. 

    "They've been a big help," Miss Ono said as the two busily adjusted settings and Lennon cleared his throat into a microphone out of the studio. "The two of us are very headstrong for the final word on my songs. I always look to John, and the final word on his comes from me."

     Lennon practiced singing along with the track, which had been recorded in an intensive series of sessions that began on August 8. It was a melodious, looping tune with the 50s backbeat. And the more he ran over it, the more scraps of Beatles songs he was able to insert, just for fun. 

    "Why don't we do it in the road..." he sang, echoing the title line from one of his songs on the Beatles' White Album, when he should have been singing, "Why don't we take off alone?"  But soon he got serious and was able to perfect his harmony part after only a few tries. It made the song sound uncanny, like a Beatles record, though the backing band was composed of New York studio professionals. 

    Ono had been taking care of business details while Lennon sang. Periodically, a Japanese assistant would bring her hot tea and a pad with telephone messages in Japanese characters from photographers, journalists asking for interviews, record company representatives. The album, and the Lennons' immediate future, as recording artists hadn't yet been assigned to any company, and the bidding was intense. She'd gone in a room adjoining the studio that was equipped with a comfortable couch and telephone and looked something like a motel room in order to return the most important calls. 

    "Well, Mother," Lennon said, plainly elated that his work was going so well. "I'm done for now. Time to work on one of your songs." He retired to the joining room, stretched out and went to sleep.

     After hearing Lennon's melodious pop, Ono's song "Give Me Something" was a little startling, propelled by a serpentine, chromatic guitar figure from the Ex David Bowie's side man Earl Slick, and clocking in at a brisk one minute and 38 seconds, it offered a vision that was considerably bleaker than Lennon's reassuring "Starting Over."

     "The food is cold," Ono sang tunefully but piercingly. "Your eyes are cold. The Windows cold, the bed's cold." There was a screaming solo from Earl Slick, and the song abruptly crashed to a halt.

     Lennon greeted me at the door of the family's apartment in the Dakota, smiling broadly, one hand on his heart, the other arm outstretched like a 1930s crooner. "Pardon me," he sang, "if I'm sentimental." It was late October, and the Warner Brothers distributed Geffen label had released a single "Starting Over" backed with Ono's "Kiss, Kiss, Kiss", from the album, which will be in the stores this week. I'd written the preceding week that while Lennon's pop craftsmanship was intact, the song's lyric seemed a bit obvious and sentimental. Since then, I'd heard the complete album and been struck by the contrast between Lennon's generally adoring and pain spoken songs, (though his crunchy, bluesy, "I'm Losing You", is considerably more potent) and the mystery and bitterness in several of Ono's pieces, the latter employs some of her experimental vocal techniques from the Fluxes Happenings of the early 1960s (but in a pop context, they sound remarkably like the Music of acertain new wave rockers, many of whom the B-52's for instance, and surely Lene Lovich, were inspired by her vocal freak outs of the late 60s and early 70s.)

     We sat down at a plain wooden table in the middle of a spacious kitchen that had a stereo, a large video screen, and a couch and lounging area at one end. There were Italian cookies and pastries on the table, and Lennon brewed a pot of coffee. "I've heard 'Starting Over' hundreds of times now," Ono said, "but I still get choked up and cry sometimes when I hear it, because, well, in the 60s, we went through this thing with everybody, feeling that we were going to be free, and it turned into a big orgy. In the end, the woman realized that all the sexual liberation was really just for the men. And now here's a guy, John, saying to a woman, 'Let's start over again. Let's try.' These are times when women are still bitter about these things. I think men have to make that first move. "

    "The 60s," Lennon said with a smile, sitting down with the coffee, "when I met Yoko, we were two poets in velvet cloaks, almost literally, both full of positive ideas for the world, but for ourselves. Those ideas didn't count. We were both self-destructive. I'd come up thinking of myself, not so much as a musician, you know, but as a writer, and big examples in England with Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. I just naively accepted the idea that an artist had to self-destruct in order to create. And we both came out of that through the gift of having the baby.

     "By 1975, I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing anyway. I was a machine that was supposed to produce so much creative something and give it up periodically for approval or to justify my existence on earth. But I don't think I would have been able to just withdraw from the whole music business if it hadn't been for Sean. I gave him five years, taking care of him while Yoko ran our business affairs. But it's going on, and I feel it should go on. When I look at the relative importance of what life is about, I can't quite convince myself that making a record or having a career is more important —or even as important — as my child, or any child."

    Lennon lit a cigarette and pushed a tempting chocolate cake to the far end of the table. "Another thing these five years did for me," he said, "was to move a lot of intellectual garbage out of the way and allow for whatever it is in me that wants to express itself, to do it naturally. This is a digression, but going back to the beginning of rock and roll, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and someone were working-class entertainment. They were working class. The Beatles were slightly less working-class. For Paul McCartney and me, at least, going to university was a possibility. I had all this artsy stuff in me anyway, so we put a little more intellect into our music just because of what we were. And gradually, expectations for the Beatles became educated, middle-class expectations, and I tended to get too intellectual about pop music. I had this sort of critic, John Lennon, sitting over me, saying, 'You did that already. You can't do it again. You can't say it like that simply.' Now the music's coming through me again."