Gary James' Interview With The Author Of John Lennon: The Last Days In The Life
Ken Womack



Ken Womack has writen books on record producer George Martin and The Beatles, In fact, he's considered a world-renowned authority on The Beatles. His latest book is on John Lennon and his last days. We talked to Ken Womack about John Lennon and The Beatles.

Q - Ken, you have this title as "A World Renowned Authority On The Beatles." Now, I thought I was the authority on The Beatles!

A - You are. I think somebody mis-typed that. They meant you.

Q - (laughs) Where did your title come from then?

A - It's probably from my publicist.

Q - For the longest time I have been of the opinion that we know just about everything there is to know about The Beatles. Did you come across anything about John Lennon that we might not have known before?

A - Well, quite a bit. If nothing else, I helped correct the time line. But quite a lot is new in this book. Rolling Stone published an article about one of my findings about the origin of the song "Grow Old With Me". You can find that by Googling it pretty easily. There are a number of revelations in that sense, revelations in terms or the order of the story that took place that last year. There's another point to it too, and this is why I wrote the book. I wanted a John Lennon book that was not a True Crime story. I wanted a book not about murder in the archway, a book that was about the way he lived, the way he got everything together to be able to put together that last great effort. That was exactly what I was interested in. I feel pretty good about it.

Q - Jack Douglas played a pretty big role in recruiting the musicians for that album, "Double Fantasy".

A - Yes.

Q - Did you get the co-operation of the people who were around John Lennon at the time?

A - I've talked to several of the musicians. I've talked to Jack. I've talked to engineers, people who helped bring the album to light. So, yes.

Q - This is a recently published book, isn't it?

A - Yeah. It came out in the United States on September 15th, 2020 and September 8th in England.

Q - In 1980, John Lennon would walk down the streets of New York without any security. In Jim Morrison's time he had a body guard, a bodyguard who would even accompany him to parties. Where was John Lennon's bodyguard?

A - Well, there are a couple of things obviously in retrospect we can say. He should have had one, but of course in 1970, 1980 people thought very differently about what their vulnerabilities were and their (John and Yoko) biggest fear was that someone would kidnap Sean. That was what concerned them. There was of course a security consultant who suggested that they amp up what they were doing. But one of the reasons I also wrote this book is to bring us back to the world of 1980, which was a different time in almost every way, right? The world seemed smaller. The TV shows we watched at night, John was watching too. (laughs) There was more of a shared human experience at that time. New York was vastly different. The crime they were worried about was the kind of petty, street crime that was happening anyway or the crimes in the park. It was such a different city. It was absolutely a different world. Another thing I wanted to do was give people a vivid picture of New York. You can walk those streets now and while many of the buildings look the same, it's not the same place. It's just a different feeling. I know from having done it myself, in the '80s and now. Well, right now it's very quiet. In any event, just a very, very different kind of world in place. So, I wanted people to go into that world.

Q - Did you ever talk to Paul Goresch, who took the photo of John signing Chapman's "Double Fantasy" album?

A - I shared some correspondence with him, but really nothing of substance. It's like Facebook Message junk. He really had said all he was going to say. There was nothing new there. So, there was nothing really to gather other than guilt and his awful feelings of not saying anything to anybody.

Q - Besides John and Yoko, there were other celebrities who lived in the Dakota, Rex Reed and Lauren Becall. Where was the security of the Dakota to chase people away from hanging around the entrance?

A - They felt for 1980 they had a pretty good handle on things. They thought they had it covered. The fact that every now and then some kids would slip in and run around the building, they felt like that was harmless. In 1980, we felt things like that were harmless. We thought prank calls were harmless. We thought that kind of thing was just highjinks. Goresch met John by sneaking in and pretending to be a TV repairman. Obviously hindsight is very different and so are four decades of American life, and culture changed significantly. But you know, back then it was simply a different time and place. One of the pleasures of writing this book was being able to go back to that era and sort of remember what 1979 was like.

Q - Did you ever see John Lennon in person?

A - No.

Q - Since you wrote two books on George Martin, did you ever meet or talk with him?

A - No. When I started this project he wasn't taking meetings anymore. He did send a nice note. His hearing had gone essentially. As I learned later from talking to Giles Martin (George Martin's son) he had been in bad health much longer than people knew. So, I had to make do without him, but of course he left a lot of material behind that I could look through.

Q - Do you consider George Martin The Fifth Beatle?

A - If you're talking about the thing that matters most, and this is their artistic achievement, absolutely. If you're measuring it in some other way in terms of their friendships, they maybe it's Brian (Epstein) or Mal (Evans).

Q - Right. Because without Brian Epstein there would be no George Martin.

A - Sure. That's exactly right. It really depends on how you're talking about it. Others would say it's Billy Preston for awhile. They had a great team, four of them, Brian, Neil, Mal and George, and Geoff Emerick to a certain degree. So they had a very core group of people who did everything. Today, they would've had ten times that many people working for them.

Q - Of course, record companies don't really exist for the most part. So, The Beatles came along at the right time.

A - Yeah. Now they're media companies.

Q - In your research, you must have come away with the fact that John Lennon was really a complex individual.

A - I do, but I think they were all complex. We still don't have a clue what happens in Paul's mind because he's so very careful about keeping up his veneer. So, I would note that. One thing I did come to understand in this book, when you put the totality of the evidence together in a kind of scholarly way, he (John) really liked who he was in 1980. He was growing up. 40 seems so young to us now, but he was really succeeding at being a grownup and you could see it in the number of ways he behaved. What he considered important is really quite telling. My favorite story is a couple of weeks before he died, they (John and Yoko) realized that the initial sales were going to get them a Gold record. But they were concerned that "Double Fantasy" wasn't flying off the shelves and it's not going to be number one, at least not in the next week or so when they care about it, when he's alive. Yoko comes to him and she knows how important it is to him. She's very worried that he's going to be upset and he says, "Not a problem. We still got the family." To me, that says volumes of how far he had come. You know from your work of studying him, in 1974 he might have had a meltdown. 1972 he might have lost his mind. But he just simply said, "It's okay. We still got the family." He'd come to realize with the experience which he had loved making that album and all of the other tracks and he was about to really love making "Walking On The Ice", but he had come to understand that it was the experience that mattered. That's the moment that's so important for us in all of our lives. He really felt like he'd been doing that. He'd done the sailing trip. He really allowed himself to indulge in the creation of those songs for a period of years and he refined them in Bermuda. So, I do think he had come to a new place. That doesn't mean if he had lived to 50, 60 or 70 that he wouldn't have had other moments. Everybody's life has different crises at different times, but he had really entered a new plateau there that was very interesting and you can see it. Now he's a guy with a five year old and he's valuing the role of being a man, being a teacher and helping other people. It's uncanny how you can see that change happening. He was not in that good of a state of mind say in December of 1979. He had a crappy Fall of 1979. But through his own efforts and actually help from Yoko, one in ways that people don't giver credit for, he really pulled it together. Ad that's another reason why I wanted to write this book. I think that's a story that we all want for ourselves.

Q - Had he not been murdered, would he have gone on the road in January, 1981 to promote "Double Fantasy"?

A - It would have been a Spring tour. They wouldn't have immediately turned around and gone on tour. He was realizing as he talked to the band members, several of them were younger like Earl Slick, he was learning he needed to have a stage show. He was starting to make rudimentary drawings of what that stage might look like. He would talk about songs they would play, some old Beatle songs like "I Want To Hold Your Hand". But they didn't have dates set or anything like that. It would've been in the Spring, probably not until April. He was going to work with Ringo in January. They were going to work on the album he later changed the title of. It was originally called "Can't Fight Lightning." Does he change it to "Stop And Smell The Roses"? Maybe.

Q - I couldn't tell you.

A - Ringo had worked with George in October of 1980. He came to see John on or around Thanksgiving. Fred Seaman took a Polaroid of them. John gave him the three demos, including "Life Begins At 40" and "Nobody Told Me", that he wanted Ringo to learn for his album, for Ringo's album. They decided they would get together in January (1981).

Q - How about this report of John spending his time baking bread. Someone said he might have done it once, but that's about it. Did you look into that? Did anyone talk to you about that?

A - Sure, and that's largely true. It was an anecdote that he liked to talk about. Of course he also liked to talk about the fact that it pissed him off how fast the bread disappeared. (laughs) People ate it very quickly. And then, those wonderful, late interviews with him, September through December 1980, he kind of chides himself over that, which I think is a little unfortunate that he felt that way. Of course, that's why he had servants and people who helped him out. (laughs) So, they did talk about the house husband issue. Did they create some myths? Probably. What John would do, and when you start to study this and look at his life in it's totality, he would create shorthand for what he's been up to. The questions we should've been asking him in 1975 and 1980, since he returned to Yoko, should have been, "What are you reading?" That's what occupied his mind, but he knew, I'm sure that, that would not be something exciting to interviewers. So, he would try to create shorthand to explain his life. He did spend a lot of time with Sean. He had learned to create these kinds of shorthand very early in life. If you imagine him as a five year old and an eight year old, having to constantly explain to the other kids, and kids are nosey as we know, why he doesn't live with his mom. "Where is your dad?" His sister Julia told me, his half-sister Julia, that he would learn to speak in this kind of shorthand so he could kind of explain without having to go in like two hours of back story what was going on. When you understand that, that sort of mechanism he developed, you can see him doing it a lot of other times. Read the interview Lennon Remembers with Jann Wenner, you can see him employing this structure. I guess we all do it anyway. Most of the time we retell all of our stories.

Q - If you recall in Lennon Remembers he comes down rather hard on Mick Jagger and The Stones for continuing to tour. Yet, in those last months of his life he was making plans to get back out on the road.

A - He was a contradiction. Often when he would talk about in the case you described with The Rolling Stones he would be critical of them. He was often being critical of himself, like he wished he was doing those things. Like he said famously in "How Do You Sleep?", he wasn't picking on Paul. He was making fun of himself and he did it in an ugly way. He was mad at himself. He was mad at (Bob) Dylan when he came up with the song "Serve Yourself". But later he comes to realize he's not mad at Dylan. He's mad at John. (laughs) He would hurl his vitriol out at the world when he probably needed to be aiming it inward. He's hardly the first to do that. One of the reasons he was mad at Rolling Stone and Jann Wenner for publishing that interview in December, 1970 was because, in the book especially, when you listen to the recordings it's a very different interview.

Q - How about that Playboy interview? John seems irritated in that interview.

A - I find much of the Playboy interview, to me, mostly pretty pleasant. The one section you made me immediately think of is when he goes into George (Harrison). He sort of rips into him about the I, Me, Mine book, but after he sort of spews his vitriol of how upset he is about it and that he felt he had been left out, he said and made a point, "But, please understand I love those guys. This will pass. This is just one thing that I'm feeling right now. It doesn't change the fact that I love George." He had become very good at that and actually I see that again as part of his growing up.

Q - No matter how much I read about The Beatles, no matter how many documentaries I watch, I always have this feeling there's more to be told. How do you explain that? That's not a feeling I have about other bands.

A - There's probably a lot we'll never know. The Beatles are an art form just like Picasso or James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. They realized fairly early on in their career that they were creating a body of work. They succeeded incredibly at that. They break up. Even though they might have gotten back together again. They don't go back to the studio after August, 1969 as a unit of four, ever again. They walk across that street and walk out of the world and create this mystique and the mystique has been very powerful. A band that not only quit while they were ahead, but they went out exactly as you'd want to go out, with a masterpiece. I think with the greatest artists, if you love them, you want to know everything and you want to try and understand how these guys went from "Love Me Do" in June, 1962 to "Abby Road" in the late Summer of 1969. It is an astounding, upward trajectory. There's nothing like it.

Q - That's right.

A - But, the way you and I feel about them, and I know this because I'm also an English professor, it's exactly how people feel about Shakespeare. Once you're bitten by Shakespeare you want to try and understand how the hell this guy, who lived from 1564 to 1616, created all this stuff. How did he do it? And of course some people try to argue that he didn't and there's all sorts of other bunk that goes on. But there's lots of myths that are created about The Beatles too, aren't there?

Q - Yes, there are.

A - So, it's very similar to that kind of lasting art that is revelatory. If I could turn on The Beatles and not hear as rich or even a richer experience than I do right now as I did when I was a kid, then I would be moving on. They are confounding. I teach as course on them every year. Students come in and they just lap it up. Tomorrow we're doing "Magical Mystery Tour", and they discover it just like we did. In fact, while we've been talking, hundreds of kids have played The Beatles for the first time in their life. "Where the hell has that been?" Have you seen the latest Spotify numbers? They're fascinating. The Beatles demography looks roughly like it did in 1966 when they finally expanded to children and older folks with the Double A side, "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby". This massive demography that goes from two to four-year-olds all the way to ninety-four-year-olds. Damn it! It's the same thing now. (laughs) And that's George Martin pushing their envelope and getting them to change and they ran with it like they did with everything and made it their own. It is an amazing thing that we sit here fifty years after they break up, and the demography is really strikingly similar to what it was in 1966 when they first hammered it out.

Q - Ken, along with their music, their appearance changed as well. That's something that no other band has been able to do in the sense of not only retaining their fans, but adding new fans as they went along.

A - They changed with their music. It's really remarkable.

Official Website: KennethWomack.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed by individuals interviewed for this web site are the sole responsibility of the individual making the comment and / or appearing in interviews and do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone associated with the website ClassicBands.com.