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The Beatles · S11 E6
The Lost Weekend
John separates from Yoko and moves to Los Angeles with Harry Nilsson. Eighteen months of chaos, drinking, and the Walls and Bridges album. Then he goes home
It's March 1974, and John Lennon is being thrown out of the Troubadour in Los Angeles with a sanitary napkin stuck to his forehead. The most famous songwriter alive is four months into the wildest bender of his life.
"Whatever Gets You thru the Night" (John Lennon & Elton John, live at Madison Square Garden, Thanksgiving 1974). Lennon's only solo number one, performed live at what would become the last full concert he ever played. Elton's piano and backing vocals power the track while Lennon, visibly nervous, delivers one of his most electric performances. Yoko Ono is in the audience.
Sent Away
In October 1973, Yoko Ono told John to leave. She arranged for him to go to Los Angeles with May Pang, her twenty-three-year-old personal assistant, and told May to take care of him. What followed was eighteen months of heavy drinking, all-night recording sessions, and tabloid headlines that turned Lennon from a cultural hero into a front-page cautionary tale.
Sources
Norman, Philip. "John Lennon: The Life." Ecco, 2008.
Pang, May. "Loving John." Warner Books, 1983.
TAP TO REVEAL: Who actually set up John Lennon's relationship with May Pang?
Whatever Gets You thru the Night, John Lennon (1974)
Lennon brought Elton John into Record Plant East and built this track in a single feverish session. The arrangement keeps stacking layers: horns, percussion, backing vocals shouting over each other, Elton's piano driving the whole thing forward. It sounds nothing like "Imagine" or any other Lennon solo record. Listen for how Elton's voice doubles John's on the chorus, pushing the energy until the whole song feels like it could fly apart.
Sources
Du Noyer, Paul. "We All Shine On: The Stories Behind Every John Lennon Song 1970-1980." Carlton, 1997.
“I sort of halfheartedly promised that if 'Whatever Gets You Thru The Night' became number one, which I had no reason to expect, I'd do Madison Square Garden with him.”
— John Lennon
The Last Concert
Lennon laughed off the bet, convinced the single would stall in the top twenty. When it hit number one in November 1974, Elton called to collect. On Thanksgiving night, Lennon walked onto the Madison Square Garden stage and performed three songs: the hit, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and "I Saw Her Standing There." Yoko was in the audience, and it was the last full concert John Lennon ever performed.
Sources
Norman, Philip. "John Lennon: The Life." Ecco, 2008.
Sheff, David. "All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono." St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.
The Lost Weekend
#9 Dream, John Lennon (1974)
The second single from Walls and Bridges and the polar opposite of the chaos that produced it. Lennon said the melody came to him in an actual dream, and the finished track drifts through layers of reverb, strings, and whispered vocals. Listen closely: May Pang's voice murmurs "John" somewhere in the mix. It peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, a coincidence Lennon loved given his lifelong obsession with the number nine.
#9 Dream, John Lennon (1974)
"So long ago, was it in a dream, was it just a dream?" The lyrics dissolve into nonsense syllables and half-formed images, which is exactly the point. Lennon wasn't trying to write a coherent narrative. He was trying to capture the feeling of a dream before it evaporates, and the repeated phrase "Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé" is a sound he heard in his sleep and transcribed the moment he woke up.
What happened at John Lennon's Madison Square Garden appearance with Elton John on Thanksgiving 1974?
After five years of silence, John Lennon returns to the studio in 1980 with songs about love, fatherhood, and starting over. He has six weeks left to live. Next: S11E7, "December 8, 1980."
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