Apr
6
‘Breaking the myth’ about John Lennon
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In the years since Loving John, a vivid memoir of her 18 months as John Lennon’s significant other during his and Yoko’s separation in the ’70s, May Pang has often found herself reaching for photos she’d taken while sharing her stories of Lennon with friends.
“And you’d see the reaction,” Pang recalls. “They’d go ‘How come we never see this? This is not the John we see in public.’ I would say ‘I know.’ And then I’d put it all away, under my bed inside its little box, never thinking about it.”
After years of feeling she’d been “airbrushed out” of Lennon’s story, though, Pang felt the time had come to share the contents of that little box with Lennon’s public in a book called Instamatic Karma, its title playing off the classic Lennon single Instant Karma.
Pang comes April 11-12 to Rock Star Gallery at Kierland Commons where she will exhibit and discuss her photos and sign copies of Instamatic Karma.
It’s all about “breaking the myth,” she says, that Lennon’s time away from Ono was spent as a “down and out drunk” on what Lennon himself had taken to calling his “Lost Weekend” in that final round of interviews before his death in 1980.
“How lost are we talking here?” she asks before rattling off a list of what Lennon accomplished in their 18 months together.
Walls and Bridges topped the album charts. Whatever Gets You Through The Night became his first chart-topping single. Rock ‘n’ Roll was a spirited tribute to some of the rock and roll legends whose hits had paved the way to Beatlemania, with Phil Spector producing. He co-wrote David Bowie’s first chart-topping single Fame and played guitar and sang on Elton John’s chart-topping cover of his Sgt Pepper classic Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. He produced the album Pussycats for drinking buddy Harry Nilsson and contributed material to Ringo Starr (Goodnight Vienna), Johnny Winter (Rock and Roll People) and another famous drinking buddy, Keith Moon (Move Over Miss L).
“So when you think about it,” Pang says, with a laugh, “that’s a lot to be packed into 18 months that he’s so lost.”
He did his share of drinking, too, including several nights of true debauchery that would appear to give some credence to that whole Lost Weekend angle.
“But how many times are we really talking about?” Pang asks. “It’s not as though every few days he was hauled off for something.”
Pang was working as the couple’s personal assistant when Ono approached her about taking Lennon off her hands.
This was, of course, the ’70s.
“I had been working for them for three years at that point and she said they were having a rough time,” Pang recalls. “And one of the things she said was, ‘Well, you know, he’s going to start seeing other people.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, John, Yoko and an X factor.’ Then, she looks at me and says, ‘Well, you don’t have a boyfriend. I think you’d be perfect.’”
Pang declined the offer and even spurned Lennon’s initial advances.
“I’m like ‘Don’t come near me,’ but he kept pursuing,” she says. “And finally, I gave in.”
In their 18 months together, Pang saw Lennon reconnect with Julian, his son by first wife Cynthia. It had been four years.
“The pictures show the look on both their faces,” Pang recalls. “You had to see how emotional it was as that door opened at the plane and John is pacing like a wildcat, with a cigarette in hand, being nervous, knowing that he’s gonna see his son he hadn’t seen, the ex-wife that he hadn’t seen. The door opens and this little kid comes running up and jumps into his arms. It was the most amazing feeling.”
She was also there the day he signed the paperwork officially dissolving his old partnership, The Beatles, with a photograph to prove it.
“It was bittersweet,” she says. “He had started the band and now he was ending it. He took a deep breath and said ‘OK, here it goes.’ And that was it.”
One thing she never saw was any indication that Lennon was about to pull back from the music world the way he did when Ono called him home.
“In fact,” she says, “we were just about to go down to New Orleans to see Paul and Linda. He was getting ready to approach it so that he could write with Paul again.”
Apr
4
John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has spoken up for Heather Mills over her bitter divorce from Sir Paul McCartney.
Speaking on a visit to the dead Beatle’s childhood home in Liverpool, Yoko, 75, said she thought Mills must have “suffered”.
She added: “It’s not very easy for a woman to be associated with The Beatles. I think all the wives did suffer, but suffer quietly and endured.”
She told Sky News Heather Mills “needed to do her very best and try to survive.”
Yoko felt for John’s old bandmate Macca too, adding: “I’m very sorry for him to have had to go through that.”
Lennon was shot dead in New York by Mark Chapman in 1980.
Apr
3
Goodbye, Lennon
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Photojournalist Allan Tannenbaum captured the final days of John and Yoko.
By Erin Clements
“You know what I like about your pictures?” photographer Allan Tannenbaum recalls John Lennon asking him in November 1980. “You really capture Yoko’s beauty.” Tannenbaum, then chief lensman for the SoHo Weekly News, had just shot promotional photos for what would be the pair’s final album, Double Fantasy: Days after that conversation, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman. On Saturday 5, Tannenbaum appears at the Museum of the City of New York to present images from his latest book, John & Yoko: A New York Love Story (Random House, $45), a collection of intimate portraits that show the duo strolling in Central Park, working in their home office at the Dakota and cavorting in a Soho gallery. He discussed his work—and his relationship with rock’s most iconic couple—while driving through the East Village.
In your photos, John and Yoko seem very at ease in front of the camera. Didn’t they just emerge from seclusion at that point?
They felt comfortable with me, and I liked them. It was hard to have a professional relationship with them without having a personal one, too—they had to know you and trust you. But they were pretty used to being photographed and filmed. Of course, John had acted in music videos, and in films like Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. And they’d even done their own nude portraits for Two Virgins.
Can you still have that sort of mutual trust between celebrities and photographers?
Things have gotten a lot more complicated and legalistic. When I worked for the Weekly News, I’d be able to just meet a star in a hotel room. I went to Jack Nicholson’s room at the Carlyle and had a good half hour with him, and I don’t remember a publicist being around to hurry me up. We were able to talk about New Jersey, where we’re both from. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
And nightclubs have become stalkerazzi magnets.
When I used to go to Studio 54, there would be a handful of photographers, and we were allowed inside. When the stars got fed up, we’d go have a drink and hang out until there was another photo opportunity. Now there are hordes of photographers outside, and maybe one house photographer inside. It’s been corporatized. And I would say the fun is definitely gone.
We hear you’re still friendly with Yoko.
I was one of the photographers she asked to shoot her 75th birthday last month. She wanted it low-key, so we could get our shots and then relax with old friends. But that’s rare.
Allan Tannenbaum speaks at MCNY on Apr 5, 2008.
Apr
3
Will Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr get together to finish the song?
‘Now And Then’, a song written by John Lennon in the 1970s but never completed, could surface again as a tribute release to Neil Aspinall, the producer/record executive often described as ‘the fifth Beatle’, who died last month (March 24).According to The Sun, the song, a home recording of which was made by Lennon, may see the light of day, although the tapes would require a lot of work on them to restore them to full quality.
The newspaper quotes an anonymous source who claims that discussions about releasing the song have been undertaken, but it is not clear whether Lennon’s former bandmates, Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, have been involved in the talks or are interested in adding newly-recorded music to the song.
“There have been discussions about finishing ‘Now And Then’,” the source is quoted as saying: “It would be quite a task. It will need a significant amount of work to get it into a condition where it could be released.”
Apr
1
LIVERPOOL- As a part of Liverpool’s ongoing city of culture celebrations, the organisers have named the centrepiece to the Beatles theme park to be finished later this month: the stuffed body of the late John Lennon.
This unusual tribute, sure to anger many diehard Beatles fans, will mean Lennon’s body to be disinterred, stuffed with paxo and put on permanent display near his favourite childhood haunt of Strawberry Field.
The project, entitled Strawberry Fields Forever is the brainchild of Irish artist Ron P. O’Flail, who said he got the idea from watching his mother stuff a turkey at Christmas as a child.
“It made a deep impression. Set me on the road to becoming an artist.” said O’Flail, a 22 year old Lennon fan from Dublin “But I never thought I would ever be able to do it to me hero.”
The 60s icon, whose solo hits include Working Class Tax Exile and Happy Christmas (Where’s my present?), was gunned down in 1980 on a New York street by crazed assassin, Mark Knopfler. Knopfler, currently serving a life sentence in a mediocre band, is said to have approved of the plan.
This plan has been given the full backing of Liverpool local council, the Government and the Lennon estate. It has, to date, received lottery funding in excess of £27 million, with an additional £4 million coming from private donations, but is, by its own admission, “cash strapped” due to lavish expenditure. Stromberg himself is said to have personally profitted to the tune £6.5 Million, which many millions more going to his large entourage -mainly his relatives- for their living expenses.
“Its not about money, it’s about art!,” said O’Flail mordantly. “But artists must always have big dreams”
He was reluctant to explain where all the money was going for what was, on the face of it, a relatively cheap idea.
“Lennon himself said ‘you can celebrate anything you want’ so why not stuff him? I thought everyone might think my idea was bonkers so I was hesitant about sharing it. Fortunately everyone loved it.”
Not everyone, Ron. Indeed many opponents have been vociferous in their condemnation.
“Its so bloody ghoulish!” said Janice Mcfadden, acting president of the Lennon fan club. “Who on earth wants to see a dug-up corpse, even one as great as John? The fact he’s been buried so long means, he’ll hardly be a pretty sight, and let’s face it, he was hardly a looker even when he was alive.”
Stromberg is undeterred by this or even threats by Sir Paul McCartney to bring a lawsuit.
“The body is very well preserved, considering its age.”
Jeremy Dodd, a local undertaker and part-time taxidermist, who is actively engaged in the project, confirms this.
“People have strange ideas about taxidermy, based largely on ignorance. We’ve come a long way from stuffed beavers in the cabinets of Victorian gentlemen.”
Jeremy, who is the illegitimate half-brother to legendary comedian Ken Dodd, is said to have trousered £9 million of the fund money, despite not yet having started work.
A spokesperson for Yoko Ono has said “[Yoko] thinks it is a fitting tribute. John would have loved it.”
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