‘Reminiscing’: The song that soundtracked John Lennon and May Pang’s relationship
18 months is a long time to be on a bender. Perhaps after being thrust towards such hectic, unprecedented heights of fame at the tender age of 22, John Lennon was simply due an extended weekend off. Or perhaps he had merely lost his way in a haze of hedonism, wreckless abandon and questionable morality. Either way, his bar-crawling excursion now represents an enigmatic yet telling period in the annuls of rock ‘n’ roll, and one odd little song retrospectively became the entirely unfitting anthem of the drunken upheaval.
However, if you ask May Pang, she’ll tell you there was always tenderness at the heart of their galavanting days—even from the beginning. “Listen May, John and I are not getting along. We’ve been arguing. We’re growing apart,” her book, Loving John, startingly opens, documenting a discussion between the young assistant and Yoko Ono. Contrary to all conventional imaginings, according to Pang, the whole thing was largely started, orchestrated, and terminated by Yoko Ono.
“John will probably start going out with other people. I know he likes you. If he should ask you to go out with him, you should go,” Pang’s memoir continues. “‘I can’t’, May stammered. ‘John’s married. He’s my employer. I don’t want to go out with him, and he doesn’t want to go out with me,'” it continues.
To this, Yoko Ono reportedly replied, “‘I’d rather see him going out with you than with someone else, someone who might hurt him.’ Yoko looked searchingly at May. ‘It will be great. He’ll be happy. It’s cool. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of everything.'” Shortly after that conversation, Pang was roving around various hotel rooms with Lennon, often with his favourite drinking buddy Harry Nilsson in tow, as the former Beatle and his boozing pals dotted around Los Angeles, London, New York and an array of other cities, in a heady blur of abandon.
However, even amid this one-track adventure, Lennon still held true to the duality that has always made him such a fascinating figure. He wasn’t just throwing back drinks, dabbling in drugs and getting into unfortunate scrapes; he was also retreating from the world. Even now, his Lost Weekend is a tricky escapade to document accurately, even with Pang’s recollections. By and large, this obscurity was by Lennon’s design. He dodged the press and kept things as discreet as the world’s most famous man’s bender could possibly be.
This strange mix of madness and introspective measure can also be found in the music that soundtracked the long rabbit hole. Musically, he went on a mellow and soulful trip. “What was great about John and me was that we could sit and talk about music, which was, of course, his love,” Pang told Asaince in 2003. “We loved music from the same time period. He would be amazed that I knew so much because I was so much younger than he was,” she said.
When they first fled from his marital home in 1973, Lennon was on the brink of turning 33, and Pang was almost exactly ten years his junior, but despite this chasm, the pair still had a lot in common. “All the rock ‘n’ roll music that he loved came from America. He loved the B-sides. He loved Carla Thomas, who had this Memphis sound. One of her hits was ‘B-A-B-Y’. Recently, I met Carla and I had the chance to tell her just how much John loved her music. She was ecstatic. I never thought in a million years that I would be able to pass along something like that. She couldn’t believe that John Lennon loved her music,” Pang continued.
But that wasn’t all they’d listen to. They also dug the soulful sounds of Ann Peebles and the organ-heavy AM jams of Billy Swan. “John would DJ at parties and play these songs after their time, then they’d come back and become number one hits,” she said. Indeed, while punk might have caught his ear in the years to come, for the bulk of the ’70s, Lennon was playing steady, rolling soul during his wayward days.
While the Lost Weekend would fizzle out in earnest in 1975, Pang would claim that she remained a firm part of Lennon’s life. In fact, the track that she would call “our song” didn’t arrive until 1978, and Lennon was happy to pause Blondie and the B-52s for a minute to get back to the soft rock that had held his heart a few years earlier. As it happens, rock doesn’t get much softer or soppier than the Australian anthem that defined Pang and Lennon’s misconstrued relationship.
“Oddly, with all the fantastic music he wrote, ‘our song’ was ‘Reminiscing’ by the Little River Band,” she says.
In a manner akin to her welcome revelation to Carla Thomas, word of this would eventually reach the Little River Band. “[May Pang] wrote in her book, Loving John, that they would lay in bed listening to ‘Reminiscing’. He was asking her to play it again and again and again. That was pretty amazing,” guitarist Graeham Goble told Guitar Player. He was flawed by this impromptu praise. However, the legacy of Lennon and Pang’s love for it stretches beyond mere flattery.
For one, the fact that it was released in ’78 when their affair had apparently ended, yet it became the song that defined their time together, is a telling revelation in itself. But perhaps above all, the softness and yearning serenity of the sentimental song is as revealing of Lennon’s duplicitous and enigmatic character as all the other myriad threads of unfathomable complexity in the tapestry history has woven of the only man who could guzzle up a good chunk of the gin joints in the world on an affair apparently orchestrated by his wife, with slide guitar and soppy doo-wops reverberating between his ears.
