The John Lennon song that Tony Visconti wishes he had written
Tony Visconti first met John Lennon in the early 1970s. By that time, the legendary music producer had already worked on David Bowie’s second album, produced several tracks for The Iveys’ (later Badfinger) first LP Maybe Tomorrow, and found huge success with T. Rex’s 1971 album Electric Warrior. The LP cemented Visconti as one of the most sought-after producers in the industry, and it wasn’t long before he rekindled his working relationship with Bowie, helping to produce 1974’s Diamond Dogs and 1975’s Young Americans before moving on to Low, Heroes, Lodger and Scary Monsters and Super Creeps.
It was during the making of Young Americans that Visconti had the good fortune of meeting John Lennon. “I had the honour of meeting him at David Bowie‘s hotel suite in Manhattan,” he recalled. “John Lennon was going out with May Pang at the time. I rang the doorbell and there was a lot of shuffling behind the door before anyone would let me in. I opened the door and I found that John and May were hiding in the bathroom because there was a copious amount of cocaine on the coffee table.”
Visconti continued: “John was in danger of losing his green card, he had problems with immigration. If I was the police he would have been in big trouble. But everybody’s heartbeat started to come down and they let me in. David was afraid to talk to him because… well, John Lennon’s John Lennon. I looked around, he wasn’t chatting to anyone, he was just sitting on the couch idly. I said: ‘John, do you mind if I talk to you? Because I’ve got about 1000 questions to ask you’. He says ‘that’s cool, man, just shoot away!’ He was very, very open, very kind. I’ll never forget it.”
When NME asked him if there was a song he wished he’d written, Visconti was quick to name ‘Imagine’. Written and recorded at John and Yoko’s sprawling Tittenhurst Park estate, ‘Imagine’ was inspired by a concept created by Yoko Ono for her 1964 book Grapefruit, which featured “instructions and drawings” to catalyse creativity. One of these instructs the reader to “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in”. Another reads: “Imagine myself crying and using my tears to make myself stronger.”
In the end, Lennon was credited as the sole songwriter of ‘Imagine’, though he would later admit that Yoko should have been credited too. In his BBC final radio interview on December 6th, 1980, Lennon told Andy Peebles: “That should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song because a lot of the lyric and the concept came from Yoko. But those day, I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book.”
