“All through the making”: The album John Lennon felt guilty for recording
Any artist should normally feel at home when they get into the studio. It’s hard enough to go from town to town trying one’s best to be the perfect version of themselves whenever they get onstage, but whenever they’re behind the glass, that’s the one chance for the audience to see artists for who they really are. And while John Lennon had made the studio his home and never bothered touring again after The Beatles’ breakup, that didn’t mean all of them were pleasant experiences.
Granted, Lennon’s start as a solo artist didn’t exactly get off on the best foot. Outside of his experimental records with Yoko Ono, Plastic Ono Band was the first time that the audience got a look at the version of Lennon that was completely honest, and while tunes like ‘Mother’ and ‘God’ were fantastic comments on his past, that didn’t make them any easier to listen to, especially when he told us all that the dream of The Beatles was officially dead.
But that album laid the groundwork for everything Lennon would do later. If he was going to make any new record, he wanted to make sure it meant something other than a standard commercial pop song. Whatever he said needed to come from his heart, and while Some Time in New York City did show him standing up for what he believed in, it did mark a turning point in his career.
For the first time, it didn’t seem like he and Yoko were seeing eye-to-eye, and throughout his wilderness period all the way through to Walls and Bridges, Lennon seemed genuinely lost trying to figure out where to go next. So when he finally got back together with Yoko Ono, it was going to be a cold day in hell before he let any of his private life go now that he was a father to his new son, Sean.
Although Lennon was content to hang his guitar up for the last time, Double Fantasy reminded everyone that the former Beatle never lost his touch. After a trip to Bermuda, he finally had the passion for writing songs again, and what unfolded throughout the album was a back-and-forth between him and Yoko that showed them finally being content having survived throughout the 1970s.
Still, that didn’t stop Lennon from feeling uncomfortable not being able to talk to his son as much, saying, “I was guilty all through the making of Double Fantasy. We had his picture pinned in the studio ’cause I didn’t want to lose contact with what I’d got. We had the picture up there all the time in between the speakers, so whenever you’re checking the stereo, he was looking at me all the time.”
You’d hardly hear it in the takes, though. Throughout his own tunes, Lennon sounds completely rejuvenated as a singer, going from the same kind of Elvis Presley voice that he was known for back in the 1960s to the Buddy Holly hiccup on ‘Dear Yoko’ to finally sounding at peace on tracks like ‘Watching the Wheels’.
And while the tragedy of Lennon’s murder put a dark cloud around his final album, there’s no doubt that he had become a much different person than he had started out as at the beginning of his career. His frail heart had finally melted away, and listening to tracks like ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’, he finally seemed ready to move into a future that was never going to unfold.
