The singer who scared John Lennon into getting clean: “That’s when I straightened out”
John Lennon was never the kind to scare easily.
If anything, during The Beatles’ first major tours, there was a good chance that most people knew to stay away from Lennon whenever he got angry, especially when he started to go wild during the band’s salad days playing in Hamburg. But while Lennon had more than a few reasons to clean up his act by the end of the 1970s, it sometimes takes the right kind of incident to scare someone straight once they come up for air.
For a while, though, it felt like Lennon was slowly starting to spiral right before the band’s breakup. He may have been able to get his mind straight when working on Plastic Ono Band, but aside from being burned out on the rest of the Fabs, seeing him slowly start to medicate himself with heroin saw him become a sell of the electric personality that he used to be. It’s dire looking back at a few of those rehearsals, but it wasn’t going to get much better when he started his solo career.
Then again, it’s not like everything kicked off on a bad note. He had finally expunged all of his demons on his first solo album, and while Imagine still had a few sly digs at his old band, you could tell that he had made some peace with being in one of the biggest bands in the world. He was now his own artist, but when he moved to America, getting handled by American authorities when protesting against President Nixon wasn’t exactly going to be the best look for him.
All he really needed to do was cool out a little bit, but when he started making Rock ‘n’ Roll, Yoko Ono’s idea of sending him to Los Angeles may have been one of the questionable decisions she ever made. Lennon was already distraught, but giving him nothing but drinking buddies after finding out that he was walking away from the love of his life wasn’t exactly going to be the healthiest environment for anyone to be in.
For God’s sake, those sessions even managed to do the impossible by bringing Lennon and Paul McCartney back together on the same track, and yet even those sessions are looked at like one of the most dreadful jams that they ever had together. But after singing the road that Harry Nilsson was going down, Lennon was focused on not being that far gone after one too many sleepless nights away from home.
He and Nilsson had the potential to make great songs together, but Lennon felt that his new friend’s wild personality got to be a bit too much for him, saying, “We did one session and that was it. He didn’t tell at the time he was bleeding from the throat, or I would have stopped the session. He had no voice. We had a lot of fun. It was me, Harry, Keith Moon, and Ringo in the same house, and we had some moments, folks, but it got a little down to the knuckle. That’s when I straightened out.”
It might have taken a little while longer for Starr to dry out, but when the light came on for Lennon, he seemed to be a completely different songwriter. The idea of working with Yoko again on songs about their domestic life was far more exciting for him, and while Double Fantasy isn’t his best album by any stretch, you could tell that he was finally at peace after drinking his brains out every single night.
Those ‘lost weekend’ sessions are still a lot of fun for fans to listen back to, but there’s a reason why Lennon wanted to leave that in the past. He was a much different person when he had been drinking too much, and even if he didn’t have that much time left to become a family man, he was going to be the best father that he could have been once his son, Sean, was born when he returned.
