Cheap Trick joins John Lennon in the studio

John Lennon and Cheap Trick : I'm Losing You

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On August 12, 1980 Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Bun E Carlos joined John Lennon at the Hit Factory studio to record I’m Losing You and Yoko Ono’s I’m Moving On. Lennon played a second guitar part, and future King Crimson member Tony Levin added bass guitar. 

Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas has worked with Cheap Trick on their Live At Budokan album. Cheap Trick had just released an EP with a version of "Day Tripper" on it when Douglas tracked them down.

Bun E. Carlos:

“Jack Douglas called, and they had a song they were having trouble getting a version of, and did I want to play on this thing, and I said sure, you know, like yeah . . .

" Then we went in and he introduced us to John Lennon, and he said, “Oh you’re the guys from Cheap Trick, they told me your name but they didn’t  tell me what band you’re in,” so we thought that was kinda neat. . . . We told him, “You know we wanted you to produce our first record,” and Lennon said, “I woulda done that no one told me!”

 We sat around the control booth and Jack played us the acoustic version of “Losing You,” and Lennon turned to us and said, you know, “You got any ideas?”

 In Cheap Trick we did “Cold Turkey,” and “It’s So Hard,” and we did some other Beatles tunes, “Day Tripper,” stuff like that. In the band, we’re all big Plastic Ono Band fans, we’re always saying, “Well, how would Plastic Ono Band have done this?” Or like, “If this were the next song after ‘Cold Turkey,’ how would it go?

The session happened quickly; the sound more raw than what eventually appeared on Double Fantasy. Six days later the studio musicians were brought in to take another crack at both "I'm Losing You" and Yoko's answer "I'm Moving On". 

Bun E Carlos again:

When the band later recut those songs for the album they didn’t clone our version. But they copied Rick’s riffs on the songs and they did our arrangement of Moving On, too. Jack told me, ‘We cut those songs and had the band play along with it a few times on headphones to try and get the same feel you guys had.’ 

When we heard that we started laughing, we thought those guys must wanna kill us. We were thinking, Boy, if someone asked us to do that, we’d sure put our unhappy faces on.