Double Fantasy doesn't mesmerize the critics

John Lennon and Yoko Ono : Clean Up Time

[Purchase]

On November 17, 1980 John Lennon and Yoko Ono released Double Fantasy. It was Lennon's first album in five years where he played stay at-home dad with Sean and spent time separated from Ono. Had Lennon not been murdered weeks later, its legacy as a "heart play" might have been very different: an honest look at a relationship between two strong personalities, one living in fantasy ; the other more of a realist.

"Well, I know I hurt you then," sings Lennon on "I'm Losing You". "But hell, that was way back when/ Well, do you still have to carry that cross?"

"I'm moving on, moving on you're getting phony," responds Ono. 

40 years later, it's Yoko's music that thrills me more. There's too much polish, too much studio craftsmanship,  in the Lennon songs.

The immediate reviews of the album were not necessarily kind. 

Charles Shaar, writing for NME, memorably said Double Fantasy "sounds like a great life, but it makes for a lousy record. ... I wish Lennon had kept his big happy trap shut until he had something to say that was even vaguely relevant to those of us not married to Yoko." 

David Hepworth of Smash Hits was also brutal.

More negative reviews were withheld following the murder, including those for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. 

My dad was one of the millions who bought Double Fantasy after the murder. He was writing a novel about the dissolution of a marriage at the time and I think he found wisdom in the lyrics, especially Yoko's. Some of her biting lines sound like something his next wife was already saying. (The food is cold/ Your eyes are cold/ The window's cold /The bed is cold). He honestly wanted to make a go of this upcoming third marriage but it wouldn't last.

Double Fantasy is more than a memento. But, like Rumours and Shoot Out The Lights, an honest dialogue with universal appeal. As Sean Lennon said "“I feel like Double Fantasy would have been the beginning of a whole new style of records for him."

 

John Lennon releases "(Just Like ) Starting Over"

John Lennon : (Just Like) Starting Over

[Purchase]

On October 20 in the US and 24 in the UK , 1980 John Lennon released the single "(Just Like) Starting Over", his first in five years and the final of his lifetime. Composed of three songs Lennon had demo'd , the song reminded fans of his Rock and Roll album of 1950's covers. In interviews Lennon would refer to his performance as "Elvis Orbison".

I’d done that music and identified with it – that was my period – but I’d never written a song that sounded like that period. So I just thought, Why the hell not? In the Beatles days that would have been taken as a joke. One avoided clichés. ‘Course now clichés are not clichés anymore.

The single charted well even before Lennon's death pushed the ironically named song to Number One. In the US it had reached Number 3 and in the UK Number 8. 

Yoko, whose "Kiss Kiss Kiss" was the B side, told Ken Sharp:

We knew that song would be the first single. I love ‘Starting Over’, but when I hear it now it just chokes me up a bit because it’s how we felt at the time. We really thought that we were starting over and it didn’t work out that way.

Much more can be discovered about the song on The Beatles Bible. 

 

Cheap Trick joins John Lennon in the studio

John Lennon and Cheap Trick : I'm Losing You

[Purchase]

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.

John Lennon: ‘Mother, tell the world we’re making a record.’

John Lennon : Watching The Wheels

[Purchase]

On August 8, 1980, after five years of mostly silence, John Lennon walked into the Hit Factory in midtown Manhattan to record Double Fantasy with Yoko Ono and producer Jack Douglas. Douglas was a second engineer on Imagine before making a name for himself by producing Aerosmith. He rehearsed musicians without ever letting them know who was recording the album.  Then Douglas  played the tapes for Lennon. John didn't want to make a comeback album until he knew it was going to be good. When Lennon finally liked what he heard he turned to Yoko and said:

‘Mother, tell the world we’re making a record.’

In nine days, shrouded in secrecy,  they recorded twenty-two songs, with fourteen chosen for the album. Seven sung by John and seven by Yoko. Yes, Yoko had convinced John she should also have songs on the album so that Double Fantasy came across as a conversation. 

John has been recording cassette demos at the Dakota. One, originally called "Tennessee", addressed everyone who thought he was crazy to be spending so much time at home with Sean when he could be out "riding on the merry-go-round" of fame. 

Lennon had paid all the costs of production so he would have total control. It would be up to Yoko to find a record company to release the album. We will revisit a session next week when Cheap Trick enter the studio to record two tracks .

A bit of the recording: