But flying to Cape Town alone was just a prelude. As John’s fortieth birthday loomed, he felt a desire, common to many men at that stage in life, for some great adventure outside all his previous experience. His voyages with the Isis on Long Island Sound had whetted his appetite for life afloat, and with his young sailing mentor, Tyler Coneys, he began discussing the possibility of a yacht trip into more challenging waters. He had no idea where he wanted to go, only that it must be in the direction his numerologist had prescribed to avoid the “clouds of evil”—southeast. From mainland America, the nearest southeasterly destination for sailing craft was the British island territory of Bermuda. Coneys undertook to organize the expedition in early June, to find a crew, and go along himself. When John reached Bermuda, Sean would fly out to join him, and they would spend several weeks there. Such a extended separation was not exactly inconvenient for Yoko at that moment, and she readily gave the plan her blessing.
Originally, her psychics were to have selected the yacht, but in the end Tyler Coneys’s expertise took precedence. The chosen vessel was a forty-three-foot sloop, the Megan Jaye, based in Newport, Rhode Island, and skippered by a bearded salt named Hank Halsted. Astrology and numerology could not be denied, though, in the selection of John’s sailing companions. Eventually, only four passed this unusual seagoing test: Tyler, his two cousins, Kevin and Ellen Coneys, and the skipper, “Cap’n Hank.” The journey of seven hundred miles traversed busy cargo and tanker routes and unpredictable weather zones, including the notorious Bermuda Triangle, where ships and aircraft were wont to disappear without a trace. But the Megan Jaye was a modern, well-equipped vessel and her crew, though fewer than was usual on such a voyage, seemed more than capable of handling it.
On June 4, John bade Sean a tearful farewell and sailed out of Newport with his new group. The Megan Jaye’s equipment included a weather fax, which coughed out regular bulletins from larger craft with satellite forecasting systems. Each spoke confidently of an uneventful crossing, and, for a couple of days, this prediction seemed spot-on. The weather was idyllic, with unbroken brilliant sunshine, flat seas, and schools of dolphins curveting off the bows. John was particularly exhilarated to see a large bank of cloud dropping back behind the stern.
In the communal cabin, he found himself living in closer proximity to other people than he had since traveling around by van with the Beatles. He shared a watch with Tyler Coneys, and acted as ship’s cook, providing a healthy diet dominated by vegetables and brown rice. Though he liked and got along with all three Coneyses, his closest rapport with Cap’n Hank, the shipmate nearest to him in age. Before becoming a charter skipper, Hank had lived through the psychedelic era, promoting rock concerts with acts like Big Brother and the Holding Company, at one stage even running a drug clinic. He treated John with a total lack of deference, mixed with profound respect for the musical talents so long inexplicably on hold. “You just affected 50 million people there to the positive, big boy,” he said in one of their chats. “What are you going to do to follow that up?” The radio happened to be playing a lot of Wings tracks, like “Silly Love Songs” and “Coming Up.” Tyler Coneys recalls how the sound of Paul’s voice seemed to make “[John] think ‘Jesus, what am I doing, sitting here? I should get up and do something because it’s not that hard.’”
Then came one of those capricious weather changes for which the Bermuda Triangle is notorious. The first sign was the turning of the water from turquoise to gray, then blue-black. A flotilla of military ships appeared and circled the Megan Jaye, as if tut-tutting and shaking their heads. Then a storm broke, with 65 mph winds and twenty-foot-high waves—not the worst her experienced crew had ever known, but bad enough for a smallish yacht way out here, where one couldn’t turn back or pull over to the side of the road. The most hardened sailors occasionally get seasick, and so it now was with all three Coneyses. As the Megan Jaye heaved and corkscrewed, Tyler, Kevin, and Ellen could take no further part in handling her, but only lie prostrate on their bunks. Cap’n Hank was unaffected, however—and so, amazingly, was John. A cleansing fast that he’d put himself through in the first days of the voyage undoubtedly helped. He said that having weathered heroin and cold turkey made any tempest seem small by comparison and that he’d “learned to control throwing up.”
Cap’n Hank stayed at the wheel for forty-eight hours, then, dazed with fatigue, shouted to John in his usual unceremonious fashion, “I’m gonna need some help here, big boy.” Though John had often steered the Isis off Cold Spring Harbor, this was like a Quarryman being told to back Jerry Lee Lewis. “Hey Hank…” he protested, “I’ve just got these little guitar-playing muscles here.” But the skipper would brook no shirking: “That ain’t the kind of strength I’m looking for…Just come back and drive this puppy and I’ll tell you what to do.”
John gingerly took over as helmsman, and Cap’n Hank barked out a few basic instructions (“You don’t jibe…you don’t let the wind get across the back of the boat”) then gave him a course to follow. “He picked it up fast,” his instructor would recall. “His intuition about this kind of stuff was remarkable.”
Cap’n Hank remained watchfully close for a while, then decided it was safe to grab some desperately needed sleep. Left in charge of a forty-three-foot sloop, solely responsible for the safety of four people, John was at first almost paralyzed with panic. But gradually he connected with the boat and began to understand its responses, almost as if it had been some great silver-bodied guitar. His fear passed and he began to enjoy himself, roaring out every obscene sea chantey he had ever heard around Liverpool docks to the screaming audience of wind and waves. He also later remembered shouting “Freddie!” feeling a sudden kinship with the father who had sacrificed everything for the sea—and had returned from a watery Lost Weekend on a ship named Monarch of Bermuda. “When I came back on deck…this was a man who was just enraptured,” Cap’n Hank would remember. “It was stimulus worthy of this stimulus-addict of a guy.”
The storm changed John’s status on the boat from celebrity passenger and paymaster to bona fide crew member, able to take on and handle anything the others did. He even helped Cap’n Hank carry out repairs to the mainsail after the Megan Jaye had drifted without sails for a whole day. (That would have been a sight for his Liverpool cousins, Mike and David, who remembered him being unable even to change a lightbulb.) He was unrecognizable as the landlubber who had come aboard in Newport—though to Cap’n Hank every surprising new capability seemed somehow natural. “I would venture to say that he discovered the tremendously strong man who had always been there.”
As well as sustaining damage to fabric and fixtures, they had been blown a considerable way off course, and did not reach Hamilton, the Bermudan capital, until June 11. Before going ashore, John wrote an appreciative message in the logbook: “Dear Megan ‘There’s no place like nowhere’ (TC 1980) + Thanks Hank love John Lennon.” Underneath he sketched a sailboat, a shining sun, and his own smiling, bearded face,.
For a few days, he shared a small cottage with the three Coneyses (rented under the name of Yoko’s psychic-in-chief, John Green). With his crewmates’ departure and the arrival of Sean, plus a nanny and Fred Seaman, he rented a large stucco villa named Undercliff, on the outskirts of Hamilton. Here they enjoyed an idyllic seaside holiday lasting almost two months. John took Sean swimming every day; they paddled, built sandcastles, strolled round Hamilton’s street market and Botanical Gardens, and had their portrait painted together as a gift for “Mother” by a young woman artist they met by chance on the beach. The tropical island abounded with reminders of England for John—and better even than that. One day, he was entranced to hear the wheeze of Scottish bagpipes float from a neighboring property. The piper turned out to be a man named John Sinclair, just like the White Panther martyr of yore. John dispatched a note of appreciation, accompanied by a bottle of Chivas Regal malt whiskey.
His adventure on the Megan Jaye proved the best possible remedy for the cri
sis in creativity that had all but drowned him. In Bermuda, he was suddenly seized with a desire to make another album. “I was so centred after the experience at sea, that I was tuned into the cosmos,” he remembered. “And all these songs came…After five years of nothing. Not trying, but nothing coming anyway, no inspiration, no thought, no anything, then suddenly voom voom voom…” Like a long-dormant radio, his senses retuned to processing everything he saw and heard into words and chords. Bob Marley’s “Hallelujah Time” on the radio, for instance, triggered the all-too-prophetic line: “We gotta keep living, living on borrowed time….” He went into Hamilton, bought some cheap tape recorders and speakers, and began to lay down demos, usually working out on the terrace at night after Sean was in bed, with a background of cicadas and whistling tree frogs.
There were also some low-key crawls around Hamilton’s pubs and discos with Fred Seaman and a couple of friendly local journalists, though nowadays John seldom drank more than one glass of wine—and even that knocked him out. On one such outing, he heard “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, an American new wave band, which, like Blondie and Talking Heads, had eagerly picked up on British punk rock. The style of the two female vocalists, at once girlish and slightly camp, was just like Yoko’s a decade earlier, when no one wanted to listen to her. “So I called her on the phone and I said, ‘There’s someone doing your act there,’” he remembered. “‘They’re ready for you this time, kid.’”
Some of the songs that took shape on Underhill’s terrace were reworkings of rough ideas demoed at the Dakota, then put aside; others sprang into his head virtually complete. Every one dealt with the life he had been leading these past five years and testified that, by and large, it had been a happy and fulfilled one. “Darling Boy,” later retitled “Beautiful Boy,” was a hymn of joy to Sean, affording a peep into his warm, safe nursery world (“The monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here….”) and tempering impatience to see him come of age with a poignant self-reminder to appreciate every moment (“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”). “Watching the Wheels” was a self-portrait of one thankful to have escaped the Elvis trap, content to let the machinery of the business grind on without him, the painted horses named Paul or Mick continue their interminable circuits, while he devoted himself to important things like “watching shadows on the wall.” “Woman” was seemingly addressed to Yoko, a delicate letter of appreciation “for showing me the meaning of success” and an apology for causing “sorrow and pain”—which in the end went out to every woman who had nurtured him, back to Julia, Mimi, and the aunts: “After all, I’m forever in your debt.”
The old insecure, fearful John had not completely vanished. An edgy rock track called “I’m Losing You” revealed his awareness that something was going on with Yoko, and that the outcome could be disastrous. When she flew out for a visit, he spent days beforehand telling Sean that “Mommy’s coming,” the way mothers usually did with children when daddies interrupted work to spend time with them. Once at Underhill, however, she spent most of her time on the telephone, selling one of their pedigreed Holstein milk cows—and getting a record price of $250,000. After she returned home, John rang her repeatedly, but was unable to get through. “It drove me crackers,” he remembered, “just long enough to write a song.” Superstitious as ever, he changed the working title to “(Afraid I’m) Losing You,” in case it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the Botanical Gardens one day, he spotted a clump of yellow freesias of the extra-large variety ‘Double Fantasy,’ growing under a cedar tree. There could have been no better description of his life with Yoko or title for the album he was now itching to make with her.
By the time he returned to New York on July 29, Yoko had already lined up a producer. They both agreed they wanted someone young and contemporary rather than a legend of yesteryear, and Jack Douglas seemed to fit the bill to perfection. He had been a studio engineer at the New York end of the Imagine album, then had gone on to produce hugely successful new acts like Aerosmith and Cheap Trick. When Douglas first heard the demos John had made in Bermuda, with their cicada and tree-frog chorus, he wondered whether he had a real role at all: “They were already so much fun to listen to.”
Work began at the Hit Factory Studios, West Forty-eighth Street, on August 4. John turned up wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and carrying one of the briefcases from his large collection. His first act was to tape a large photograph of Sean above the mixing desk.
It was firmly impressed on Jack Douglas that Double Fantasy was as much Yoko’s album as John’s, and that the songs she had been simultaneously writing in New York were to alternate with his rather than go on a separate side, where they might be bypassed altogether. John called the project “a conversation between a man and a woman,” and that was the effect, although they sang not a single duet and even recorded their respective tracks at different times of day. The anxious, doom-laden “I’m Losing You” segued into a part two by Yoko called “I’m Moving On,” in which all its worst fears seemed about to be realized. “Beautiful Boy,” John’s elegy to Sean, was answered by her “Beautiful Boys,” a tribute to the two of them. The fade-out of his “Dear Yoko” gently reproached her for her abstraction in Bermuda, while hopefully anticipating another holiday there together: “When you come over next time, don’t sell a cow…spend some time….”
The complement of top session musicians did not include any old crony of John’s who might lead him astray again. Indeed, the studio atmosphere suggested a health spa more than a rock album. Yoko created a special “quiet room” for the two of them, softly lit, with palm trees and a white piano. Instead of cocaine and Cognac, the band were served tea and sushi (“dead fish,” John called it); a plate of sunflower seeds and raisins stood beside every microphone, and shiatsu massages were available on request. Sean’s picture stayed over the mixing desk, a constant reminder that sessions must end in time for John to get home and say good-evening to him. One night, when he could not leave the studio in time, he relayed a message to Sean: “I love you, sweet dreams, see you tomorrow.” “He says, ‘I love you, too,’ Yoko called from the telephone. “I hope he does,” John said, “because I’m the only daddy he’s got.”
Douglas wanted to give the album a contemporary edge and, to that end, enlisted Bun E. Carlos and Rick Nielson, drummer and guitarist of Cheap Trick (who by an odd coincidence were currently working at George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat) to play on “I’m Losing You.” But, funky as their contribution was, it simply did not fit. The spirit of Double Fantasy was Matisse rather than Picasso, soothing and reassuring rather than challenging and unsettling like John-and-Yoko albums of old. “Beautiful Boy” ended with sounds of sea and children’s voices that could as easily have came from Bournemouth as Bermuda. And where once John had screamed, “I don’t believe in Beatles,” he now reminisced freely about what he called “the B’s” and was happy to use them as a shorthand when telling the musicians what he wanted. He described “Woman,” for instance, as “an early Motown/Beatles circa 1964 ballad”—though in fact its honeyed “Oooo…well well” chorus was more like a Paul ballad or even a Wings one. Drummer Andy Newmark would later recall being told unceremoniously, “Andy, I want to get this in three takes, play like Ringo.”
One track above all, John’s “(Just Like) Starting Over,” signified that, whatever Bermuda Triangle his marriage had passed through this summer, it was back on an even keel and sailing confidently forward once more. Beginning with three light pings on a Tibetan “wishing bell”—a conscious contrast with the ominous tolling that had preceded “Mother”—it was a relaxed ballad, for which he prescribed an “Elvis/Orbison feel.” His tone was lighthearted, at one point even breaking into a little laugh (something, strangely enough, never heard in a John song before). But the message was in utter earnest: a plea to Yoko to heal their recent difficulties with some quality time alone together, including in bed; an insistence that “no one’s t
o blame”; a declaration that “our life together is so precious” and “our love is still special.” Those dark clouds, it seemed, had all rolled away.
The news that John Lennon was recording again sent a tremor throughout the transatlantic music industry. As Apple had long since ceased to be an active record company, it was assumed that a bidding war would break out among the major labels to secure Double Fantasy and his subsequent output. By that time, top artists who signed recording deals received huge advances against royalties that he never had, either as a Beatle or subsequently. Privately, he set a benchmark of $22.5 million, the figure recently agreed between Paul McCartney and Columbia. But the nonnegotiable proviso was that he and Yoko had to be signed together. Any record boss who balked at this—or even showed surprise—was automatically ruled out. That fate even befell the celebrated Ahmet Ertegun, cofounder of the Atlantic label, which had dominated black music throughout the seventies and might have been expected to head John’s wish list. In desperation, Ertegun himself went to the Hit Factory to plead his case, but could not obtain an audience and was asked to leave.
In the end, the prize went to a brand-new, untried company, Geffen Records. Its owner, David Geffen had started the hugely successful Asylum label in the early seventies but, like John, had retired from the business midway through the decade, in his case after being misdiagnosed with cancer. Geffen made clear from the start that he would be signing two artists of equal merit; though unable to match the big labels in financial terms, he promised personal care and absolute commitment to them both. His trump card (apart from good astrological readings) was offering a contract before hearing a note of the album.