Product Description

Twenty years ago David Sheff climbed the back steps of the Dakota into the personal thoughts and dreams of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. From the kitchen to the studio and up those fateful Dakota steps, Sheff recorded 20 hours of tape, discussing everything from childhood to the Beatles.

Sheff gives a rare and last glimpse of John and Yoko, one that seemed to look beyond the kitchen table to the future of the world with startling premonitions of what was to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #667777 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
John Lennon could be angry, as he is in Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970, and nasty, as proven by Albert Goldman's brilliant, scathing The Lives of John Lennon.

But he could also be charming, smart, and extraordinarily witty, as he is in his last interview, published in book form as All We Are Saying. Co-interviewee Yoko Ono is charm-free but valuable, because she sparks the conversation and brings up fascinating stuff that Lennon wished she hadn't, like their mad plots to kidnap her daughter from her ex-husband. As interviewer David Sheff's tape rolls, John and Yoko's anecdotes flow effortlessly: the joys of making their 1980 comeback album, Double Fantasy; the mortifying horrors of John's "lost weekend" in L.A. with Harry Nilsson; John's interestingly twisted family life; John and Yoko and Paul's last get-together, watching Saturday Night Live the night producer Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,200 to reunite on the show (they almost got in a cab and did it!).

Best of all is Lennon's song-by-song account of who wrote which famous tunes and where they came from. "Strawberry Fields" contains an entire childhood memoir, and the production reflects Paul's alleged "sabotage" of Lennon's work. "Please Please Me" was based on a Roy Orbison melody and Bing Crosby's punning song title "Please (Lend an Ear to My Pleas)." The "element'ry penguins" in "I Am the Walrus" refer to idiots like Allen Ginsberg who chant "Hare Krishna" worshipfully. "Hey Jude" was Paul's song comforting John's son Julian when John left his family for Yoko, and Paul's unconscious, reluctant farewell to his writing partner ("go out and get her").

Lennon had been publicly silent and artistically dormant for five years before these interviews, and he was just bursting with the exhilaration of the rebirth of his imagination days before his death. Reading this book is like sharing a day in the life of a very happy man. --Tim Appelo

From Booklist
As the song goes, it was 20 years ago today . . . when John Lennon sat down in his Dakota home with wife, Yoko, for a Playboy interview. It was also just a few months before Lennon was killed. Lennon and Ono touched on many different subjects, including Lennon's disappearance from the public arena for five years to be a househusband; the release of the couple's then-new album, Double Fantasy; and more dishy subjects like the Beatles' breakup and John's relationship with Yoko. The interview was a newsmaker at the time, and in retrospect, it is a crucial piece of Beatle history. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A fascinating, detailed glimpse into the workings of a musical genius.... A valuable piece of work." -- New York Times Book Review

"The interview is lively proof that some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life." -- Time Magazine

"The interview would hardly have been less engrossing and important even if it were not illuminated by tragedy." -- Los Angeles Times

Customer Reviews

As close as we'll ever get to a Lennon Autobiography
Actually I have the original version of this book, The Playboy Interviews, but since I'm an avid collector of "all things Lennon" I'll probably buy this newer version as well. But man! What a great read this book is! I learned so much about John here in his own words. Do people remember when he was shot, and the current issue of Playboy had just come out with the John & Yoko interview? Man, I clutched that thing like a bible in those sad sad days of December 1980. That interview turned out to be just a portion of the whole interview, and now that is published in this book. A cautionary note: reading this book can re-awaken your love and feelings for John and the Beatles, and this can lead to some pretty serious melancholia. Twenty-plus years later! I still ponder the what-ifs of it all, if John had been allowed to live - for instance, how would that Beatles Anthology thing on Tee Vee had been with a living John? And would there have ever been a Beatles reunion? ( I doubt it.) Not to mention how the politics of the Reagan-80s if John had been there to help out! Anyway, buy this book. It is still very valid and even timeless in its depth and scope.

The Walrus and the Carpenter


My favorite Lennon quote comes not from this book, but from the Beatle's set during the Royal Variety Performance for the British Royal Family in 1963: "Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry." I love that, though I've been told you need to be raised in the British class-consciousness to fully appreciate the insolence of that.


I grabbed this book just out of curiosity, as a Beatles fan and a Lennon fan in particular. I read in a review that Lennon goes through the whole catalog of Beatles songs and comments on them. I thought that would be interesting to read. Yoko Ono was the least of my concerns, but they were and are a package deal. I bought into the popular cultural conception of Yoko as the villainess who broke up the Beatles. So the first thing that struck me, reading these interviews, is what an intelligent, sympathetic, and likeable figure she is, when heard in her own words, in the comforts of her home base. And the two of them together actually seem like a nice, well-matched couple, decent people who- against the odds- had found contentment amid the surreal circumstances of their lives. No doubt that they are eccentric in some ways, and some of their philosophizing has that post-Hippie, flaky, dated feel, as you might expect. They are artists after all. But at the same time, they surprised me at times at how level-headed they came off. Despite the near deification of the Beatles, it is John who continuously reminds us that they were just a rock and roll band that was in the right place at the right time and wrote some good songs. And they are able to honestly talk about the strain on their relationship caused by their celebrity. With all the typical defiant talk about letting people think whatever they are going to think, Yoko admits to the heartache of bad press: "It's a very strange thing that society can do that much to a relationship, but it does because we're social animals. We're social beings. A relationship is not isolated from society." "Society can break an individual. That is what happened." John, too, often displays the vulnerability buried within the armor of the iconoclast: "We're both sensitive people and we were both hurt by a lot of it." Enough time has passed for them to analyze the hostility garnered by Yoko, as a woman, when she began managing John's business affairs. John talks about the attitude towards Yoko at these meetings where she was the only woman, "They're all male, you know, just big and fat, vodka lunch, shouting males, like trained dogs, trained to attack all the time." Yoko is wonderful, chiming in with "I was emasculated." Then launching into her formulation of male aggressiveness, "you must have the womb-envy thing," she speculates. Men are aggressive to mask their intimidation and jealousy. After all, she notes, "we give life."

The most valuable part of this book, in which John systematically goes through almost every Beatles and solo Lennon song, is a concession John granted after blowing Playboy's scoop by giving an interview to Newsweek magazine. We get John's feelings about each of the songs as well as the memories triggered by them, what was going on in that period of his life and how they were written. Though John continues with the superficial model of `John songs' and `Paul songs,' we see that the truth is more complicated, they wrote the best of the Beatles "one-on-one, eyeball to eyeball... both playing into each other's noses." We see why they were great together (and why George and Ringo are two very lucky men to have been along for the ride) and why neither of them, as solo musicians, could produce songs that measure up well to the Beatles. There are several examples of the two of them contributing little touches to each others songs, the little shadings that profoundly deepen the work. Without Paul, John was mostly a writer of catchy tunes, superficial fluff with great hooks. Some of Paul's solo works come close to the best of the Beatles, but for the most part, he was missing the nuances- the melodies and tenderness- of Paul's sound. A song like "Michele" is a perfect example. Paul wrote a pretty little love ballad. John heard it shortly after hearing Nina Simone sing the blues, and he suggested the bluesy "I love you, I love you, I love you," bridge. Paul writes "It's getting better all the time," and John adds "it couldn't get much worse." Paul writes "We can work it out" and John adds "Life is very short..." Or conversely, John writes about "A Day in the Life," about a man violently killing himself, and Paul adds the sweetest little lick to ever float into a song from nowhere: "I'd love to turn you on." And so on. I particularly recommend this section as a morning commute read, riding the train with Ipod in hand, keeping the songs in your ears as you read John's analysis of them.

Of course, one can't read these interviews without being constantly reminded that John was assassinated just months afterwards. It gave me chills to read some of John's philosophizing in that light, "Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic nonviolents who died violently. I can never work that out. We're pacifists, but I'm not sure what it means when you're such a pacifist that you get shot."

And the heartbreak is palpable when reading of the pride John took in stepping out of the action and becoming a full time father to Sean. "Here we are: I'm going to be forty, Sean's going to be five. Isn't it great! We survived!"

Primary source
John Lennon gave two interviews in particular that were extraordinary for their length, depth, and honesty. One was his famous "Lennon Remembers" interviews with Rolling Stone in 1970, and the other was this one, shortly before his death in 1980. Lennon was a complex man, and it is interesting to compare his attitudes among the two milestone interviews. Yet this one (conducted over several days) stands alone for its insights into Lennon's personal life, his relationship with Yoko, his philosophising, and his song-by-song discussion of his work, both with the Beatles and afterwards. It offers an unprecedented glimpse into his mindset and outlook at the time of his death, filled with the usual engaging Lennon wit and wisdom. Lennon comes across not just as a vital source of information about his own life and career but as an interesting conversationalist, period. We are also treated to Sheff's brief glimpses of Lennon and Ono at work on their "Double Fantasy" album. This book is an important document for anyone interested in the man or his music.