John Lennon: The Last Interview
On the evening of Friday, December 5th, 1980, John Lennon spoke to Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott for more than nine hours at his apartment on New York's Upper West Side and at the Record Plant recording studio. Three nights later, Lennon would be murdered as he was returning home from a mixing session. The interview had originally been scheduled to run as the cover story of the first issue of 1981, but after Lennon's killing, Cott instead wrote an obituary for Lennon and ended up using very little from their conversations. In fact, he never even fully transcribed his tape. On the 30th anniversary of Lennon's death, we present, for the first time, the full text of Lennon's last major print interview: the joyous, outrageously funny, inspiring, fearless and subversive conversation Lennon shared with us that night, as he was preparing to jump back into the limelight after five years of private life with Yoko and their young son, Sean.
"Welcome to the inner sanctum!" said John Lennon, as he greeted me with high-spirited, mock ceremoniousness in Yoko Ono's beautiful cloud-ceilinged office in their Dakota apartment. It was December 5th, 1980. I sat down on a couch next to Yoko, and she began telling me how their collaborative new album, Double Fantasy, came about: The previous spring, John and their son, Sean, were vacationing for three weeks in Bermuda while Yoko stayed home "sorting out business," as she put it. While in Bermuda, John phoned her to say that he had taken Sean to the botanical gardens and had come across a flower called a Double Fantasy. "It's a type of freesia," John would later say, "but what it means to us is that if two people picture the same image at the same time, that is the secret."
"I was at a dance club one night in Bermuda," John interrupted as he sat down on the couch, and Yoko got up to bring coffee. "Upstairs, they were playing disco, and downstairs I suddenly heard 'Rock Lobster' by the B-52's for the first time. Do you know it? It sounds just like Yoko's music, so I said to meself, 'It's time to get out the old ax and wake the wife up!'" She and John spoke on the phone every day and sang each other the songs they had composed in between calls.
By: Jonathon Cott
Source: Rolling Stone
