My Day with John Lennon
By: Tom Zimberoff
Tags: Rock, Music, Photojournalism, The Beatles, John Lennon

John Lennon himself answered my nine o’clock knock on the door, still full as a tick. My mind’s eye expected to see one familiar guise or another of John the Beatle; you know, from “mop-top” to hirsute hippie. I was startled to see that his locks had been mowed to a bristle broom with abbreviated mutton chop sideburns. It wasn’t a look that would last; not on him anyway. David Bowie’s similar hedgehog coiffure, orange in the guise of Ziggy Stardust, took off in the 70s, ushering in the era of the mullet. It’s only relevant to me because, other than May Pang’s personal photographs of John, mine are the only others from his bad haircut days, giving them the stamp of the Lost Weekend.

John invited me in. That Liverpudlian lingo! Those round and wire-rimmed tinted glasses! I tried not to act starstruck. He was not much shorter than my six feet, but wearing colorfully embroidered cowboy boots, giving him an extra inch or so. He wore a black cashmere sportcoat over a knitted black turtleneck sweater and bell-bottom blues; jeans that is, with tiny flowers and butterflies appliquéd on the exaggerated wide cuffs.

Lennon pulled himself together quickly for the interview, considering how many empties were littered around the house; evidence of the previous night’s debauchery. Spliffs were lined up on a coffee table, next to a note reminding John to “[buy] jeans for Julian,” written in broad strokes with a Sharpie on the back of a catalog. The musicians, with whom he had apparently stayed up all night, had all taken off but one. I met Jesse Ed Davis on his way out that morning. We were in the home of legendary record producer Lou Adler, who had rented the place to Lennon. Adler recorded Carole King, Jan & Dean, The Mamas & the Papas, and helped create “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But I digress.

Scumpy arrived shortly after I did, accompanied by freelance writer Jack Breschard. My job was to illustrate Lennon with his interlocutors, to shoot some black-and-white “grip-and-grin” pictures. I was also asked to shoot some color headshots, just in case, for a potential magazine cover.

Lennon made us tea. Then, throughout most of the interview, he sat on a sofa fielding questions. The topics included his approach to songwriting:

Crawdaddy: Do you ever sit down and decide, I want to write a song about such and such and then do it? John: No. Sometimes I’ll want to express something like an emotion, but that’s about as far as it goes. Generally, it’s whatever comes out, like diarrhea. I try to sneak up on myself, so I’m not too conscious of what I’m doing. If I can just open the plug, it will do itself for good or for bad, but then I don’t have to sweat over it. But I do sweat a lot, usually over trying [too hard] to do something, then I book the [recording] session. And then, BAM! There it is.

Just as suddenly that, before Scumpy and Breschard were ready to wrap up, John declared he was done.

©1973 Tom Zimberoff / Lennon with Scumpy and Breschard

I may have been a young wise-ass, but I like to think I may have saved the day by suggesting that John could finish the interview with the help of a ventriloquist’s dummy lying to his side on a table. It was one of many tchotchkes Lou Adler left lying about the furnishings of this rented house. Inspired by contemporaneous goings-on with the Nixon-Watergate scandal and the concept of deniability, I told John he could disavow any quotations that might give him second thoughts, later on, by blaming them on the dummy. He bought it! Throughout the rest of the interview, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, John kept the dummy on his lap, working its mouth up and down with a string in the back.