{"product_id":"days-that-ill-remember-isbn-9780307951281","title":"Days that I'll Remember","description":"\u003cb\u003eJonathan Cott met John Lennon in 1968 and was friends with him and Yoko Ono until John's death in 1980. He has kept in touch with Yoko since that time, and is one of the small group of writers who understands her profoundly positive influence on Lennon. This deeply personal book recounts the course of those friendships over the decades and provides an intimate look at two of the most astonishing cultural figures of our time. And what Jonathan Cott has to say and tell will be found nowhere else.\u003c\/b\u003eJONATHAN COTT is a contributing editor at \u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e and has written for the \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. He is the author of more than sixteen books including \u003ci\u003eDylan\u003c\/i\u003e (a biography), \u003ci\u003eConversations with Glenn Gould\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eStockhausen: Conversations with the Composer\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBack to a Shadow in the Night: Music Writings and Interviews—1968-2001\u003c\/i\u003e and is the co-editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Ballad of John and Yoko\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Welcome to the inner sanctum!” said John Lennon, as he greeted me with  high-spirited, mock ceremoniousness at the entrance to Yoko Ono’s office  in their ground-floor apartment in the Dakota—the quasi-Gothic,  castle-like edifice with its gables, gargoyles, and wrought-iron gates  on New York City’s Upper West Side. I removed my shoes and entered an  iridescent, high-ceilinged, white-carpeted room, and Yoko, who was  seated at a large gold-inlaid desk, got up to say hello.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was  Friday, December 5, 1980. Rolling Stone was preparing a cover story on  John and Yoko for its first issue of 1981, and I had come to interview  John on the occasion of the release of his and Yoko’s new album, Double  Fantasy. It had been a long while since they had talked to the press.  With the birth of their son, Sean, in 1975, John and Yoko had undertaken  what they called “the Spring Cleaning of our minds” and had ceased  stoking what Joni Mitchell once referred to as the “star maker  machinery.” For five years, they made no records, created no new music  or artworks, and made no public appearances. And while Yoko looked after  the family business, John became a self-styled househusband who spent  his time taking care of his son and engaging in domestic chores. One  thinks of the Greek historian Herodotus’s description of some of the  remarkable customs practiced by the Egyptians in the fifth-century B.C.:  “Women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home  and do the weaving.” The Lenonos—to use the name of John and Yoko’s  music-publishing company—seem to have run an ancient Egyptian household!  Or a topsy-turvy nursery-rhyme one, where, as John informed us in his  song “Cleanup Time,” the queen is in the counting house “counting out  the money,” while the king stays in the kitchen “making bread and  honey.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn an interview with journalist Chet Flippo, the media  consultant Elliot Mintz—who had developed a close friendship with John  and Yoko in 1971—spoke of a night when John phoned him in Los Angeles.  “It was very late,” Mintz recalled, “and John said, ‘An incredible thing  happened to me today, Elliot,’ and he said it with such reverence that I  thought he was going to divulge a really significant spiritual  experience. So I propped myself up and said, ‘Yes?’ And John said, ‘I  baked my first loaf of bread and you can’t believe how perfectly it  rose, and I’ve taken a Polaroid photo of it and I think I can get it out  to you by messenger tonight.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMintz explained that John and  Yoko would use a courier service instead of the mail because people  would pocket their letters or packages as souvenirs when they saw either  one of their names on them. “So someone would pick up the  communication,” Mintz elaborated, “and get on an airplane and fly with  the communication wherever it was going, and then hand the communication  to the person it was going to.” Mintz received the Polaroid. A week or  two later, he flew to New York and stopped by the Dakota. “We were  sitting around the kitchen one night,” Mintz said, “and John brought out  an object enclosed in silver foil. It was a piece of the bread that he  had saved me from his first loaf. And we broke bread together.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn  had stepped outside the inner sanctum for a few minutes, and I sat down  next to Yoko on an enormous pearl-white plush couch. In this gently  lit, immaculate office, I noticed a black upright piano and, on a wall  above it, a painted portrait showing John and Sean, both with  shoulder-length hair, sitting on a beach in Bermuda; an ivory-and-jade  inlaid oak box resting on a coffee table; and several glass vitrines  containing ancient Egyptian artifacts, which Yoko valued for their  beauty and magical properties.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen I looked up, and, as if I  were rising—rather than falling—into a dream, I suddenly realized that  the entire ceiling was in fact a supernal trompe l’oeil sky filled with  floating and drifting gossamer clouds. “Above us only sky.” And I was  immediately reminded of the open letter written by John and Yoko and  published on the back page of The New York Times on May 27, 1979.  Entitled “A Love Letter from John and Yoko to People Who Ask Us What,  When, and Why,” it had concluded: “Remember, our silence is a silence of  love and not of indifference. Remember, we are writing in the sky  instead of on paper—that’s our song. Lift your eyes and look up in the  sky . . . and you will see that you are walking in the sky, which  extends to the ground. We are all part of the sky, more than of the  ground.” And although my head was still in the clouds, ensorcelled by  cerulean light, I slowly brought myself back down to earth as Yoko began  explaining to me how the album Double Fantasy came to be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  previous spring, she recounted, John had, with her blessing, chartered  the Megan Jaye, a forty-three-foot sloop based in Newport, Rhode Island,  and set sail on June 4 with a four-member crew for the 635-mile trip to  Bermuda. He had previously learned to sail on Long Island Sound where  he and Yoko had a second home in Cold Spring Harbor, and for a long time  had harbored a desire to undertake a long sea voyage. He would be  turning forty on October 9, and, as he wrote in “Borrowed Time”—a song  that he composed after the completion of his trip—“Now I am older \/ The  future is brighter and now is the hour.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe plan was for Sean to  fly with a nanny to Bermuda after John had arrived there, and father  and son would then spend a three-week vacation together, swimming and  sailing, while Yoko stayed at home “sorting out business,” as she put  it. But midway into John’s navigational journey through the Bermuda  Triangle, a storm broke out with gale-force winds and twenty-foot-high  waves. The captain and crew fell ill, and John, not prone to  seasickness, had to take over as helmsman for six hours. Buffeted by the  winds and pummeled by water, he later described himself as having felt  like a Viking “screaming sea chanteys and shouting at the gods.”  Reflecting on his adventure, John would later remark to me: “You get in a  fucking boat in a 110-mile-per-hour gale and you really find out what’s  real or not.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe rented a stucco villa in the idyllically named  Fairylands on the outskirts of Hamilton, and every day he and Sean would  go swimming and build sand castles on the beach. It was here that they  ran into a woman artist who mustered the courage to approach them to ask  if she could paint John and Sean together. Surprisingly, John agreed.  For several days, he and Sean went to her studio to pose for the  portrait. When John returned to New York, he presented it to Yoko as a  surprise gift, and it was this painting that I had noticed hanging on  the wall above the piano in Yoko’s office.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day, John took  Sean to the Bermuda Botanical Gardens where, under a cedar tree, he came  across some delicate white-and-yellow flowers called a Double Fantasy.  “It’s a type of freesia,” John explained, “but what it means to us is  that if two people picture the same image at the same time, that is the  secret.” And then one night he wandered into Hamilton and, curious to  find out what kind of music people were listening to, he went  club-hopping—something he hadn’t done since the mid-1970s in Los  Angeles—and ended up at a spot called Disco 40. “Upstairs, they were  playing disco,” John would later tell me, “but downstairs I suddenly  heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52s 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!’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn began writing songs  at a rapid pace. “Woman” apparently took him about fifteen minutes, and  in one of his new songs, “Dear Yoko,” he referred to his harrowing sea  voyage, telling her that even in the midst of the tempest, her spirit  had been watching over him. Simultaneously, Yoko, in New York, had also  started writing songs. As if to confirm her idea that, as she once  remarked, “you can assemble a painting with a person in the North Pole  over a phone, like playing chess,” she and John began to speak on the  phone every day and sang each other what they had composed in between  calls. During one of their conversations, John sang her “Beautiful Boy,”  and Yoko said, “I wrote a song, too, it’s called ‘Beautiful Boys.’ Let  me sing it to you.” And when John came back to New York, Yoko asked him,  “Do you want to do it?,” and John answered “Yes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e•••\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn  had now returned to the inner sanctum, and Yoko said that she’d be  leaving us for a while so that we could chat. As John sat down on the  couch, I told him that Yoko had informed me how Double Fantasy had come  about, and observed that this was probably the first album ever created  over the telephone. “Yeh,” John said, laughing, “and it’s a play. It’s a  heart play, with the emphasis on ear in the middle of that word!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’ve  heard that you’ve had a guitar hanging on the wall behind your bed for  the past five or six years,” I said to him, “and that you only recently  took it down to play on Double Fantasy. Is that true?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I bought  this beautiful electric guitar round about the period I got back with  Yoko and had the baby,” he replied. “It’s not a normal guitar, it  doesn’t have a body, it’s just an arm and this tubelike,  toboggan-looking thing, and you can lengthen the top for the balance of  it if you’re sitting or standing up. I played it a little, and then just  hung it up behind the bed, but I’d look at it every now and then,  because it had never done a professional thing, it had never really been  played. I didn’t want to hide it the way one would hide an instrument  because it was too painful to look at—like Artie Shaw went through a big  thing and never played his clarinet again. But I used to look at it and  think, ‘Will I ever pull it down?’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“On top of the guitar I’d  placed a wooden number nine that some kid had sent me and a dagger Yoko  had given me—a dagger made out of a bread knife from the American Civil  War to cut away the bad vibes, to cut away the past symbolically. It was  just like a picture that hangs there but you never really see, and then  recently I realized, ‘Oh, goody! I can finally find out what this  guitar is all about,’ and I took it down and used it in making Double  Fantasy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“So that guitar wasn’t gently weeping behind you for five years?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mine never weeped,” he replied. “Mine screams or it’s not on at all!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’ve  been playing Double Fantasy a lot,” I started to say to John  overexcitedly, “and it’s fantastic, but I’ve only heard it for the past  three or four days and I wish I had it before—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How are you?”  John interrupted, and looked at me with a time- and interview-stopping  smile. “You don’t have to rush, we’ve got hours and hours and hours.  It’s been like a reunion for us these last few weeks. The record’s  already up there, it’s already passed the test of whatever it’s supposed  to pass, the public have accepted it and bought it. I’m glad, Yoko’s  glad, we’re glad to work together again and talk to the press.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You haven’t minded answering all the usual questions?” I asked him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s  a game,” he said, “but the whole of life is a game, isn’t it? But is  the implication then that the game is immoral? I mean, are we supposed  to be very serious or just a little serious about it? But it is a very  serious concern—a lot of money is put into an album, a lot of sweat and  blood . . . and then having to put up with the garbage again, right? So  we’re doing it because we want to do it, and we think we can have fun  with it, and people want a record, obviously, because otherwise they  wouldn’t have bought it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We recently did a very nice interview  with a very nice reporter—I really enjoyed him, and he was an  intelligent guy, and I don’t want to hurt him in any way. But when he  described me in his article, I realized he hadn’t seen me at all.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In what sense?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“He  described me as wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Now, I haven’t worn  wire-rimmed glasses since 1973. You see the glasses I’m wearing? They’re  normal, plastic, blue-frame glasses.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Just so that I don’t fall  into the same trap,” I said to him, “maybe you could describe to the  magazine’s readers what you’re wearing right now.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“O.K.,” John  began. “Tell them that he’s wearing needle-cord pants, and the same  black cowboy boots he’d had made in Nudie’s in 1973—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What’s Nudie’s?” I asked him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s  the famous cowboy shop in Hollywood where Elvis got his gold lamé suit.  It’s the place with the bull horns on the front, and everybody knows  it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Except me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Now you do . . . And he’s wearing a  Calvin Klein sweater and a torn Mick Jagger T‑shirt that he got when the  Stones toured in 1970 or so. I think that it belonged to a roadie and  someone gave it to me. And around his neck is a small, three-part  diamond heart necklace that he bought as a makeup present after an  argument with Yoko many years ago and that she later gave back to him in  a kind of ritual. Will that do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Thanks! You’ve saved me.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Anyway,  it’s been fun talking to people, and it’s fun having your picture  taken . . . well, not so much having it taken, but it’s fun to see them,  and in ten years you still have them. We’ve seen Ethan Russell, who  took photos of us in 1969, and Annie Leibovitz was here. She took my  first Rolling Stone cover photo, and she’s doing her life. It’s been fun  seeing everyone we used to know and doing it all again—we’ve all  survived. When did we first meet?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I met you and Yoko in London on September 17, 1968,” I told him, remembering the precise date of the first of many encounters.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305539358949,"sku":"NP9780307951281","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307951281.jpg?v=1767724781","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/days-that-ill-remember-isbn-9780307951281","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}