In his lauded career, John Lennon recorded around 400 songs. Those tracks defined a generation of music, with more than a few of them transcending any trends of the time and weaving their way into the fabric of society. Unlike many stars, such was the rapid rise of The Beatles, he spent most of his time recording those tracks as the alpha figure in the studio.
Much has been made of days when The Beatles banded together to cut their latest hits, but not so much is none of the solo days that surely offer a relative perspective of what he was really like. So, with such a lofty status attached to his name adding baggage to each studio session, how did that impact his working ways? Was he an autodidact barking orders? Did his peers shrink in his presence? Or did he take a back seat, resting on his unrivalled laurels?
Well, the producer Jack Douglas was faced with the task of getting him back among the hits as his career started to wilt. This was perhaps the most notable time to see the truest Lennon in the studio. They achieved it with the Grammy-winning Double Fantasy. And he explained to Far Out: “I had worked as an engineer on the Imagine sessions, and I had done three records with Yoko Ono, so I was familiar with them, but it was basically as good as it could get to be working with John Lennon at that time.”
Lennon was on a bounce-back, having put his ‘Lost Weekend’ behind him, and he was looking forward to the future. If anything, this made things even more daunting for Douglas. “He was just such a great person and a huge star and so humble,” he explained, illuminating a lighter side to the bespectacled Beatle. “Working with them was like making four records because we did a lot of stuff separately; have breakfast with them, then Yoko would come in and work all afternoon, and she felt more comfortable not having John around during her vocals because he was critical of her,” he adds, showcasing how he was, nevertheless, a ruthless stickler for quality.
All the same, it is notable that he was happy to do whatever was conducive to creating a great tune, gladly stepping aside if it made Yoko more comfortable, even at a time when he was desperate to be back among the hits. So, unlike the reports of being a control freak that are often cited, he simply returned home, left the talented artists who he trusted to their own devices, and returned to the studio around 6pm to work right up until midnight or later.
“He was very open to suggestion and very easy to work with,” Douglas explained. “He took direction without any problem. He would let me comp his vocals [process of cutting pieces of vocal takes together] without being in the room saying this one or that one. He left it totally up to me. A lot of trust early on, he let me do arrangements on the songs from cassettes that he gave me. I arranged Double Fantasy with the rhythm section without him even being there.”
This was far from over-the-hill laziness either. As is clear from the legacy of Double Fantasy, it stands among his best work, it’s just as Lennon had learned from a lifetime of working with a list of legends, you can’t force perfection and you have to trust the instinct of others.
At a time when he could’ve been overbearing, that took great self-awareness. As Douglas continues: “He didn’t even want the band to know it was his record they were working on, so we put together the list of musicians he wanted, and I got them rehearsing.”
“A few of the more savvy ones figured it out that was John Lennon’s album,” he explains, but even still, the freedom that Lennon had clearly given them with his material set the tone.
Aside from this selfless self-awareness and sense of creative freedom, what was he like when things got tense and he was present? “In the studio with John you had to really stay ahead of him, if you got bogged down and he was waiting to record something he would become very impatient,” Douglas counters. “So, I had to stay a few steps ahead of him.”
Alas, it was just waiting that he loathed, sensing time away from his family slipping by, not to mention the irk of lost momentum. “As long as I was doing that and the rhythm section was attentive,” Douglas says, “it all went really smooth.”
In short, the ridiculous work ethic of The Beatles is often noted as their secret weapon. However, it was a notably bohemian work ethic, built upon creative freedom, curated collaboration and playing to your peers’ strengths. Lennon was the master of this, creating singular records from a flowing form of organised effort.
