Fuck Yeah John & Yoko

wentintoadream:

One early morning in the summer of 1980, I woke up with “Let Me Count The Ways” ringing in my head. I called John who was then in Bermuda and played it over the phone. “How d’you like it?” “I really like it. It’s beautiful”. “How about you writing one with a Robert Browning line and we’ll have portraits of us as Elizabeth and Robert on the cover?” (This needs a little explaining. John and I always thought, among many others things, that we were maybe the reincarnation of Robert and Liz. So he immediately knew what I was talking about). We discussed then about Double Fantasy cover that it should be two portraits, one of Elizabeth and the other of Robert, only the faces would be ours. John thought we should look very prim and proper with just our hands coming out of the paintings and holding in the middle, the funny touch. We both laughed. “Okay then, just tell downstairs (our office) to send me the collection of Robert Browning and let’s see what happens.” It wasn’t necessary, however, to send the collection to Bermuda. John called me that afternoon “Hey, you won’t believe this!” He explained that he was watching the TV, a fifties film of a baseball player. In the film, John saw the girlfriend send a poem to her baseball player, a poem which was one by Robert Browning called “Grow Old Beside Me”. “Can you believe that?…so anyway, this is my version”. John proudly played his song over the phone. That’s how our two songs happened.

To us, these two songs were the backbone of Double Fantasy, and we kept discussing how we could arrange them. For John, “Grow Old With Me” was one that would be a standard, the kind that they would play in church every time a couple gets married. It was horns and symphony time. But we were working against deadline for the Christmas release of the album, kept holding “Grow Old With Me” to the end, and finally decided it was better to leave the song for “Milk And Honey” so we won’t do a rush job.

December 25, ‘80, I discovered that I received a Christmas present from John which he had bought and had it held as a surprise for me. It was a portrait and an original handwriting of Elizabeth Browning framed side by side. Sean received an Akita puppy, and named her Merry as in Merry Christmas. It was a cold day, and I remember Sean’s thoughtful voice explaining to me how he named her Merry. Sean also received a watch inscribed in the back from Dad and Mom, which disappeared later.

“Grow Old With Me” was a song John made several cassettes of, as we discussed the arrangements for it. Everybody around us knew how important those cassettes were. They were in safekeeping, some in our bedroom, some in our cassette file, and some in a vault. All of them disappeared since then except the one on this record. It may be that it was meant to be this way, since the version that was left to us was John’s last recording. The one John and I recorded together in our bedroom with a piano and a rhythm box.

From ‘81 to ‘83, it was as though Sean and I were standing in a snowfield surrounded by human wolves, who claimed themselves “close friends” and meanwhile raped and desecrated John’s body in front of our eyes. We saw beautiful rainbows behind the black forest and people calling us with love from the distance, but there was no way to let them know what was happening. And Sean and I decided to call the rainbow to us by sharing our song with you.

Happy birthday, John. God bless our love.

October 9, ‘83. N.Y.C. y.o.