STEPPING OUTT h e L o s t T o u r

Mark Cunningham

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Publication

Text & design copyright © 2015

Mark Cunningham / Liveculture Music Limited

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“I’d like to get up on stage with Yoko and a good band and playthese songs...”John Lennon,

September 1980

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ON THE EVE OF HIS TRAGIC ASSASSINATIONIN 1980, JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO WERE PLANNING TO TOUR THE WORLD WITH A LIVE PRODUCTION YEARS AHEAD OF ITS TIME – ONE THAT WAS DESTINED TO INCLUDE A PUBLIC REUNION OF ALL FOUR BEATLES.

IN THIS LONG-FORM ARTICLE, MARK CUNNINGHAM TALKS TO THE PEOPLE INVOLVED AND UNRAVELS THE MISSING PIECES OF AN EVERLASTING LEGACY...

In the second half of 1980, five years after turning his back on the rock star rat race in favour of raising his son Sean with wife Yoko Ono, John Lennon was making a profound comeback and the maverick couple were play-ing the media circus game to the full. For the first time since 1975, Lennon re-turned to the recording studio to create a fresh body of work, and with the help of co-producer Jack Douglas and a crack band of session musicians, the result was Double Fantasy. The first album release on Geffen Records, David Geffen’s newly-founded label, its songs – including ‘Watching The Wheels’, ‘Beautiful Boy’ and the timeless ‘Woman’ – were ar-ranged back-to-back by the husband and wife duo to form an intimate ‘heart play’. Although much has been documented about the star’s final creative spurt before his tragic assassination on December 8 that year, little

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has been written about the chapter that was supposed to follow: John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s 1981 world tour – provisionally titled One World, One People. Even less detail has been divulged about the plans for the tour’s production... until now. In an interview with Playboy magazine’s David Sheff, a month before the release of Double Fantasy’s trailer single, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, Lennon was asked if he might con-sider returning to the live stage. He said: “I wouldn’t have believed it a month ago. But then I thought, ‘What the hell, why not?’ If it’s enjoyable and if it

doesn’t become something that one doesn’t want to do, ‘cause it’s nice to get up and sing sometimes, like it’s nice to make mu-sic. I don’t want to get mixed up in deals and business and spin-offs and pressures, though, because I don’t need that anymore. Once was enough.

“But sure, I’d like to get up on stage with Yoko and a good

band and play these songs, and really do ‘em, be-

cause the band’s hot as shit. They just came off the album and they were all good – we’ve got the good feeling

among ourselves. So it would be great.

Above: The Double Fantasy team – (back row L-R) guitarist Hugh McCracken, drummer Andy Newmark, John & Yoko, producer Jack Douglas and percussionist Arthur Jenkins, Jr; (front row) bass player Tony Levin, guitarist Earl Slick and keyboard player George Small.

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“I’m just a little nervous about all that goes on around it. But I think we can proba-bly handle it a bit better this time.” Days later, on October 9 1980 (Lennon’s 40th birthday and his son’s fifth) it was announced to the press by the couple’s as-sistant, Fred Seaman, that “next spring, John and Yoko will be touring Japan, USA and Europe”. Having been granted a Green Card in

1976 after a long and highly publicised battle with the United States Government, Lennon could now travel the world and return to New York without fear of deporta-tion. Allegedly, South Africa, Australia and Canada were also to have been included on the tour itinerary. Jack Douglas, who first worked with the star as second engineer on 1971’s Imagine album, confirmed that, “John pictured a big

Top row (L-R): Production manager Henry Smith, set designer Mark Fisher and Britannia Row’s Bryan Grant. Above (L-R): Promoter Harvey Goldsmith, label boss David Geffen and the BBC’s Richard Skinner, who revealed Paul McCartney’s plans to work again with Lennon.

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production tour... he definitely planned a tre-mendous production with new arrangements of Beatles songs he felt he never got right.”

NEW... AND OLD One can speculate endlessly about the tour’s set list, which would inevitably have varied from show to show. Lennon’s recent renewed interest in his Beatles catalogue, along with private comments to those closest to him, suggested that new, specially arranged versions of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Help!’ and ‘I Am The Wal-rus’ – one of the few ‘Fab’ oldies with which

he consistently associated himself – were to have made the selection. Fifties standards such as Little Richard’s ‘Rip It Up’ and Gene Vincent’s ‘Be- Bop-A-Lula’ were also likely to have made the set in acknowledgment of Lennon’s rock’n’roll roots. According to writer Castor Dekker, Yoko Ono revealed after her husband’s death that, “John said, ‘We have to sing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’”. Solo classics ‘Imagine’, ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and ‘Instant Karma’ were A-list con-tenders, as were the then-current ‘Starting

Lennon’s final appearance before a concert audience was as the special guest of Elton John at Madison Square Garden, New York on November 28 1974.

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“Talk of a possible tour seemed to increase on an almost daily basis...” Earl Slick

John and Yoko on the streets of Manhattan in 1980. “You know I could walk down the street and people say, ‘Hi John! How are ya? How’s the baby?’” Lennon told the BBC’s Andy Peebles.

Over’, ‘Watching The Wheels’ and ‘Wom-an’, and even newer songs that had been set aside for the couple’s next projected album release, Milk And Honey, including ‘Nobody Told Me’, ‘Borrowed Time’ and Ono’s disco-flavoured ‘Walking On Thin Ice’ – the last track that the pair worked on. A specially-written ‘Nutopian’ anthem,

‘One World, One People’, is said to have been earmarked as the set’s finale jam at every show. Guitarist Earl Slick, who had performed on Double Fantasy and ‘Fame’, Lennon’s 1975 collaboration with David Bowie, says: “John was constantly referring to The Beatles and his early love of rock’n’roll

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during those sessions, often in a jokey way. As the album was progressing and John was feeling more confident in the people he was making this music with, talk of a possible tour seemed to increase on an almost daily basis. “The idea was that in the January, we’d complete some tracks that were left over from Double Fantasy and finish off a new album. Once that was in the can, we would go out on a tour. Most, if not all, of the main musicians were formally asked about our availability at the very end of the ses-sions in the September.” Ahead of the tour, Lennon’s first live ap-pearance anywhere since his guest spot on

the ‘Salute To Sir Lew Grade’ TV show in April 1975 was due to be filmed in Hawaii in mid-December 1980 as part of a Mike Douglas TV special – the decision to eventu-

ally turn down the invitation may have proved to be fatal. Also, to appease fans whose territories were not to be included on the tour itinerary, one of the Lennons’ concerts at New York City’s Madison Square Garden – the venue that hosted Lennon’s famous guest

spot with Elton John in November 1974 – was to have been broadcast live via satellite to TV stations and possibly also cinemas around the world. This would come 14 years after The

“I was trying to show John that he could self-promote his own shows using local promoters and not involve an agency...” Henry Smith

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Beatles helped to pioneer the medium for their performance of ‘All You Need Is Love’ during 1967’s ‘Our World’, the first global TV production.

ONE WORLD: THE PRODUCTIONAccording to concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith, in the autumn of 1980, he was contacted in London by David Geffen with the aim of promoting a John Lennon world tour – UK dates would inevitably have in-cluded Earls Court. “I was booking Earls Court for most of the major artists I promoted at the time, such as Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and David Bowie – so that would have made a lot of sense,” says Goldsmith. Simultaneously, on the other side of the Atlantic, Henry Smith, a freelance tour manager who cut his industry teeth during the 1960s and early ‘70s whilst working for The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin through Mickie Most’s RAK Music, was privately approached by Jack Douglas.

Together with his colleague, Dick Hansen, with whom he had worked on numerous Aerosmith and Roberta Flack tours, he was consulted about putting together a live schedule for the Lennons. Smith reveals: “Jack Douglas called me and mentioned that John was going on the road and needed people to run his tour. At that time I was out with the Beatlemania stage show, working with Leber Krebs who produced the show, and managed bands like Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and AC/DC. “I had a brief meeting with Jack and John at the Record Plant in New York to get acquainted and talk about the possibilities of his touring. John mentioned that as far as sound and lights went, he knew how to turn on a radio and switch on the lights at home! “John was keen on getting Bill Graham to promote the tour and also be his booking agent, but I was trying to show him that he could self-promote his own shows using local promoters and not involve an agency, making the whole thing more lucrative.

It was during a family visit to Japan in 1977 that John Lennon and Yoko Ono first made contact with representatives of Yamaha. Having been impressed with a black custom acoustic gui-tar that the com-pany had made for Paul Simon a few years earlier, he took the opportu-nity of discussing his own require-ments for a special instrument, when he met Yamaha staff at a hotel in Tokyo.

Lennon wanted his guitar to have a bigger body that Simon’s and, after viewing a range of Yamaha’s stock models it was decided that his physical design would be based on the CJ-52 ‘country jumbo’ mod-el. A lover of Oriental art, Lennon asked the Yamaha team if it would be possible to featured an inlaid curling red dragon (to mark his birth year, 1940, the Year of the Dragon) on a black body, using the Maki-e technique of colouring with gold and silver powders, and lacquering with materials ex-tracted from the Urushi tree. To explain his ideas clearly to Mr Terumi Nakamoto of the Yama-ha custom shop, he made a basic sketch that included the Chinese

letter for ‘dragon’ on the head-stock and the Tomoe (yin & yang) symbol just behind the bridge. After carefully studying Len-non’s design, it became apparent

to Yamaha’s luthiers that this would be a major challenge. Never before had the Maki-e tech-nique been used in professional guitar manufacturing, and it would require precise steam kiln-ing to ensure that the natural lac-

THE YAMAHA SPECIAL

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quers bonded correctly to the guitar body. The main problem with this method was that the humidity involved in the bonding process might damage the wood. A week after presenting his design to Yamaha, the party met once again, where-upon the construction challenges were explained to the former Beatle. Lennon, being Lennon, insisted that the company find a way around these technical diffi-culties as his heart was set on the art-work. Yamaha then set about finishing the basic guitar construction and experiment-ed with different coating thicknesses and humidity levels before they produced a guitar that could satisfy Lennon. If the guitar’s performance was compromised in anyway, it was in its low-end projection, but the final result was an instrument that sounded and looked absolutely unique. Finally presented to Lennon in Decem-ber 1977 and costing US$10,000, it was – at least at the time – the most expensive guitar ever made. He recorded several home demos with it during his ‘house-husband’ period and lat-er used it on a number of the 1980 Double Fantasy/Milk And Honey recording ses-sions, notably ‘Woman’, while Earl Slick played it on ‘Beautiful Boy’. It is alleg-edly the last acoustic guitar that Lennon ever played. Along with other Lennon-owned guitars, including his Les Paul Junior, resonator and Fender Telecaster, the Yamaha special was a permanent exhibit in the John Len-non Museum at the Saitama Super Arena in Chuo-ku, Saitama, Japan from October 9 2000, the 60th anniversary of Lennon’s birth, until September 30 2010. It remains part of the Lennon Estate.

“I had mentioned to U.S. promoters like Jam Productions in Chicago and Lewis Messina in Texas that if they were interested in dates, I might arrange their involvement. Naturally, Messina was more than interest-ed, once he realised I wasn’t pulling his leg.” From the outset, it was Smith and Hansen’s intention to bring in Britannia Row Productions as the worldwide sound and lighting vendor (“for all the hard goods”), with John Conk co-heading the production management role alongside Smith. A PA system comprising of Mar-tin Audio stacks and Altec sub-bass enclosures, along with Midas con-soles, would almost certainly have been specified. In those pre-automated days, Britannia Row’s default lighting would have included PARs and ACLs. Had any specific sound engineers and lighting designers been put in the frame? “Not by myself,” says Smith. “John or Bryan Grant might have been considering people,

but it was premature as we started our in-volvement just before Thanksgiving and the tour was being considered for May [through July].”

A FISHER DESIGNFresh from designing both Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July/Masterblaster tour and Pink Floyd’s ground-breaking The Wall shows, set designer Mark Fisher was invited into the

inner sanctum to ap-ply his own creative skills. Says Smith: “It might have been Dick Hansen or Perry Conley from Britannia Row who mentioned Mark to me. It was accepted immedi-ately as he was the leader in stage de-sign as far as I was concerned. “Perry called

Mark and offered some of our ideas, and he left London that night, drawing up a design to show us in New York the following day.” Fisher – who sadly passed away in 2013 – recalled in an interview three years earlier that it was, in fact, Bryan Grant who played ‘the fixer’ in getting him involved. However,

“The design process was well under way. I stayed [in New York] several days, made sketches and proposals which were favourably received...” Mark Fisher14

Grant’s further activity on the brief project was prevented by his work with Stevie Wonder. “John’s people contacted Britannia Row and it therefore ended up with me in a room with them because of the then-recent production of The Wall,” commented Fisher. “I made the trip to New York around late November/early December and everything was arranged by Bryan. “Although it wouldn’t be true to say that the tour planning was at an advanced stage, the design process was well under way. I stayed there several days, made sketches and proposals which were favour-ably received, and then returned to London two days before John’s death.“ Fisher insisted that whilst he “met with a man who was acting as their producer”, he did not meet either of the Lennons during his New York visit. He added: “That was a huge pity in hindsight. Looking past the tragedy of John’s

death, I never imagined that the sketches I made in New York were anything more than the start of a process, or even that the process would end with me being the designer of the show. Creating a show is a long journey and we had barely started when John was shot. “I still have the original sketches in my archive, but they might be misleading as to what was in John’s mind, because they were only the starting point of the conversa-tion.” Jack Douglas says that the initial scenic ideas came from Lennon himself – his rough sketches of a stage included a device that suggested large crab-like arms with camer-as mounted on them. Fisher’s proposal mod-ified these with “some articulated booms above the stage with followspots in them”. Five large video displays were also fea-tured, and Lennon visualised that content for video projection would be custom-designed for each city on the tour, notably featuring

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The Lennons and John’s second son Sean, in 1975 and early 1980.

Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Beautiful Boy’, a love song for his son Sean.

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footage of John and Yoko walking amongst local people, thus emphasising the ‘One World, One People’ theme. Such a concept would have been many years ahead of its time, and Mark Fisher was poised to make this a practical reality. Commenting on Douglas’ recollections, Smith says: “It was definitely going to be a complex set for the times, and I know that John was very hot on the idea of hiding all the backline amplification to make the stage ‘cleaner’ – something that is now common-place. “I don’t remember all the details of that drawing, but arms and at least five video screens were in there, moving in and out – both new concepts for that period. I believe that what Jack remembers is the total con-cept of both John’s ideas and Mark Fisher’s vision of what he knew was technically achievable.“

THAT FATEFUL NIGHTWe all know how this story ends. Jack Douglas was at the Record Plant Studio with the Lennons on the evening of December 8. After working that night on Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice‘ for a potential New Year sin-gle release, the team planned to reconvene the next day for further work on the next [posthumous] album, Milk And Honey. “We were so excited, everything was wrapped,” says Douglas. “John got in the elevator with Yoko and said, ‘See you at nine in the morning.’ He had a big smile on his face. He was buzzing.” Of course, that meeting never happened. At 10.52pm, when John and Yoko’s limo dropped them at the entrance of their Dakota Building apartment at 1 West 72nd Street, Mark David Chapman – an obsessed, paranoid schizophrenic stalker – pumped four bullets into Lennon’s upper

Lennon’s mid-’70s lover and confidante May Pang actively encouraged a renewed friendship with Paul McCartney. Their plans to visit McCartney at New Orleans’ Sea Saint Studios during the 1975 sessions for Wings’ Venus And Mars album were halted when Lennon suddenly returned to wife Yoko after more than 18 months apart.

torso. The legend was rushed to the Roo-sevelt Hospital and pronounced dead at 11.07pm (Eastern Standard Time). The official cause of death was shock produced by massive haemorrhaging. Just like JFK’s assassination, Neil Arm-strong’s “one small step for Man” or Princess Diana’s tragic car crash, everyone of a certain age remembers the impact of hear-ing the news of John Lennon’s death. Henry Smith recalls his moment vividly: “Like so many peo-ple, I went through a variety of emotions, including absolute disbeilef. I was with Roberta Flack and her band in New Zealand at the time; Dick Hansen was also there. Roberta called me in my room and said John had been shot and died. “Roberta shared a floor at the Dakota with John and Yoko. The Dakota staff alerted her to what had gone on. At that time they didn’t know if it was a terrorist attack on him or not, and wanted her to be aware. “She had a show that night and sang ‘Imagine’ in his memory. We had to go out and buy a copy of the record for her so that she could jog her memory. We all joined in that night and not a dry eye was seen in the house.”

A REHEATED SOUFFLÉ…?Political assassinations and untimely deaths of public figures never cease to shock the world, but Chapman’s senseless murder of John Lennon remains to this day the most heartbreaking waste of life ever experi-enced within the artistic community – argua-bly rivalled only by the passing of Michael Jackson in 2009. If he had lived, one can only imagine how the proposed tour would have reposi-tioned Lennon as a performing artist and a

major influence on the 1980s. As relationships between the former Beatles were less frosty in 1980 than at any time since their break-up 10 years earlier, it may not be foolish to assume that at some point on the 1981 tour, a brief reun-

ion – possibly during the filmed Madison Square Garden show’s inevitable encore – would have been very possible. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that this was certainly on the cards. Ten days before his death, as part of a deposition by Apple Corps against the producers of the Beatlemania theatre show (whose team, ironically, included Henry Smith), Lennon categorically stated: “I and the three other former Beatles have plans to stage a reun-ion concert.” Footage of the reunion would have pro-vided the natural, final chapter of ‘The Long

“The studio they wanted to use was booked out, so they didn’t work together

and they were hoping to meet up in the New Year...” Richard Skinner

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“The studio they wanted to use was booked out, so they didn’t work together and they were hoping to meet up in the New Year...”Richard Skinner

And Winding Road’, the band’s official documentary spearheaded by Apple Corps’ Neil Aspinall, which eventually grew into the epic Anthology project of 1995. Lennon’s fraught relationship with Paul McCartney had hit a positive streak during 1974 when the former was in the middle of his love affair with May Pang. In fact, things had cooled to the extent that Lennon planned to drop in on his old bandmate’s sessions for Wings’ Venus And Mars album in New Orleans during February 1975 – an idea scuppered, to Macca’s deep dis-appointment, by the reconciliation with Yoko Ono that led to the birth of baby Sean. But thoughts of working once again with McCartney were never far from Lennon’s mind in the intervening years. British radio presenter Richard Skinner, who was then working at BBC Radio 1, recalls a profound conversation: “I’d gone to sleep with the radio on and woke up at 4.00am, and they were an-nouncing that John Lennon had been shot. I leapt out of my bed and jumped into my car, and I drove into Radio 1 Newsbeat. I suddenly see in my phone book that I’ve got Paul McCartney’s home telephone num-ber. I thought about it because it’s a kind of

nerve-wracking and responsible thing to do but I did phone the number. “Somebody answered the phone. I asked if they knew about John and they didn’t, and so I passed it on and said, could Paul phone back to Newsbeat because obvious-ly we would value a comment, but appreci-ate that he may not be able to. “Suddenly, one of the [office staff] came through and said, ‘Richard, Paul McCa-rtney’s on the phone’. So I went to the

editor’s office and shut the door, and had a long conver-sation with Paul who wouldn’t go on air. He was so upset. “We talked about John and about plans that he and John had to try and write music together again, that would have been happening that December. But the studio they wanted to use was booked out, so they didn’t work

together and they were hoping to meet up in the New Year. So John Lennon shouldn’t have even been in New York on December 8.” That Chapman slayed a husband and a father was tragic in itself, but in the hearts and minds of millions, he also killed The Dream. Since 2012, prisoner 81A3860 has remained confined in Wende Correc-tional Facility in Alden, New York. Let it be.

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Photography: Lenono Music; Bob Gruen; Camera Press; Rex Features; Trinity Mirror;

Stufish; Rock Cellar; Mark Cunningham, Liveculture Group Media Archive

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