RINGO: THE MESSAGE JOHN LEFT FOR ME
He fled to LA, was reunited with Macca and found new happiness. But his wife had other ideas...
be an almighty row? Absolutely not. When musicians get together and conversation runs out, they do what they always do. They play. It was an ice-breaker.
John invited Paul and Linda to visit the house he and May had just moved into and the McCartneys arrived the following day. After lunch, Paul told John he’d seen Yoko in London, and she’d told him if her husband wanted to get back with her, he’d “have to work at it”.
It was ironic. Paul was acting as mediator between John and the woman who helped break up The Beatles. Returning to New York, John rented an apartment for May and himself. But Yoko was never far away, covering for him by telling May that her husband had stayed the night in a spare room at the Dakota, when actually he’d been with another girl. It amused her.
Now more friendly and sociable than he’d been in years, John welcomed guests to his and May’s new home. Paul and Linda turned up on their first night there.
“We spent two or three nights together,” John said later, “talking about the old days. It was cool seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool”.
Mick Jagger came too, telling May it was easier to see John now he didn’t have to negotiate Yoko first.
Then came a call from Paul. He was going to New Orleans to record his next album. Did John and May want to join him and Linda? “What would you think if I began writing with Paul again?” John asked May.
“Are you kidding?” she said, delighted. To this day May believes that had John joined Paul in New Orleans, they wouldn’t have been able to resist working together again. It never happened. Instead, Yoko rang to say she had discovered a new way of quitting smoking through hypnosis. John should try it too. The hypnotism would take place at the Dakota. But when May asked to go, too, John refused.
“I’ll see you later,” he said as he left one Friday. When he hadn’t returned by that night, May phoned Yoko, asking to speak to him.
John was sleeping, Yoko replied. He would call her back the following day. He didn’t. Saturday and Sunday came and went with no SIR Ringo Starr has revealed John Lennon left a message for him on a long-lost demo tape, recorded shortly before his death.
He has teamed up with Sir Paul McCartney to record a version of Grow Old With Me, a track written by Lennon during the sessions for Double Fantasy, the final album he made with Yoko Ono before he was shot dead in Manhattan on December 8, 1980.
The Beatles drummer, 79, found out about the song and the message after a chance chat with record exec Jack Douglas, who produced Lennon’s album.
“He said ‘Did you ever hear the John cassette?’” Sir Ringo told the BBC. “[I said] ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you a copy.’
“It says on the beginning. ‘This will be great for you, Ringo.’ And so I said ‘I’m going to do the track’.”
Of Lennon, he added: “He’d have loved it.”
Sir Ringo enlisted the help of Sir Paul, 77, to play bass on the track. Announcing his new album, What’s My Name, on which Grow Old With Me features, Sir Ringo said: “The idea that John was talking about me in that time before he died, well, I’m an emotional person.
“And I just loved this song. I do well up when I think of John this deeply. And I’ve done my best. We’ve done our best.”
He added: “The other good thing is I really wanted Paul to play on it, and he said yes.
“Paul played bass and sings a little bit on this with me. So, John’s on it in a way. I’m on it and Paul’s on it.”
LUCY MAPSTONE
word from John. When they finally met on the following Monday, he told her Yoko had “allowed” him to go home.Then he lit a cigarette.The cure obviously hadn’t worked. As May tells it, he looked “dazed” and “disoriented”.
For a man who had so much to say on virtually every aspect of his life, John never said anything publicly about what happened when he underwent hypnosis. In public John and Yoko would present themselves as a reconciled, very much in love, couple. Nine months later Yoko gave birth to their son, Sean.
But in private, John would slip away to see May for a further 18 months. Yoko, with her enormous ego and desire for equal fame with John, was demanding. But she brought order to his life – arranging stuff he couldn’t be bothered to do.
In many ways, she wasn’t just a wife. Perhaps that was why he began to call her Mother.
●● Abridged from Being John Lennon: A Restless Life by Ray Connolly (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £9.99). For free UK delivery, visit expressbookshop. co.uk, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310, or send a cheque/PO payable to Express Bookshop Ray Connolly Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ.