Recording: I’m Stepping Out, Forgive Me My Love by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Hit Factory, New York City
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jack Douglas
Engineer: Lee DeCarlo

The first recording session for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album took place on 7 August 1980.

This was Lennon’s first recording session since a ‘Stand By Me’ overdub and mixing session on 3 March 1975. Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas had chosen the Hit Factory, located at 353 West 48th Street in Manhattan, following Ono’s directive that “you can do it anywhere in the world except for the Record Plant, and no California.”

We chose to record at the Hit Factory because it was out of the way. The studio was located way over on the West Side of Tenth Avenue and 48th Street in a building that no one would think to camp out in front of. No one would know. We could go in and out of there without ever being seen.

It caused a lot of problems with the people I worked with at Record Plant because they thought the project should come there. The Record Plant was so visible. That’s where they would expect him to be. I just couldn’t do the record there. The first month we were working at the Hit Factory, no one outside of the studio knew what was going on.

The Hit Factory afforded the couple privacy, with its sixth-floor studio being accessible only via a private key-operated elevator. The sessions were booked in the name of Rich DePalma, Lennon and Ono’s accountant at the Dakota Building. Lennon required complete secrecy from the musicians and studio staff. According to Douglas: “John didn’t know if he could do it, and he didn’t want to be made a fool in the press. If anyone found out that this was going on, the project would stop.”

Lennon and Ono were photographed by Paul Goresh as they left the Dakota Building. Upon their arrival at 2pm at the Hit Factory, they were photographed again by Roger Farrington, who was invited into the session.

The session musicians were guitarists Hugh McCracken and Earl Slick, bass guitarist Tony Levin, keyboard player George Small, drummer Andy Newmark, and percussionist Arthur Jenkins Jr.

We’d spent the previous day setting up the studio and getting drum sounds so we’d be all set to go when John and Yoko arrived. We sent our security man, James McClain, down to meet them at the front of the building to make sure they got upstairs without anyone harassing them, which hopefully wouldn’t happen because it was a big secret that they were coming in. He brought them up to the sixth floor where the studio was and I remember John was wearing this huge hat. He walked in and he looked gigantic to me, like he was seven feet tall, which thinking back on later he wasn’t that much taller than I am. Being John Lennon, though, he was such an historical figure, you couldn’t help but be in awe. He came in and he was very friendly and nice. Everyone was very excited to be there, including John. It was the first time he’d been in the studio for years.

Guitarist Earl Slick was the first of the musicians to arrive at the Hit Factory.

I was like a kid in a candy store. I got there an hour earlier. I wasn’t excited, right? [laughs] So I showed up at the Hit Factory and nobody was there. I walked into the main studio and John’s sitting there by himself and he’s got a guitar in his lap and he’s just noodling around. I went to introduce myself and he said, ‘Nice to see you again.’ And I was like, ‘Huh? Nice to see you, too, but we haven’t met.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, we met on the Bowie Young Americans sessions.’ I said, ‘Trust me, if we’d worked together before, I would have remembered.’ [laughs]

Although the musicians and studio staff were nervous at the prospect of working with Lennon, there was an air of professionalism from the start of the session.

I first worked with John on Walls And Bridges. Lennon came in focused, but the musicians he brought in from California weren’t. They were more interested in starting off the session with what I call ‘amenities’ rather than tuning up and getting down with the music. For Double Fantasy, the work experience was completely different. Lennon came in prepared to take care of the business of music. And unlike the Walls And Bridges experience, the band was as focused as John. We got to work immediately. He was at the top of his game. The point he made is that he still had it. He was a master artist of our time.

The first song to be tackled was ‘I’m Stepping Out’, which was released on the posthumous album Milk And Honey. An edit of the second take was also released on the 1998 box set John Lennon Anthology.

The Milk And Honey take was the penultimate one, featuring guide vocals by Lennon. The original performance contained a verse which was later edited out, but can be heard on Anthology:

Called up the doctor but he was sick to death
He don’t make house calls any more
He’d gone out dancing just to sweeten up his breath
Left a message on the floor…

Following a break for dinner, the musicians worked on Ono’s song ‘Forgive Me My Love’, which remained unreleased until the 1992 compilation Onobox.

The first day John and I went into the studio to work on Double Fantasy was a very nerve-racking day because neither of us had been in the studio for years. For both of us the nerves didn’t really go away until we had finished recording all of the tracks. We finished the tracks very fast. So right after that and after hearing what we’d done, and that it was a good record, that’s when we stopped feeling nervous about it.