Hit Factory, New York City
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jack Douglas
Engineer: Lee DeCarlo
The fifth recording session for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album took place on 12 August 1980.
Three tracks were worked on, all of which were included on the album. The first two were Lennon’s song ‘I’m Losing You’, followed by Ono’s ‘I’m Moving On’. Producer Jack Douglas brought in Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Bun E Carlos to play on the backing tracks.
We got a call about a month or two ahead of time from our office with the message, ‘Bun E, call Jack.’ I called him and Jack said, ‘John Lennon is gonna record and I want you to play drums on this song, ‘I’m Losing You’. Then he said, ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ and I immediately told the other guys in the band. It was all big top secret. The reason it was top secret is CBS was trying to sign Lennon. They had Ringo and they had Paul on the label, they wanted to get all four Beatles signed to CBS and they were battling with Geffen over it. Then about two or three weeks later we heard from Jack, who said, ‘We’re gonna have Rick play guitar, too.’We flew in that morning from Montreal on our day off before we were leaving to go on tour in Japan. We were excited, but also beat. We’d been on the road for a better part of two or three years.
We went walking up the stairs of the Hit Factory and Bob Gruen was outside taking pictures. We get into the elevator and saw this bald guy. We’d seen the footage of John Lennon at the Lew Grade benefit show right before he retired. He did ‘Slippin’ And Slidin” and ‘Imagine’ and he was backed by the Band Of Mother F*****s and the whole band were bald. I turned to this bald guy and said, ‘Are you by any chance a member of BOMF?’ And he said, ‘I’m Tony Levin, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ So we went into the studio and we were introduced to John and Yoko. When you meet these famous guys they’re always shorter than you think. John was smaller than I expected. They introduce us, ‘This is Bun E and Rick,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, you’re the guys from Cheap Trick. They told me your name, but they didn’t tell me what band you were in.’ So he recognised us from being in Cheap Trick, which we thought was cool. John was really friendly. He was Mr Nice Guy.
We sat in the control room with John and Jack and they played us a cassette demo of ‘I’m Losing You’ with him on acoustic guitar. He’d been down to Bermuda and had two ghetto blasters. He’d sit there and record guitar and vocal on one and then aim it at the other one and lean over and do overdubs like that on the second machine. John said, ‘We don’t have a good version of this, do you guys have any ideas?’ When Jack called us he said, ‘We’ve got this song and I know you can do this tempo real good. The session guys don’t have a feel for it.’ We were just glad to be there. We knew it would be fun to do. I mean, how often do you get to play with a Beatle? So we listened to the tune a couple of times and mapped it out.
The whole band tracked the song live. John played guitar and sang, I played drums, Rick played guitar, Tony Levin played bass, and George Small was on keyboards. Tony had the fretless bass and George on piano. With those two guys and Lennon, the road was paved for us musically. Those guys were all top dogs and it was really a pleasure to do. John was like Chuck Berry, he was the perfect rhythm guitar player. I noticed that when we were playing together and his sound was in my cans. I thought, ‘Oh here we go. I don’t even have to do anything except sit and play along.’ It was the same feeling I got when we opened for Chuck Berry seven years earlier.
We walked through the song a couple of times. Rick came up with the song’s main riff and I came up with some drum parts. I asked, ‘What speed do you want this?’ And John said, ‘Oh, whatever speed you think it should be.’ They just kind of let me and Rick take the lead on it. We did a few takes and that was it.
Rick did the solo live and then he went and doubled his solo, which is not on the record. It was meant to be doubled so it would be more of a prevailing theme. The guitar part was kind of orchestrated. While Rick was doubling it, I was in the booth with Lennon and he said, ‘Do you want to smoke a joint?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, no problem!’ I remember when Rick was doing lead and John said, ‘Your guitar work is great. Clapton did something like this on ‘Cold Turkey’, but he could only do one lick. I think I said, ‘We’re just trying to give it a Plastic Ono Band feel.’ That’s where we were coming from because Cheap Trick were big Plastic Ono Band fans. We did ‘Cold Turkey’ and ‘It’s So Hard’. John was having a good time on that session. We all had a lot of laughs.
‘I’m Losing You’ was supposed to crossfade into ‘I’m Moving On’ and they were both about the same tempo. Jack said, ‘Your beat on ‘Loser [by Cheap Trick] would work great on ‘Moving On’. So we had the sheet music from Yoko and it just had chords listed and the melody on it. Rick came up with these riffs. Rick wrote the riff for that and I tried this drum part. We were messing around with it because there was no arrangement for it. Tony was messin’ around with this funky bass riff and he said, ‘Maybe we could do it like this in the first verse?’ Yoko was in the vocal booth and John was in the control room with Jack. We’re trying to get an arrangement. John gets on the talkback and goes, ‘Mother dear, perhaps you can do the first verses like Tony and then do the boys’ arrangement after the first verse.’ He called Rick and I ‘the boys’. Yoko turned to John and gave him a look and said, ‘F**k you very much, John!’ and everybody started laughing.
Our version of ‘I’m Moving On’ is a lot barer than the record ’cause it was done live in the studio. Her vocal on it is pretty raw. It’s very cool. At the end she went into her gurgle-gargling ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ vocal thing and everybody playing went, ‘Oh yeah, we’re in Yokoland now.’ We did a couple of takes with Yoko singing live. Our take wasn’t the best take in the world. The drums were a little faltering so the one on the record is probably a little better.
The tracks never came out. Then in 1996 or 97 we heard from Yoko that they wanted to use our version of ‘I’m Losing You’ on the Lennon box set. It was neat that it was finally out there. I was proud of it when we did it and glad it still sounded good years later. For many years we told people, ‘We did this thing with John Lennon and it never came out.’ You can imagine people thinking it mustn’t have been that good if it didn’t come out. Yoko asked us if we wanted to do a music video for it with Tony Levin and we did it.
Starting Over, Ken Sharp
In the evening, the album’s core musicians worked on Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’. They were guitarists Hugh McCracken and Earl Slick, bass guitarist Tony Levin, keyboard player George Small, drummer Andy Newmark, and percussionist Arthur Jenkins Jr.
John played a piano part for me and I harmonized his original line, which had an Asian flair, and he didn’t object. Listening to the album recently, that song hit me the strongest of anything I heard. It’s got that great line, ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.’ I mean, who can ever forget that line? Originally, they wanted to hire a steel drum orchestra for the song. The number that was bandied about was twenty-plus. They finally decided that they could get the effect with one. He was a real Jamaican steel drum player and I had to teach him the song at the session.
Starting Over, Ken Sharp