Recording: I’m Losing You, Cleanup Time, (Just Like) Starting Over, Yes I’m Your Angel by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

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

An overdub session for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album took place on 5 September 1980.

The session was for the addition of brass instruments to four songs: ‘I’m Losing You’, ‘Cleanup Time’, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, and ‘Yes, I’m Your Angel’.

In that song [‘Cleanup Time’] you hear background vocal, ‘Got to clean up, clean up.’ I used the horns to trigger a vocoder. I think I sang ‘Got to clean up’ so it made the horns sound like vocals. They did the same thing on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen; the sound of all those background vocals is being done by a vocoder. You play a synthesizer, you sing into a microphone, and it picks up the characteristics of the chords and turns it into vocals. The background vocals in there are actually the horn players being turned into voices.

The session musicians were Howard Johnson, Grant Hungerford, John Parran, Seldon Powell, George ‘Young’ Opalisky, Roger Rosenberg, David Tofani, and Ronald Tooley.

We did a horn session on a Friday night and the session went until three in the morning. That following Monday when I got into the studio, we were in the control room and I heard Jack say to John, ‘John, how much do you think the horn players cost for that session the other night?’ And John looked at him befuddled and said, ‘A million dollars?’ [laughs] Jack was like, ‘No, seventeen thousand dollars.’

Lennon was angered by the expense of the session and told studio engineer Lee DeCarlo to erase the recordings. None of them were used on the album except for ‘Yes, I’m Your Angel’ and ‘Cleanup Time’.

John paid this huge bill and came into the studio and told me to erase all of the horns. He stood there and watched me hit record and he turned and looked at the machine to make sure that I was erasing the tracks. That’s how pissed he was. I pretended to do it, but erased empty tracks. I figured he might change his mind.