Interview: John Lennon for RKO Radio Network

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were interviewed for the RKO Radio Network on the afternoon of 8 December 1980.

It was the fall of 1980, I was in LA and I spent some time with David Geffen. He called and said, ‘I have something I want to play for you.’ So I went to his office on Sunset Boulevard. We sat down and he played ‘Starting Over’ without telling me who it was. I had no idea. None. I thought, it sounds like someone’s trying to do an Elvis kind of thing. It had an Elvis vibe. I later found out when I interviewed John that the Elvis vibe was intentional. So I said to David Geffen, ‘Who is this?’ Then he told me who it was. I thought it was phenomenal. Before John dropped out of music for five years to raise Sean, we hadn’t heard much about what he was doing. So hearing ‘Starting Over’ for the first time was amazing. David told me, ‘We’re granting one radio interview for America and we’d like you to conduct it.’ He asked me if I wanted to do it and it took me about a nanosecond to say yes. I’d interviewed Paul and Linda in London in 1979 for the Back To The Egg album. It’s kind of unbelievable that a year later I got the chance to interview John and Yoko.

We flew from San Francisco and got into New York City late afternoon, early evening. We got together for dinner and went over notes and thoughts of what we wanted to cover. I knew we didn’t want to focus on too much Beatles stuff, as that’s all been covered, although John did discuss the group during the interview. Here was a brand-new album done by someone who dropped out of the music business for five years just to stay home. There were a lot of things that we covered in that interview.

There was an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot going on in the morning. The radio interview was set for one o’clock. We arrived at the Dakota around a half hour earlier. We did the interview in the Studio One business office.

They asked us to take our shoes off and escorted us in this wonderful room with a white piano and celestial clouds on the ceiling.

Shortly thereafter, Yoko came into the room. It was just her and it was one o’clock so we started talking, knowing John would show up eventually.

This was Lennon’s final interview. It took place at the couple’s home at the Dakota Building in Manhattan. RKO presenter Dave Sholin was joined by Laurie Kaye and producer Ron Hummel, as well as Warner Bros executive Bert Keane, who had helped set up the interview.

Our team was ushered into an incredible room that turned out to be Yoko’s (and, to a lesser extent, John’s) private office so that we could get set up for the interview. The first thing I noticed was the fluffy white wall-to-wall shag carpeting, which almost made me wish I was barefoot, and we were all asked to take our shoes off before entering. The next thing that caught my eye was this spectacular, superlong, glass-topped coffee table framed in metal, with serpents winding their way up and around each of the legs. I remember that as I looked at these man-made snakes through the glass off and on during the entire interview, I had this surreal feeling of ‘Am I really here? With John and Yoko?’ No doubt about it: I was living a dream, and I was more than just a tiny bit scared that I’d suddenly wake up to find out I was imagining the whole thing.

Lennon was late arriving as he was still with Annie Leibovitz, who had photographed him and Ono for Rolling Stone earlier that day.

I’d like to make at least another… I’m so hungry for making records because of the way I feel. I wanna make some more records before I tour. So I’d like to make at least one more album before actually making that final decision of calling those very expensive session musicians and taking them on the road, you know? But, when I went in there, I had no intention of going live, because I’ve noticed a lot of things like The Clash don’t do any personal appearances – hardly – anymore and they just make a video and a record. And, so, part of me was thinking, ‘Well, all right.’ But when we were playing in that studio… and then, I don’t know if it was Tony the bass player or the drummer after we’d done ‘Starting Over’, he said, ‘Can we do this again? I mean, let’s take it on the road!’ and I… that’s the first time it came on, ‘My God, this would be fun, wouldn’t it?’ And if we can do it in the way we’ve done the album, which is have fun, enjoy the music, enjoy the performance, be accepted as John and Yoko, then I’d be happy to go out there.

I felt within a matter of ten minutes after we sat down and talked, it was like John was somebody I’d known forever and Yoko couldn’t have been nicer. It was that comfortable. That doesn’t happen with every interview.

John and Yoko were both very open during the interview. Early on, I told them, ‘Is there anything off limits that you don’t want to discuss, let me know,’ and they said, ‘Absolutely not. Just go ahead.’ They gave me great stuff.

One of the most moving things about the whole experience was seeing the connection between John and Yoko. To sit in that room as they would talk about each other and watch their eye contact, you could feel the magnetism. I know they had their ups and downs in that relationship like everyone in a relationship does. But these were people that are connected and meant to be together. It was pretty powerful. You could feel it in the room. To me, that was one of the things I did not expect.

Over the years, I’ve been asked if I felt John had some kind of a premonition that he thought he was gonna die. That couldn’t be further from the truth. During my interview, he says, ‘I feel like this is just the beginning, this is just the start of everything.’ He couldn’t have been happier or more upbeat. He couldn’t have been more looking forward to the future. He was talking about doing more music.

The interview ended at approximately 5pm, after which Lennon and Ono prepared to leave for the Record Plant for Lennon’s final studio session. As the radio crew were preparing to head to JFK Airport, bound for San Francisco, Lennon asked if they could give him and Ono a lift to the studio, as their car was delayed.

As the RKO team packed their equipment into their car, they were approached by Mark David Chapman, who asked if they had interviewed Lennon.

When Lennon left the Dakota Building, he Lennon was photographed by Paul Goresh as he gave an autograph to Chapman.

I remember during the interview, the phone rang several times and it was Yoko’s assistant. They were checking about the availability of a car to take them to the studio. I split the channels when I was recording, so when I went back and listened you can hear Yoko going, ‘Is the car ready? Is it gonna be here?’

John was king of funny. He was standing outside waving his arms, going, ‘Where are my fans?’, ’cause nobody was really around. Unfortunately, the worst fan possible was there, as we would find out hours later. As we were packing our gear in our limo, this guy approached us and we thought he was just a fan. He asked, ‘Did you guys interview John Lennon?’ He probably saw that we had recording equipment with us. We said, ‘Yeah, we did, as a matter of fact.’

When we landed in San Francisco we learned that John had been killed. We thought it was a horrible joke. We just dropped him off at the studio. How could he be dead? Because I didn’t have a studio at home, I was reduced to clip-leading my tape recorder directly to the phone line to feed bits of audio to our network office in New York so they could start airing snippets of the interview to the radio stations around the country.

The day after, I remember I saw a photo in the paper of his killer. Dave [Sholin] and I spoke on the phone and we said, ‘That’s the guy we saw out in front of the Dakota.’ Then we realized that this was the guy who must have done it.

Literally that same night after landing in San Francisco and learning the news of John’s death, I left my house and went directly into the production studio to begin putting the radio special together. So, instead of weeks, I had only a couple of days, as the show was already scheduled for air even before production began. The original two-hour show, based on that interview, aired that very weekend across the country. The complete interview was just under three hours and only fifty percent was ever broadcast. Half of the interview has never been heard to this day.