7.32am
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20 August 2013
John’s “lost weekend” is mentioned in various threads, but I thought a thread dedicated to it would be a good idea.
Jimmy Webb has put out a new memoir, The Cake and the Rain . He talks about the lost weekend in this interview about the book: https://www.yahoo.com/music/ji…..20340.html
You were a witness to John Lennon and Harry Nilsson’s infamous “lost weekend” in the early Seventies. There’s a scene in the book where they call you up at 3 a.m. to bring them hundred dollar bills and cocaine (or as they call it “hee haw”). What was it like growing up looking up to the Beatles and then to see John Lennon at the worst state of his life? That’s a very dark passage in the book.
I was as taken aback as you probably are by reading it. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to communicate. I really want to hasten to add that when John was struck down the way he was, I was absolutely shattered, and I ended up writing a lot of music about it and really going through some bad emotional stuff. It may be perceived as some sort of a get-back or something, but he never did anything to me. He basically was an impassive person. I never got a reading off him, ever. If you ran a magnetometer over him, it wouldn’t indicate anything. He was, like, so placid.
But I think that he revealed probably a lot more to people who were closer. Harry Nilsson was very close, but I was sort of called in as the bag man when they had gotten themselves into some sort of a jam. It was done out of love. It was done out of dedication. I mean, why would you be out in the middle of the night doing a drug run unless you … I wasn’t getting paid for it. I had a lot of money. So there was a loyalty there, and there was a code. There was an unwritten code that if the Beatles ask you to do something, you did it. And I’m not kidding about that.
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7.49am
1 January 2017
1.10am
26 January 2017
In your opinion, was the lost weekend a good thing for John? I feel as though the liberty he had then helped him express his creativity in ways that he may not have if he had been with Yoko. Plus it yields A Toot And A Snore In ’74.
"The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles!"
-Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
"We could ride and surf together while our love would grow"
-Brian Wilson, Surfer Girl
2.44am
24 March 2014
8.04pm
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20 August 2013
Another story from Jimmy Webb from the Lost Weekend.
Interviewer: I think it was singer Harry Nilsson who asked you to commit perjury for John Lennon ?
Webb: [Lennon] was in the shadow of the U.S. government. They were pretty serious about getting him out of the country — I believe that would be Richard Nixon specifically — and of course he didn’t want to leave America.
Therefore, he should have been on his best behavior. They were waiting for him to screw up so they could throw him out. And he got in a jam with my pal Harry Nilsson one memorable night in Hollywood at the Troubadour. He was alleged to have attacked a photographer and to have broken her camera and/or to have struck her.
I don’t have a clue what happened because I wasn’t there, but I ended up giving a deposition to the effect that I was there, and that I could assure the court that Mr. Lennon did not strike anyone or break anyone’s camera or anything like that.
I mean, it’s outrageous what I was doing because I think there’s a 50-50 chance here that he probably did it. In fact, I heard him say some things that made me think that maybe he had done it.
And so naturally, the question that follows is, why would you put yourself in jeopardy like that? And the answer is: Because it was the Beatles. Because if the Beatles asked you to do something, when the Beatles needed something, if the Beatles were in peril — horrors! — you rushed to their aid because they were the Beatles. It was the code.
Wonder if I would have lied for a Beatle if I were in that situation.
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