Robert Rosen

Save the Date: Sunday, January 28, 2024, at 19.00 (7 p.m.), at La Tregua café in Sevilla, Spain. I'll be reading en español from Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon and answering questions (in translation) about the book. I'll also be signing the latest Nowhere Man Spanish and English editions, which will be available at the café.

A performance by the Nowhere Band, featuring New York City's Mary Lyn Maiscott and Sevilla locals Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto will follow. Backed by La Tregua's house band, the trio will perform Beatles and Lennon covers, original songs by Mary Lyn, and more. You can check out Mary Lyn's latest release, "My Cousin Sings Harmony," here.

Admission is gratis. For more information please call La Tregua at +34 687 94 02 36 or write them at latreguasevilla@gmail.com.

Stay tuned for more details.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my just-launched Threads.

This is the final installment of a transcript, edited for clarity, of the questions asked at my Nowhere Man event at Subterranean Books in St. Louis. Transcription courtesy of Laurel Zito.

What did John write in his diary that was most revealing about his relationship with Paul McCartney that was not publicly known?

One of the main parts of Nowhere Man is my description of John Lennon's relationship with Paul McCartney based on my memory of his journals. John didn't see much of Paul, but he thought about him virtually every day. He was angry at Paul because Paul wanted a Beatles reunion and John wanted no part of that. He felt that reuniting the Beatles was going backward, and he wanted to move forward. The Beatles were his childhood, his adolescence, his 20s. He was a 40-year-old man with a family. He wanted to leave the past behind. And Paul was just a constant reminder of that past: "Let's reunite the Beatles! Let's reunite the Beatles!" John made it absolutely clear that he didn't want to do that. He said he loved Paul like a brother but he couldn't stand being around him.

While John was in seclusion, doing nothing, not recording music, not writing music, Paul was out there recording song after song, hit after hit, and John was extremely jealous. He felt that the only way he could get Paul's attention was if Yoko did something like sell a cow for a quarter-million dollars, and that would make the papers. And Yoko sold a cow for a quarter-million dollars, which at the time was a record-setting price for a cow. There was a big story about it in the papers, and John wrote in his journal that it was a great victory over the McCartneys.

In early 1980, Paul was getting ready to go on tour with Wings. He stopped by New York on his way to Japan and called John at the Dakota. He said he had some good weed and, you know, would you like me to come by and we'll smoke some weed together. And John said no. Then he found out that in Japan Paul was planning to stay in the Presidential Suite at the Okura Hotel, in Tokyo. John and Yoko considered that their private suite and he was outraged and repulsed that Paul and his wife, Linda, would be staying there. He told Yoko that we can't let this happen, that she's got to stop McCartney from going on tour and staying in our suite and "ruining our hotel karma."

"Yoko did it!!! Paul busted in Japan!!!"

He wrote in his journals about how Yoko practices magic. They both were into all this occult stuff: magic, tarot, numerology, you name it. They had a full-time tarot-card reader, Charlie Swan—his real name was John Green. Yoko and Swan went to Colombia, in South America, where Swan hooked her up with a powerful bruja, a witch. And she paid the witch $60,000 to teach her how to cast magic spells. And Yoko told John that she was going to use her magic to stop McCartney from staying in their hotel suite. And what happened was—you might remember this—in 1980, when Paul arrived in Japan, he was stopped at customs smuggling marijuana. He was arrested; he spent 10 days in jail; and the tour was ruined. And when John found out about this, it was the happiest moment of 1980 for him up to that point. Because his life was just kind of adrift, and he was doing nothing. Even his journals were really fragmented. He just wasn't writing coherently. But when Paul was busted he wrote, "Yoko did it!!! Paul busted in Japan!!!" And then he quotes the thing from Monopoly: "Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200." He was thrilled.

John also thought he had a psychic connection with Paul. Anytime Paul was in town he said he heard McCartney's music in his head. And then finally, in Bermuda, in the summer of 1980, John started writing music again, serious music, for the first time in five years. And, yeah, he was really struggling to get back in gear and to connect with his muse and write something inspired. What really got John going was that McCartney had just released an album called McCartney II. And one of the songs on there is "Coming Up." The whole song is addressed directly to John, and McCartney's calling for a Beatles reunion. One of the lyrics in "Coming Up" is "I know that we can get together/Stick around and see." John would play "Coming Up" over and over again. It inspired him and he started writing a song that was really a response to "Coming Up." That song was "I Don't Wanna Face It." It has autobiographical lyrics like "You want to save humanity/But it's people that you just can't stand" and "You're looking for oblivion/With one eye on the Hall of Fame." Even though Paul wasn't there, John was collaborating with him by listening to "Coming Up" and responding to it. Some of John's best writing was when he was collaborating with Paul. Which is not to say his solo songs were bad, but his best work was with the Beatles.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my just-launched Threads.

Below is a transcript, edited for clarity, of another question asked at my Nowhere Man event at Subterranean Books in St. Louis. Transcription courtesy of Laurel Zito.

How was John's relationship with Yoko in those last days?

Most of the time John was keeping the diaries he was in seclusion and there wasn't much going on. When John and Yoko's son, Sean, was born, in 1975, he was going to drop out of the music business, which he hated, and he was going to devote five years to bringing up Sean. That had been the plan. It's not that he didn't do that. He did it to some degree, but he had a staff of servants and nannies to do the heavy lifting when it came to bringing up a child.

John had mostly retreated to his room and he smoked a lot of dope and he wrote in his journals and he dreamed a lot. The journals were kind of a stream of consciousness for five years. I mean he would record everything—what he ate, when he went to the bathroom. You just got like a real granular sense of what this man's life was like, and, yeah, he spent time with Sean, obviously. But he was very much into his solitude and smoking his weed and writing in his journals.

John and Yoko had five apartments in the Dakota. They had an office on the first floor; their apartment was on this the seventh floor. John was spending most of his time by himself in the apartment, and Yoko was downstairs in the office doing business. So, yeah, you got the sense that they really didn't see each other that much. He would complain in his journals that he wanted to spend more time with Yoko. He missed her and loved her and needed her.

Then towards the end, when they finally decided that he was going to come out of seclusion and he was going to release his first album in five years, that's when John and Yoko started working together and that was a big change. At that point he pretty much stopped writing in his journals. He'd recorded the Double Fantasy demo tape in Bermuda, and then he came back to New York and they started working on the album. They had to find a record company and they signed with David Geffen.

For the first time in five years John was writing music and rehearsing and going into the studio and recording. And Yoko was doing the same thing. Double Fantasy, the final album—probably a lot of you have heard it—was a song of John's followed by a song of Yoko's followed by a song of John's all the way through. And working on Double Fantasy brought them together unlike anything that had happened in the previous years when he wasn't working and doing whatever he was doing to pass the time watching the wheels as the song said.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my just-launched Threads.

Shepherd is a Website that works closely with authors in an effort to guide readers to good books. Last year I gave them a list of five books that inspired me to write. You can see the list here.

This year they wanted to know the three best books I read in 2023. It was an easy question, and three books sprang to mind: The Overstory by Richard Powers, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, an iconic author I've somehow managed to avoid reading until now.

Click here to peruse the list and see my reasons for chosing those books. Perhaps it will inspire you to pick up one of my books or another book you hadn't considered reading.

If you're looking for even more choices, here's Shepherd's list of The 100 Best Books of 2023.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Below is a transcript, edited for clarity, of a question asked at my event at Subterranean Books in St. Louis. Transcription courtesy of Laurel Zito.

Do you feel that the burglary of your apartment was done by somebody who wanted John Lennon's diaries back or do you think it was just an ordinary burglary?

I know who did it: My old college friend Fred Seaman, John's assistant, the guy who hired me to write the book that 18 years later would become Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. He had the key to my apartment. He was staying there when I was out of town and he had three weeks to go through everything and take what he wanted. John's diaries were the key to the project.

John and Fred were in Bermuda in the summer of 1980. John was putting together the demo tape for his Double Fantasy album. Fred said that John had a premonition of his death, and John told him that if anything should happen him he wanted Fred to write the true story of his life based on whatever material he needed. This is what Fred told me and I accepted it as face value. Years later I learned that Fred had decided at a certain point he was going to sell the diaries as an art object and he didn't need me for that. He was going to make a lot more money that way.

After the burglary I put together a book proposal based on what happened and what I remembered from the diaries. I was going around trying to get a book deal. I went to Playboy because they had that big interview with John and Yoko. I went to Rolling Stone and I met with Jan Wenner, the editor. I told him the story and he believed me but he said he couldn't publish it and that he wanted to save my karma. He told me I needed go to Yoko Ono and tell her the story. So I went to Yoko Ono and she put me on the payroll for six months.

The whole time that I was transcribing John's diaries, and long before that, beginning in 1977, I'd been keeping my own diaries. Everything that had happened since the day John and Yoko hired Fred was in there. Fred's first day on the job, in February 1979, he came to me and said, "Someday we have to write a book about John Lennon." And I said okay. I didn't know when this was going to happen, and for the two years, between when Fred was hired and John was murdered, he was in touch with me at least once a week, and he'd tell me everything that was going on with John and Yoko and their son Sean—how they were traveling to Bermuda or their homes on Long Island and in Palm Beach. For two years I was taking notes in my own diaries, and this is what Ono wanted to see. She told me that she didn't know that John was keeping diaries. I didn't think that was true. In fact I'm sure it wasn't. On some pages in John's diaries, like when he was contemplating having an affair, Yoko had scrawled something like, "Over my dead body." So she obviously knew the diaries existed. She told me that John's diaries were sacred and I shouldn't have read them. That's when she asked if she could read my diaries. I said, "All right, that's only fair. I read John's diaries you can read my diaries."

I brought over 16 volumes of my diaries, about a half-million words. This covered everything from the day Fred was hired until he was fired. We'd sit around her kitchen table, she'd read my diaries and ask me questions about them. She wanted to piece together what Fred was doing this whole time, and my diaries were like an hour-by-hour account. As far as she was concerned Fred did not have the right to take John's diaries. She had him arrested and she got John's diaries back.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.