Robert Rosen

 

Francine du Plessix Gray gave me a great piece of advice: "Keep a notebook and write in it every day."

 

She said this in 1975, when I was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the City College of New York. But I waited two years to take that advice. I'd just finished my first book and was remembering the impossible time I had getting started. I'd taken a long vacation from writing and so hadn't written a word in months. When I tried to begin the book, the words refused to flow. It was as if the writing gears had rusted and wouldn't budge. It took weeks of pounding out reams of gibberish before decent sentences began to form.

 

The day I typed the last page of the book, I bought a pocket-size memo pad and began scribbling in it. That was 47 years ago. Over that time I've written virtually every day and filled 60 notebooks. Francine's idea, I realized, is to make writing as natural and necessary as breathing. It's how a writer finds their voice.

 

Since I've been writing in notebooks, getting started on a project has never been as difficult as my first attempt at writing a book. Diaries flow into books flow into blog posts flow into articles flow into books flow into diaries. I refer to the diaries all the time. Beaver Street is based on diaries I kept when I was working as an editor of men's magazines.

 

Around 1982, I had so many volumes that I started losing track of what any given volume covered. That's when I began decorating the covers with images that serve as reminders. In the photo, Volume 57 covers, among other things, the publication of Bobby in Naziland, which would be renamed A Brooklyn Memoir. Volume 58 covers the first year of the pandemic. Volume 59 covers the publication of the latest edition of Nowhere Man. Volume 60, the current volume, covers my recent trip to Spain.

 

And so it continues, my life a river of words flowing into an ocean of sentences and paragraphs like the ones you've just read.

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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 recently launched Threads.

In December 2021, I wrote an article for The Village Voice about Michael Barbosa Medeiros, John Lennon's gardener, personal assistant, archivist, and friend. John couldn't remember Michael's last name and called him "Mike Tree."

 

The Voice article, "Mike Tree in John Lennon's Nutopia," was in part about a memoir Michael had written about working with John and Yoko Ono beginning in 1977 and continuing until 1982, 18 months after John was murdered.

 

Michael sold John Lennon: Barefoot in Nutopia to Diversion Books. They changed the title to In Lennon's Garden and were supposed to publish it in 2020. But Ono's attorneys threatened legal action and now, four years later, Diversion has still not published the book and they refuse to return the rights. The book remains in Limbono.

 

Michael wanted to wait until Barefoot in Nutopia was available before he spoke publicly about his relationship with John and Yoko.

 

In 2022, I went on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, to discuss Michael and how Yoko is able to suppress books that refute her narrative of John as the happy househusband. The episode is called "Catch and Kill."

 

This month Michael, now 84, agreed to talk with Robert about the book and life with John and Yoko. It's an amazing episode of Something About the Beatles: intimate, detailed, surprising, and honest. Among Michael's many revelations is that John wanted him to become romantically involved with Yoko.

 

Please do give it a listen.

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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 recently launched Threads.

 

The Glass Onion podcast.

 

I always read comments posted about interviews I've done. I find it helpful to get a sense of the vox populi—voice of the people. Though I rarely respond to anything posted in a public forum, I  appreciate positive comments. (Please contact me directly through this website or on Facebook if you'd like me to respond.)

 

The other day I was poking around the Internet and stumbled on an interview I did three years ago with Glass Onion, a podcast devoted to John Lennon. I was surprised that people were still listening to it and had posted a number of comments I hadn't seen. Those comments, I thought, are emblematic of the kind of feedback I've been getting about Nowhere Man since it was published more than 24 years ago.

 

Naturally, there are those who insist on calling me a "con artist" whose only goal was "to profit off of John's death." Their evidence: a discredited hatchet job Yoko Ono's spokesman Elliot Mintz dictated to two Playboy magazine reporters in 1984, in a failed attempt to insure that Nowhere Man would never be published. If you want to know why this libelous work of half-truths and gross distortions has been discredited, please read "An Open Letter" to former Playboy editor G. Barry Golson in the latest edition of Nowhere Man.

 

But as has been the case since 2000, most people like what I've written and said and have commented accordingly. Below is a sampling, edited for clarity, of some of the recent comments posted on Glass Onion's YouTube channel.

 

@stevenrufini3515
Maybe John would have published his memoirs or diaries in some form himself later on! Didn't John not like Elliot Mintz and call him a sycophant? He's always remained loyal, maybe he's paid to be! Robert seems a good guy.

 

@favouritemoon4133
This seems to me to be a seriously under-listened to interview.

 

@keriford54
It'd be a good thing to have John's journals published, I suspect he wouldn't have minded. They were probably his main form of expression for the years he wasn't producing music. I've just ordered Nowhere Man. I like that Rosen used imagination to recreate something he knew was there. I think it is more honest to give an approximation than to remain silent because you can't be sure it's exactly right.

 

@glassoniononjohnlennon6696 [podcast host]
Robert's book is both entertaining and fairly truthful (as much as we can possibly know). It's pretty messy what goes on with the Lennon estate. Have a listen to Robert on Something About The Beatles, an episode about a year ago called "Catch The Kill," all about claiming and reclaiming narratives.

 

@keriford54
@glassoniononjohnlennon6696 Thanks, I listened to that, it was good. I am looking forward to getting his book. I live in New Zealand and it takes about a month for things to arrive. I am currently reading Fred Seaman's book, I understand he's not that well thought of, but I understand that's mainly because of his legal issues with taking the diaries and conflicts with Yoko. The book itself I am finding really interesting and it seems to me to be quite a nuanced portrait. While he doesn't have much love for Yoko I do think that he tries to see things from her perspective. It doesn't feel to me like a character assassination. But the portrait of John is fascinating. John comes across as incredibly intellectually curious, a voracious reader and able to move from anger to humour. For me, the portrait he paints makes John more interesting than the kind of bland popular portrait. It also inspires me to get the John Green book Dakota Days. I had not really previously appreciated that line "The Oracle has spoken, We cast the perfect spell," from "Cleanup Time." I wonder if that line was meant as a humorous dig at McCartney and the spell to keep him from staying at their favourite hotel.

 

And that's how a book endures for 24 years. People keep talking about it. So I guess I did something right.

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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 recently launched Threads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I arrived in Sevilla, Spain, for my presentation of Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon at La Tregua, I did a lot of rehearsing. My plan was to read in Spanish a brief introduction and then the opening paragraphs of the Siendo Rico chapter, enough to give people a sense of what the book is like. So I read both parts out loud over and over until the Spanish words started to feel comfortable coming out of my mouth.

 

The problem is I don't speak anything resembling fluent Spanish, and though I can make myself understood when necessary, I cannot understand what people are saying, especially when they talk fast. For the Q&A part of the presentation, I was going to need somebody to translate. Martín León Soto and Aida Vílchez made that possible. Martín and Aida had invited me and my wife, singer-songwriter Mary Lyn Maiscott, to come to Sevilla and stay at their house. They organized the event, arranged for publicity, and arranged for the Nowhere Band to join them and Mary Lyn in playing Beatles songs and original music for the second part of the show.

 

Aida was my language coach, Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle—The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain until I got it. A typical session would go like this: "The word is reclusión, not seclusión... You do not pronounce the 'u' in seguir... It's él, not el." And so on. But she was a good teacher, and by the time I took to the stage at La Tregua, though nobody would ever think Spanish was my mother tongue, I felt confident that the audience would understand everything I said.

 

Martín and I had never worked together, but he proved to be an excellent translator for both the audience questions and my answers. I did my best to keep my answers short, and we'd discussed beforehand what to do if I went on too long. "Oh, just slap me across the face," I said. But violence was unnecessary. A comical hand signal drew a laugh from the audience and got me to shut up so he could translate. Click here to see a video of the Martín & Bobby Show. It begins at 6:55.

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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 recently launched Threads.