Robert Rosen

May Pang's relationship with John Lennon began in 1973 after he separated from Yoko Ono. Eighteen months later, in early 1975, Lennon returned to Ono. Pang's 2023 documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, covers the same ground as her book Loving John, published in 1983. It's not surprising that it took Pang almost 50 years to get the movie version of her story into theatres and onto streaming services. As I've discussed in my book Nowhere Man, in The Village Voice, and elsewhere on this blog, Ono, now 91, uses the threat of legal action to try to control what other people say about Lennon. And she's often successful at repressing stories that go against the official narrative of Lennon as a happy househusband and secular saint. (Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros's unpublished book, In Lennon's Garden, is an especially egregious example.) What Pang went through to make and release The Lost Weekend must be quite a story in itself. That the film exists is a tribute to her tenacity.

 

If you know the story of Pang and Lennon, The Lost Weekend, set in LA and New York, will seem familiar. It's a diary-like collection of still photos of the two of them, some iconic, some taken by Pang; video of Lennon and Ono; video of Pang on various talk shows; recent video of Pang with Lennon's son Julian; and a bit of animation to fill in the gaps. Pang provides the narration and does a nice job of it. The entire film is well done and has garnered a wide array of mostly positive reviews, like the one in Variety.

 

What I found most interesting about The Lost Weekend is that Pang confirms virtually everything I wrote about her relationship with Lennon in Nowhere Man, a book that grew out of my access to diaries the former Beatle kept during the final six years of his life. Lennon's diaries begin in 1975, when he's living with Pang in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan and enjoying himself very much. The diaries confirm that he had deep feelings for Pang and carried a torch for her the rest of his life. They were in love, she says in the film.

 

"John was torn between May and Yoko," I write in Nowhere Man. "He wanted both of them but that was out of the question. May was fun, and pure sexual passion." But Yoko "was survival." May, with some hesitation, talks about their active sex life and mentions that the last time she spoke to John was when he called her from Cape Town, South Africa, a "directional" journey he took in April 1980. This is all detailed in Nowhere Man.

 

One thing May didn't know was that Lennon had learned to program dreams and many of the dreams he programmed were about making love to May. It was often the only way he could be with her after he returned to Yoko.

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

If you habla español, then you can understand my interview on El Flexo de Paco Reyero on Canal Sur radio in Sevilla, Spain. I talk about Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. Since I don't speak fluent Spanish (or even close to it), the interview is done NPR style—I say a few words in English and it switches to the Spanish translation. The interview begins at 7:55 and runs for 17 minutes.

 

If you don't speak Spanish and want to learn about Nowhere Man, then please check out any of my other interviews. Most of them are in English. Or read the English edition of the book.

 

Many thanks to Martín León Soto (aka Maleso) for arranging the interview with Paco.

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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.

 

Why has Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon (Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon) endured for more than 24 years? Because people keep talking about it and writing about it.

 

The book has generated a miraculous amount of media coverage over the decades, in a variety of languages. The most recent example appeared in Diario de Sevilla the day before a Nowhere Man event last month at La Tregua café in that beautiful Spanish city. (Click here for the English translation.)

 

The article, "Nowhere Man, o todo lo que siempre quiso saber acerca de John Lennon" (Nowhere Man, or everything you ever wanted to know about John Lennon), by José Miguel Carrasco, is a retrospective of my career. But José also talks about how the presentation at La Tregua came about with a lot of help from Aida Vílchez and her "partner in life and art," Maleso (Martín León Soto), musicians in the Nowhere Band who performed Beatles and Lennon songs at the café along with my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, who sang some of her own songs, too.

 

Maleso must also be given a huge amount of credit for providing the translation during the Q&A portion of my presentation.

 

José's article certainly got word out about the show. The turnout at La Tregua was fantástico, the most people who've come to any event I've participated in since the Nowhere Man New York City launch party in 2000. And the crowd's enthusiasm for literature and music was electrifying. All I can say is, "We slayed in Sevilla!"

 

But enough talk about the show. If you want to see what it was like and get an idea of why Nowhere Man is the book that refuses to die, there's a video of the complete event. You can watch it here.

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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.

If you couldn't make it to La Tregua, in Sevilla, on January 28, here's a video of the complete show. Martín León Soto provides the translation for my Nowhere Man presentation. Bajo Cuerda, La Tregua's house band, covers a few Beatle tunes. And the Nowhere Band performs the Beatles, John Lennon, and Mary Lyn Maiscott originals. That's Mary Lyn on vocals and guitar; Martín on keyboard, guitar, and vocals; Aida Vílchez on guitar and vocals; Juan Carlos León on guitar, and Jorge Collado on percussion and vocals.

 

Here's the set list:

00:00:50 Grow Old With Me - Aida Vílchez & The Nowhere Band
00:04:05 Oh, My Love - Adelardo Mora
00:07:00 Presentación de Robert Rosen
00:11:12 Lectura
00:14:38 Questions from the audience
00:54:08 Nowhere Man - Bajo Cuerda
00:57:22 Things We Said Today - Bajo Cuerda
01:00:38 And I Love Her - Bajo Cuerda
01:03:43 I'm Losing You - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:08:43 Jezebel - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:13:12 Midnight in California - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:17:48 You Can't Do That - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:21:41 My Cousin Sings Harmony - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:26:20 Now And Then - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:30:50 If I Fell - The Nowhere Band
01:33:26 One After 909 - The Nowhere Band
01:36:08 (Just Like) Starting Over - The Nowhere Band

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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 these first days of 2024, as I prepare to travel to Sevilla, Spain, to read from and answer questions about Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon, at La Tregua café on January 28, I've been thinking about what a miracle Nowhere Man has been. A book that publishers spent 18 years rejecting has now been in print 24 years in a variety of languages, and it's been a life-transforming odyssey. In 1981, when I began writing the book, I was an obscure freelancer. Suffice it to say that's no longer the case.

 

To celebrate my upcoming journey and the book's longevity, and to remind myself that what's happened is real, I've put together the above collection of ten print editions of Nowhere Man. This does not include another half-dozen print and ebook editions with identical covers. I invite you to join me in this celebration and, if possible, come to see me in Spain for a night of literature and music featuring the Nowhere Band: Mary Lyn Maiscott,  Aida Vílchez, and Martín León Soto.

 

Till then, happy New Year and ¡Feliz año nuevo!

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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.

 

Every gift-giving season I make available signed copies of some of my books. Here's the selection for 2023:

• Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon (updated and expanded 2022 edition), $21
• A Brooklyn Memoir (2022), $23
• Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon (2002 edition with photos), $19
• Bobby in Naziland (2019, earlier, slightly different edition of A Brooklyn Memoir), $23

Prices include shipping in the continental US. Please email me for information on payment via Zelle, check, or money order, or if you have any questions.

 

Wishing all of you the happiest of holidays! And to help you get into the spirit of the season, here's Mary Lyn Maiscott's Christmas classic, "Blue Lights."

 

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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.

 

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.

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.

Jeopardy! premiered March 30, 1964, on NBC and has run, on and off, ever since, with the current edition now in its 40th season. In New York City, the original show, hosted by Art Fleming (Don Pardo was the announcer), aired at 11:30 in the morning. My mother watched it and all the other morning game shows on a small TV in the kitchen as she did her housework. One day, probably in 1968, I was watching it with her and my uncle. I don't remember the category or clue, but the answer (always in the form of a question) was, "What is 'Penny Lane'?" My mother and uncle didn't know it, but I was a Beatles fan and I did, and it prompted my uncle to say, "He should do as well with his schoolwork as he does with Jeopardy!"

 

Flash forward to December 2003. I'm a professional writer enjoying success with my first published book, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. It's on best-seller lists. Excerpts are running in magazines. Foreign-language editions are appearing. It's getting reviewed. But my parents, retired and living in Florida, have not grasped how dramatically my life has changed.

 

One night my father calls. "Did you see Jeopardy!?" he asks.

 

"No," I say, aware that he and my mother are big fans of the show. "Why?"

 

"You were a question!"

 

"What?"

 

All he remembers is that my name and Nowhere Man were mentioned. And this to him is proof at last that his son is "a famous writer." 

 

I obtain a videocassette of the show, from December 26. And sure enough, there I am in Double Jeopardy!, "Rock & Roll Bookstore" for $400: "'Nowhere Man' is Robert Rosen's take on 'the final days' of this Beatle."

 

Flash forward again, 20 years, to October 18, 2023. I'm scrolling through Facebook when my messages and notifications suddenly light up: I'm hearing that Bob Rosen was a clue on Jeopardy tonight!... You've hit the big time, my boy!... You were just on Jeopardy!!... Bob, did you know that you're a Jeopardy question??? I'm watching tonight's episode right now!

 

It's the same category, same question, and same $400 from 2003. Except this time half the world is watching, and at least three people managed to take a picture of the clue.

 

I later find out that Jeopardy! has been rerunning questions since the writers' strike. And they reran my question in the age of smartphones and social media.

 

From "Penny Lane" to Nowhere Man, Jeopardy! loves the Beatles.

 

My Jeopardy! moment 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.

 

Zito's transcript of the first question and my answer, edited for clarity, is below. Photo © Mary Lyn Maiscott.

 

You said that John's diaries were taken away from you. Did you have enough material at that time to write Nowhere Man or did you eventually get the diaries back? What happened?

 

I was sent out of town. While I was gone my apartment was ransacked. Everything I'd been working on for like a year was taken from me. I was in a state of shock. I couldn't believe that's how the thing ended. I didn't know what to do. Two weeks passed and I started waking up in the morning and realized that passages from the diary were running through my head. I had passages memorized. A lot of the stuff John had written was just so vivid. I started writing down what I remembered, and the more I remembered the more I remembered. This went on for some time and eventually I had large portions of the diaries re-created. I turned that into a book proposal. That's when I started trying to publish the book. This was late 1982, early 1983, and I was met with a lot of rejection for the reasons I was talking about before—you can't prove that this is true; there's going to be lawsuits. When I finally got the deal 18 years later there were no lawsuits and the more time went on the more people realized that what I'd written was true. More information about John's life had begun coming out, and now, 23 years later, pretty much everything I said has been confirmed in one way or another. There was a copyright infringement trial in 2002 and I was subpoenaed to testify by Yoko Ono's lawyers. A lot of what I wrote in the book I eventually told under oath. That's what happened.

 

A short video clip of my reading from the "Money" chapter of Nowhere Man. Video © Laurel Zito.

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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.

I was thrilled to return to Subterranean Books, in St. Louis, for my first live event in four years. There's a complete audio recording of the reading and Q&A that followed, which I'll make available in weeks to come. In the meantime, here's a transcript of my opening remarks.

 

Hi everyone. Thank you all for coming. I know many of you were here in 2019 for my previous book, Bobby in Naziland, which was re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir. Nowhere Man is a very different book, and there's a new edition with 45 pages of supplementary material, a new introduction, and innumerable corrections, additions, and revisions.

 

I was supposed to do this three years ago. Unfortunately a pandemic got in the way. This is my first book event since the pandemic started, and I timed it to coincide with what would have been John Lennon's 83rd birthday on October 9.

 

Perhaps some of you have already read Nowhere Man, possibly when it was originally published more than 23 years ago. A lot's happened since then. Tonight I'm going to talk about how I wrote Nowhere Man and some of what's happened since 2000. Then I'm going to read three short passages to give you a sense of the book's flavor. I should warn you that one passage has some strong language, which is pretty much unavoidable when writing about Lennon. After I finish reading I'll throw it open to questions.

 

I began writing Nowhere Man more than 41 years ago, in early 1982. It took me 18 years to find a publisher. Everybody I sent the manuscript to was afraid to publish it. They were worried about lawsuits. They were worried that there wasn't enough interest in John Lennon. They were worried that I couldn't provide documented proof that what I'd written was true. I didn't work nonstop on the book for 18 years, but I never gave up on it because I knew it was a story that needed to be told. So I had 18 years to refine the book and get it right.

 

Then, a small indie publisher, Soft Skull Press, made an offer for Nowhere Man and published it in the summer of 2000. They were very good at promotion and after 18 years of rejection I had an international bestseller in multiple languages.

 

So what made the book so dangerous and controversial that nobody would touch it for all those years? Nowhere Man exists because five months after Lennon was murdered, his personal assistant Fred Seaman, an old college friend, gave me the diaries Lennon had been keeping for the last six years of his life and asked me to turn it into a book—it's what John had told him to do, he said.

 

In the new introduction I describe this as the old literary trope: an "ordinary man" in an "extraordinary situation." Did I take at face value what Seaman told me? Yes. Was this naïve? Obviously. Did I recognize the moment as a life-changing occasion? No, I saw it as a job. Of course I wanted to turn Lennon's diaries into a book. I was a writer looking for a story, and the story of the Beatles was the story of my generation.

 

But what exactly was in those diaries that made them such an extraordinary document? Well, they struck me as a rough draft of the tell-all memoir John never had a chance to complete. He put everything in there: the gossip, the fear, the rage, the insanity, the insecurity, the inspiration, the love, and the hate… all the emotions and contradictions that made Lennon who he was. And I had to turn this disjointed mass of raw material into a coherent narrative. Which I started doing. But before I could finish—and this is the story behind the book, which I detail in a chapter called "John Lennon's Diaries"—everything I was working on was taken from me.

 

All of this raises a question that I've been asked repeatedly for the past 23 years: What right did I have to reveal the personal information in a man's private diaries? In other words did I have a right to tell this story?

 

All I can say is that John Lennon was a historical figure, the information in his diaries was of historical value, and an extraordinary circumstance allowed me to be a conduit of that information. Had I chosen to not publish Nowhere Man, this story would not have been told in my lifetime, if ever. So I made a decision: I chose to put the story out there.

 

If you're uncomfortable with that (and I know some people are), there are plenty of authorized Lennon biographies. You don't have to read my book. But if you choose to read it, I will say that I've done my best to give you the truth as I know it.

 

The three selections I'm going to read are from a section called "Dakota 1980." They take place towards the end of John's five-year hiatus, before he returned to the studio to record his final album, Double Fantasy.

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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.

Robert Rodriguez and I covered a lot of ground when we spoke recently on his podcast, Something About the Beatles. We talked in detail about the new edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, which has 45 pages of supplementary material, a new introduction, and innumerable corrections, revisions, and additions. And we talked about the reading I'm doing tonight, October 4, at 6 p.m., at Subterranean Books in St. Louis, my first public event in almost four years, since the beginning of the pandemic. And we talked about the book I'm working on, tentatively titled No Future, which is set at a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York in the 1970s, as the student left is giving way to the forces of punk.

 

In the course of discussing the many dramas surrounding the publication of Nowhere Man, the subject of Yoko Ono's 2002 copyright infringement lawsuit against Fred Seaman came up. I was subpoenaed to testify at that trial as a witness for Ono, and I told Rodriguez about the bizarre cross-examination Seaman's lawyer subjected me to. Fresh out of law school, the attorney was up against Ono's high-priced, well-prepared legal team that had both the facts and the law on their side, in a high-profile trial that dominated the front page of the tabloids. For the young lawyer, it was a baptism of fire.

 

Ono's lawyer questioned me first, and I told a story that was, essentially, the same story I tell in the Nowhere Man chapter titled "John Lennon's Diaries." Except this time I told it under oath.

 

Then Seaman's attorney had at me. The first rule of cross-examination is: Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. This cross-examination was a series of shots in the dark, the attorney hoping to hit on something, anything, that would discredit me. His first question was (and I'm paraphrasing throughout): "Did you burglarize Fred Seaman's apartment?"

 

I looked at him like he was crazy. "No," I said, realizing that Seaman must have believed that Ono was somehow able to force me to do this.

 

"Is this the first time anybody asked you that question?"

 

"Yes."

 

I don't recall exactly where the cross-examination went from there, only that the attorney asked me a lot of questions that did his client no good whatsoever. But I do recall his last three questions:

 

"Did you believe John Lennon wanted you to have his diaries?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Do you still believe that?"

 

I thought about it for a few seconds, and I'm told it was a very dramatic moment. "Yes," I finally said.

 

"Did you pay taxes on the money Yoko Ono paid you?"

 

This was his last desperate attempt to discredit me, and it pissed me off. "I sure did," I said.

 

The lawyer turned and walked back to his seat.

 

Ono won her case.

_______

Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon tonight, October 4, 6 p.m., at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

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.

 

Wednesday, October 4, at 6 p.m., I'll be doing my first live event in almost four years, since the beginning of the pandemic. If you're in the St. Louis area, please join me at Subterranean Books. I'll be reading from and answering questions about the new and expanded edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

The book has endured for 23 years and achieved cult-classic status because it takes you on a journey through Lennon's consciousness. Read Nowhere Man and you'll feel what it was like to be John. I was able to write such a biography because five months after Lennon was murdered, his personal assistant gave me the diaries Lennon had been keeping for the last six years of his life and asked me to turn it into a book—it's what John had told him to do, he said.

 

The diaries struck me as a rough draft of the tell-all memoir that Lennon never had a chance to complete—which raises a question I've been asked repeatedly: What right did I have to reveal the personal information in a man's private diaries? In other words, did I have a right to tell this story?

 

I'll discuss this at the event. Of course you should feel free to ask me about anything else.

 

I'm also going to read three short excerpts from chapters in the "Dakota 1980" section of the book: "Being Rich," "That Magic Feeling," and "Money." They all take place towards the end of John's five-year hiatus, before he returned to the studio to record his final album, Double Fantasy. 

 

If you're unfamiliar with me or my work, please listen to my recent appearance on the Something About the Beatles podcast. This will give you a sense of what the Subterranean event will be like.

 

I look forward to meeting you in St. Louis. To paraphrase the Beatles, been away so long I hardly know the place anymore.

________

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.

I'd never seen this episode of The Joan Rivers Show from 1991, but it popped up on YouTube a few months ago and has already gotten more than 234,000 views and 2,000+ comments. Rivers's guests were Fred Seaman, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's former personal assistant; Lennon's former lover May Pang; and Michael Medeiros, aka "Mike Tree," also a former Lennon and Ono assistant. The theme of the episode was "Former Staffers Tell All," though Seaman was the only one who had something to sell that day: his book, The Last Days of John Lennon: A Personal Memoir. 

 

I've written about Seaman, Pang, and Medeiros in my book Nowhere Man, on this blog, and in the case of Medeiros, in The Village Voice.

 

Seaman was an old college friend who, the day Lennon hired him, in 1979, asked me to collaborate with him on a book about Lennon and, after his murder, gave me Lennon's diaries to use as source material for that book. I'm not going to deconstruct, line by line, everything Seaman tells Rivers. Suffice it to say that like his book, it's a skillful blend of truth and lies, and he begins the interview with a fire hose of lies about Lennon's diaries and about me.

 

If you want my perspective, read Nowhere Man. I detail the diary story in a chapter called "John Lennon's Diaries." Or  listen to any of the interviews I've given over the years, many of which are available on the home page and John Lennon page of this Website. Or if you're in St. Louis, please join me October 4 at Subterranean Books. I'll be discussing and answering questions about Nowhere Man. You can ask me anything, and I hope you will.

________

Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon on Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m. at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

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.

 

I'm doing my first public event in nearly four years, since just before the onset of the pandemic, at Subterranean Books, in St. Louis. I'm going to read from and answer questions about a new and expanded edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. If you're in the area, please mark your calendars: Wednesday, October 4, at 6 p.m. It's an early celebration of Lennon's 83rd birthday, which takes place October 9.

 

Originally published 23 years ago, Nowhere Man has been translated into many languages and has become an enduring cult classic that takes you on a journey through Lennon's consciousness. You can read about the book on the Subterranean site, or just come to the store, at 6271 Delmar, in the Loop, University City, for an intimate perspective on the life and death of an ex-Beatle.

 

With a little help from my St. Louis friends and family maybe we can reprise the outstanding turnout at my last Subterranean event, in October 2019, for my just-published memoir Bobby in Naziland (since retitled A Brooklyn Memoir). It put the book on the St. Louis Post Dispatch bestseller list.

 

Stay tuned for future postings about Nowhere Man and my Subterranean reappearance. In the meantime start spreading the news. I hope you can meet me in St. Louie.

________

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 (the site formerly known as) Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

I launched this blog February 10, 2010, with an announcement that the Italian edition of my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, was going to be published by Coniglio Editore, and that I was going to celebrate with a pizza and a bottle of Chianti. I don't remember what I called the blog back then. I changed the name every few weeks. I do know that over the past 13 years and 5 months, as I posted sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, and sometimes monthly, I changed the name many more times.

 

If you logged on here four days ago, I was calling the blog "Flatbush Flashback," a reference to my most recent book, A Brooklyn Memoir. The blog served as an illustrated postscript to what I'd written about my old neighborhood in the 1950s and 60s. Before that, my posts about Beaver Street were an addendum to my analysis of the political, technical, and sociological ramifications of the pornography industry. I called the blog "The Daily Beaver." Scroll down the left-hand column (on a computer) and you'll see a list of all the other topics I've written about since 2010.

 

Lately I've been writing about whatever catches my interest on any particular day. So, if you've tuned in recently, you've read about legal cannabis in New York City, a 350-year-old tree in Washington Square Park, tenement buildings (which did, coincidentally, touch on Flatbush), and a visit to Uvalde, Texas, on the first anniversary of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

 

It was time to change the name of the blog.

 

I stole "The Weekly Blague" from an Agatha Christie book I've been reading. There's a reference in Death on the Nile to a gossip column in a newspaper called the Daily Blague. The name made me laugh. I looked it up and was surprised to see that "blague" is a real word, though a bit archaic. I'm not going to tell you what it means, but I will say I'm using it ironically.

 

I don't know how long I'm going to keep that name. But for the time being, I am going to keep posting to The Weekly Blague about whatever's on my mind.

 

Conventional wisdom has it that people no longer read blogs, that they're very 2010, that readers want only microposts on social media. I don't buy it. A good blog is no different than a good newspaper. If you write about things people want to read, they'll find it. This blog has proven that many times.

 

Welcome to The Weekly Blague, however long it may last.

________

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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

I've probably done 400 interviews since Nowhere Man was published in 2000. And yes I'm amazed and grateful that in 2023 there's continued interest in the book. The latest interview, conducted by John Wisniewski, ran in AM FM Magazine, and touches on some of Nowhere Man's main themes: John Lennon's relationships with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, and his sons Sean and Julian; his interest in the occult; his flirtation with Christianity; his immigration battle; his songwriting; and his death. Here's a sample quote: "When Sean was born in 1975, John looked upon the new baby as a last-chance opportunity to repent for all his past sins against family."

 

When Sean was born in 1975, John looked upon the new baby as a last-chance opportunity to repent for all his past sins against family.

 

If you haven't read Nowhere Man yet, this is a good introduction.

 

Carlos E. Larriega, de Mundo Beatle, en Perú, ha tenido la amabilidad de traducir la entrevista al español. Pueden leerla aquí.

 

The interview also appears in Cultured Focus Magazine, a site that works better with an iPhone or Mac rather than a PC.

Entrevistas, he hecho algunos

 

Traducción por Carlos E. Larriega

 

Probablemente he concedido 400 entrevistas desde que se publicó Nowhere Man en el 2000. Y sí, estoy asombrado y agradecido de que en el 2023 exista un interés continuo en el libro. La última entrevista, realizada por John Wisniewski, se publicó en la revista AM FM y toca algunos de los temas principales de Nowhere Man: las relaciones de John Lennon con Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono y sus hijos Sean y Julian; su interés por lo oculto; su coqueteo con el cristianismo; su batalla contra la inmigración; su composición; y su muerte. Aquí hay una cita de muestra: "Cuando Sean nació en 1975, John vio al nuevo bebé como una última oportunidad para arrepentirse de todos sus pecados pasados contra la familia."

 

Si aún no han leído Nowhere Man, esta es una buena introducción.

 

Carlos E. Larriega, de Mundo Beatle, en Perú, ha tenido la amabilidad de traducir la entrevista al español. Pueden leerla aquí.

 

La entrevista también aparece en la revista Cultured Focus, un sitio que funciona mejor con un iPhone o Mac que con una PC.

________

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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Nowhere Man, Beaver Street, and A Brooklyn Memoir, three books about seemingly unrelated topics, are connected by my voice—they all have the same sound. It's almost as if they're a trilogy or a journey through my consciousness. The interviews I've done over the years usually focus on only one topic: John Lennon, pornography, or Flatbush. But occasionally somebody wants to explore the complete Rosen oeuvre, and that was the case with the podcast Conversations With Rich Bennett. Rich wanted to hear it all, and he allowed me to ramble on for more than hour, taking a deep dive into each of my books.

 

I hope you'll give our conversation a listen.

________

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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

The above trailer for my recent interview with the Spanish digital magazine and podcast Lo Desconocido (The Unknown) is a reminder that I've been talking about Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon for 23 years.

 

Conducted in Spanish and English, the interview is available on Ivoox and Spotify and will appear in an upcoming issue of the magazine. Sergio Ramos of Lo Desconocido asked the questions and my friend Diego Harris translated.

 

Along with the usual questions—Are you a Beatles fan? Why did you write the book? What was your impression of Lennon's dairies?—Ramos asked one I'd never heard before: Do you think Lennon's diaries may be as important as the classified files about the Kennedy assassination?

 

Here's my answer, edited for clarity:

 

It's been almost 60 years since JFK was assassinated, and the classified files having to do with his murder still have not been completely declassified. I don't know if they will be in our lifetime, or ever, but if they say that the CIA was behind the assassination, as some people believe, that would be earthshaking. What the files and diaries have in common is that President Kennedy and John Lennon were major historical figures. Lennon and Ono were working very hard to project a certain image to the world. That's what their Double Fantasy album was about—projecting an image of a happy, eccentric family, with John as the househusband bringing up Sean and baking bread.

 

Lennon was one of the most influential people of the 20th century, in music, fashion, consciousness, and religion, among other things. Because of his profound global influence, the gap between the image he was trying to project and the flawed human being who came across in the diaries is important. The world should know who John was and what really happened (just as they should know what really happened to Kennedy). That was one of the reasons I wrote Nowhere Man. I think in certain ways Lennon is more important than Kennedy because he was more influential. I'm not sure what kind of lasting influence Kennedy had on the world other than projecting an image of a vital young American president. I was 11 years old when he was killed. It was certainly shocking and it affected my view of reality. It showed me that these things can happen. But unlike Lennon, Kennedy had no real influence on my life. I wasn't interested in politics. Lennon's influence continues, more so today than Kennedy's… a lot more so. The thing that joins them forever in our consciousness is the shock and trauma of these two extremely famous men being gunned down in the prime of their life, which I discuss in some detail in A Brooklyn Memoir.

________

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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

"When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself," Oscar Wilde said in his best-known book, The Picture of Dorian Gray. I've always liked that quote because I think it's true, especially when applied to my best-known book, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. Though the majority of critics have showered Nowhere Man with praise, a vocal minority have insisted that the book is "useless," "redundant," "poorly written," and that "it hardly qualifies as a book." A number of these negative reviews begin with words to the effect of, "I don't need to read this book, I know what it says."

 

Well, I appreciate their disagreement, but for my final post of 2022, I'm going to look back at some of the positive reviews Nowhere Man has garnered. Below are 22 years of pull quotes from newspapers, magazines, websites, TV shows, and radio shows from all over the world.

 

Happy New Year to all my readers, especially those who read my books before posting reviews!

...

"A gripping read that no Lennon fan will be able to resist." —The Times (London)

"Controversial... intriguing... surprising." —Court TV

 

"An obsessive, corrosive, unforgettable account of Lennon and his ménage at the Dakota. Even readers who never bought the airbrushed image of Lennon the benign father and house-husband are likely to experience powerful cognitive dissonance as they read Rosen's chronicle of weirdness, in which the tragic and the absurd are inextricably mixed." —Christianity Today

 

"Rather like re-reading a favorite detective story... though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently." —Mojo

 

"You feel like you are inside The Dakota with John Lennon and Yoko Ono." —HuffPost

 

"Captures with disturbing immediacy the pressure of being a celebrity… flirts with brilliance." —Chicago Reader

 

"Entertainingly salacious." —Booklist

 

"After reading this book I felt an affinity for Lennon; his life with all its torments, joys and pains was real to me." —Vision

 

"Robert Rosen's gripping account of Lennon's five-year seclusion in the Dakota building makes it impossible any longer to agree with the cozy popular image of him during this period as a devoted father and bread-baking domesticated househusband. This is a portrait of... the twilight of an idol." —Uncut

 

"A fascinating story.... A shocking biography." —Proceso (Mexico)

 

"One of the most sincere and brutal biographies ever written." —iLeon.com (Spain)

 

"What makes this book valuable is the sense that Rosen is providing as honest a characterization as possible—honest enough so that, in spite of Lennon's quirks and foibles, his genius ultimately shines through." —Metroland

 

"Eminently readable, whether you're a fan or not.... An excellent, beautifully written book." —Chaotic Order (U.K.)

 

"We become privy to first-hand knowledge about Lennon's final days which has never before seen the light of day... this book makes for engrossing reading." —Beat (Australia)

 

"The manuscript is so personal that one would think John Lennon himself was telling Rosen exactly what to write." —Shu-Izmz

 

"One of the most fascinating insights in Robert Rosen's book is that John knew that he, in the last half of the Seventies, exercised his greatest power to the extent that he wasn't seen; he was beyond success; he had achieved such fame that his five-year silence hummed more loudly than, say, any of Paul McCartney's appearances in People magazine." —Oakland University Journal

 

"A fast-paced demystification of a former Beatle. An essential book." —Últimas Noticias (Venezuela)

 

"One of the best books on the life (and death) of John Lennon." —ABC (Spain)

________

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 Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

This is the introduction to the new edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

Forty years ago, when I sat down to write this book, I could not have imagined that it would take 18 years to find a publisher. But it did. I filled a filing cabinet with rejections, all of them expressing fear—of lawsuits, of the reading public's having little interest in John Lennon, and of my inability to provide documented proof that what I'd written was true.

 

Then… something happened. Maybe the stars and planets finally lined up—that's what Lennon and Yoko Ono would have said.

 

Soft Skull Press, a tiny independent operating out of a tenement basement on New York's Lower East Side, made an offer for Nowhere Man. They loved that the book was "controversial"; they understood that it was more than a standard Lennon biography; and they played the media with an impressive combination of skill and audacity. Nowhere Man became an object of global fascination, and when Soft Skull published it in the summer of 2000, I found myself transformed from an obscure middle-aged writer to an author with an international bestseller in multiple languages. Those were the days.

 

Nowhere Man exists because five months after Lennon was murdered, his personal assistant Fred Seaman handed me the diaries the ex-Beatle had been keeping for the last six years of his life and told me to turn it into a book—it's what John had told him to do, he said.

 

So there it was, the old literary trope: an "ordinary man" in an "extraordinary situation." Did I take at face value what Seaman told me? Yes. Was this naïve? Obviously. Did I recognize the moment as a life-changing occasion? No, I saw it as a job, and I went forward without doubt or hesitation. Of course I wanted to turn Lennon's diaries into a book. I was a writer looking for a story, and the story of the Beatles was the story of my generation.

 

Today I think Lennon's diaries were a rough draft of the memoir he never had a chance to complete.

 

Today I think Lennon's diaries were a rough draft of the memoir he never had a chance to complete. He put everything in there—the gossip, the fear, the rage, the insanity, the insecurity, the inspiration, the love, and the hate… all the emotions and contradictions that made Lennon who he was. And it was up to me to turn this disjointed mass of raw material into a coherent narrative. I was inspired. But before I could finish—and this is the story behind the book, which I detail in the next chapter—everything I was working on was taken from me.

 

Nowhere Man has provoked a number of people to ask what right I had to reveal the personal information in a man's private diaries. I've often asked myself the same question. Many times over the 18 years that the book remained in limbo I tried to walk away from it, to forget it, to get on with my life. But the story in John's diaries kept calling me back—it demanded to be told. So, when Lennon's spirit moved me, I worked on the book, matching fragments of information that turned up on the public record with what I knew to be true from the diaries. I was constantly adding to the manuscript, refining it, and somehow infusing it with the energy Lennon transmitted in his daily scribblings.

 

But there were crucial facts that I was unable to confirm from the public record or from speaking with people who knew John. That's where an aspect of this book that has sent certain readers into a state of spluttering apoplexy comes into play: I wrote in the author's note, "Nowhere Man is a work of investigative journalism and imagination."

 

I want to emphasize that I used my imagination not to simply make things up, but as a fictional technique that allowed me to get closer to the truth than if I'd written a conventional biography. I applied this technique most frequently in the "Dream Power" chapter, about Lennon's efforts to "program" his dreams. Details of many of those dreams have never appeared anywhere outside his diaries. In those cases I used my imagination to create parallel dreams that approximated the feeling of his real dreams—though in this  edition, the Barbara Walters dream is essentially real, a partial description having turned up on the Internet several years ago.

 

Nowhere Man, then, is a journey through Lennon's consciousness, a view of the world through his eyes.

 

But did I have the right to tell this story?

 

But did I have the right to tell this story? All I can say is that John Lennon was a historical figure, the information in his diaries was of historical value, and an extraordinary circumstance allowed me to be a conduit of that information. Had I chosen to not publish Nowhere Man, this story would not have been told in my lifetime, if ever. So I made a decision: I chose to put the story out there.

 

If you're uncomfortable with that, you may want to put this book down and pick up one of the multitude of authorized Lennon biographies. But if you prefer a book written by one of the few people outside John's inner circle to have read his diaries, you can stay with this revised, expanded, and updated Nowhere Man. I've done my best to give you the truth as I know it.

________

Buy Nowhere Man on Amazon or Bookshop. If you'd like a signed copy, e-mail me here for details.

 

A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

You can now buy the new edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon at any brick-and-mortar bookstore. That's the final frontier of its distribution: The paperback and e-book are available everywhere books are sold, online or off.

 

Of course, it's always good to support your local indie bookstore, and indiebound.org will direct you to one in your neighborhood.

 

My personal favorite indie is Subterranean Books, in St. Louis. One of the last live events I did, back in October 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, was a reading from Bobby in Naziland (since re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir) at Subterranean. The enthusiastic crowd bought enough books to put Bobby in Naziland on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bestseller list, and the staff was so happy with the way the evening went, they invited me to come back.

 

I was going to return in October 2020 to read from Nowhere Man on what would have been Lennon's 80th birthday. But this thing called Covid forced me to cancel. Now, here it is December 2022—on the eve of a sad day filled with reminders of what happened to John 42 years ago—and I've still not returned to St. Louis.

 

I'm going to make a New Year's resolution: In 2023, I will again do live events. And assuming they still want me back, one of those events will be a celebration of John Lennon and the new edition of Nowhere Man at Subterranean Books.

 

To all my friends and family in St. Louis and environs, I will see you there. Details to be announced in 2023.

________

A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

Should you be in the market for a personalized gift for a Beatles fan or somebody who appreciates a good book, may I suggest a signed copy of the updated edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

That's my hand in the above photo demonstrating where I'll inscribe the book to your specifications. If this exclusive offer interests you, write to me here and I'll tell you where to send your check or money order for the unbeatable price of $16 if you live in the U.S. Unfortunately, I'm not set up for 21st century e-commerce so we'll have to do this the old fashioned way.

 

If you'd like a signed copy of any of my other books, that can also be arranged.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

As promised last week, the updated and expanded e-book edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is now available from Barnes & Noble and Scribd. You can download it from B&N by clicking on the above image, and you can read it on Scribd by clicking here. Scribd, for those unfamiliar with it, is a digital library offering unlimited access to e-books, audiobooks, and magazines for a monthly subscription of $11.99.

 

If you'd like a signed copy of Nowhere Man, A Brooklyn Memoir, or Bobby in Naziland please contact me by clicking here and I'll send you the details.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

The updated and expanded edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon continues to reach more online bookstores. It's now available as an Apple e-book, which you can download by clicking on the cover, and as a Kobo e-book, which you can download by clicking here.

 

Soon it will also be available from Barnes & Noble and Scribd. The final frontier, of course, is your local book store, and in due time you'll be able to find the paperback edition there, as well.

 

Stay tuned for more updates on the availability of Nowhere Man.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

Talking with Emerson Souza, host of the Hear Some Evil podcast, is kind of like hanging out at a bar and getting into a stimulating conversation with the knowledgeable stranger sitting on the barstool next to you. Souza originally told me that he was interested in discussing Beaver Street, my book about the history of pornography. But we ended up talking for two hours about my other books, too: an updated edition of my classic John Lennon bio Nowhere Man, which was just re-released, and A Brooklyn Memoir, a darkly comic tale about growing up in Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s, surrounded by Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans who fought the Nazis. In short, Souza and I covered the entire Rosen oeuvre, and you can listen to our conversation if you click on "Play," above.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

The best way to get a sense of how the new edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has changed from previous editions is to take a look at the table of contents. For one thing, this is the first English-language edition to have a table of contents.

 

In addition to the new introduction, "In My Own Write," which grapples with many of the obstacles I had to overcome before Nowhere Man could be published, most of the new material can be found in Part V, "Afterlife." In these chapters I delve into such things as conspiracy theories and the absurd lengths that certain compromised people in the media and law enforcement went to in an effort to derail the book's publication. There's also an extended exchange I had with Bill Harry, founding editor of Mersey Beat, the first newspaper to cover the Beatles and to publish Lennon's poetry and prose.

 

Throughout Nowhere Man there are countless refinements, updates, corrections, additions, and clarifications. You can look at this new edition as the "director's cut." Here's the complete table of contents.

 

CONTENTS

 

In My Own Write xi

 

PRELUDE

John Lennon's Diaries 3
Jerusalem Fantasy 11

PART I
DAKOTA 1980

 Being Rich 15
That Magic Feeling 20
Sean 25
The Lunatic Incident 27
Answered Prayers 29
Cold Turkey 35
Macrobiotic Perfection 37
The Servant Problem 39
After Breakfast 47
Dream Power 49
Afternoon 53
Lennon's Complaint 62
The Occult Arts 64
The Book of Numbers 67
The Cards According to Swan 80
Beatle Economics 86
Money 90
His Finest Hour 97
People I Remember 101

 

PART II
GETTING CENTERED

Interlude at El Solano 107
The Visitors 112
Happy Birthday Dear Yoko 115
Imagine 116
Jude 117
Born Again 121
Going Back to New York City 123
Cannon Hill 124
A Plan 127
Vow of Silence 129
Cape Town 131
Voyage to Bermuda 134
Knapton Hill 137
Villa Undercliffe 138
American Tourist 140
Night Life 145
Birth of a Song 147
Mother's Arrival 151
Inspiration 154
Madonna and Child 158

PART III
THE FINAL DAYS

Double Fantasy 161
Media Blitz 167
Geffen's the One 169
October 9 170
Completion 173
Ecstasy 174
Life After Double Fantasy 175
Yoko Only 179
Weekend 181
12/8/80 182
The Best Is Yet to Be 183

PART IV
THE CODA 1980–1981

The City on the Edge of Time 187
Young Man with a Goal 191
What Would Holden Do? 193
The Diagnosis 204
God's Decision 207
Chapter 27 209
Dakota Fantasy 214

PART V
AFTERLIFE

Aftermath 217
Strawberry Fields Forever 228
And the Mersey Beat Goes On 229
The Unfinished Life of John Lennon 238
An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson 242
A Question of Conspiracy 250
The Book That Cannot Be 254
(Just Like) Starting Over 258
How It Began 259

 

Sources 261
Index 263
About the Author 279

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My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

The new Nowhere Man, the first update to the print edition in 20 years and to the Kindle edition since 2015, is slowly working its way into distribution channels. The Kindle became available this week. You can preview or download it by clicking on the buttons above.

 

In additions to updates, corrections, and clarifications, the book contains six new chapters, including Mersey Beat founding editor Bill Harry's interview with me; a discussion of conspiracy theories surrounding John Lennon's murder; and "In My Own Write," a new introduction, available in the preview, that grapples with the question: Did I have the right to tell this story? Check out the table of contents to see what else is new.

 

In the coming weeks, the e-book will also be available on Apple Books, Kobo, Scribd, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, and all other online bookstores. The paperback will be available in your local bookstore in late November.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

 

The front and back covers of the new Nowhere Man paperback, the first updated English-language print edition in 20 years, has certain references and symbols that a casual reader might overlook. Let's begin with the the color red in "Nowhere" and in the background of the front cover. This is a reference to the cover of J. D. Salinger's classic novel of disaffected youth, The Catcher in the Rye, which plays a crucial role in Nowhere Man. Mark David Chapman believed that if he murdered John Lennon he would literally disappear into the pages of Catcher, become the Catcher in the Rye for his generation, and there would be a new chapter of the book, Chapter 27, written in Lennon's blood. At Chapman's court hearing, after he pleaded guilty to murder, he chose to read a passage from Catcher as his way of explaining why he did it.

 

In Nowhere Man, I explore the insanity of what Chapman believed and what he did, and try to make sense of a senseless act that defies rational explanation.

 

The photo of Lennon, which perfectly captures the mood of the book, was shot in Denmark in 1970.

 

The circle and lines on the back cover are a reference to the tarot card the Sun, which portends good fortune, joy, and harmony. Both John and Yoko were deeply into tarot—they had a full-time tarot-card reader, Charlie Swan. In Nowhere Man, I examine their obsession with tarot and other occult practices, including magic, astrology, and numerology.

 

There have been 15 editions of Nowhere Man, in various languages, all with different covers. This cover, designed by Grey Thornberry, I think is the best one yet, and I hope it will entice you to pick up the book.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.