Robert Rosen

 

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

As Robert Rosen's wife, I've sometimes felt as if I were also living with the spirit of John Lennon. This has been mostly good, but I once told a journalist in Mexico City that there had been times when I never wanted to hear the words "John Lennon" again. (I imagine anyone who's lived with a biographer can relate.) That was long ago, and since then Bob's connection with Lennon has become a beautiful, if intricate, part of the fabric of our life together. Last January we both took part in an event in Seville centered on Bob's book Nowhere Man. I'm a singer-songwriter and aside from doing a few original songs, I performed "I'm Losing You," "You Can't Do That," and "Now and Then," which had just come out a couple of months before.

The phrase "now and then" also figures into a song I wrote and recently released as a digital single. "Mild December" was partly inspired by last Christmas evening, which Bob and I spent with our friend Michael Medeiros, aka "Mike Tree," as Lennon called him when he was John's gardener. After dinner, we settled into Michael's cozy living room to listen to music and talk. Lennon seemed to hover over us that night, and when I looked up the weather for December 1980, I saw that it was mild then too.

 

The recording was produced by Adam Tilzer, with Danny Bradley on drums, and mastered by Nick Miller. You can read the lyrics below:

 

Mild December

 

It was a mild December

When we had our Christmas meal 

Spicy puttanesca

Red wine for the reveal

 

You played a tape just for me 

I heard the stops and starts

Then we went out on the fire escape

Those geraniums had heart

 

And you said you were unwanted

But you screamed that all away

Then you strutted with a puffed-up chest

To a Central Park West subway

 

And now you've got an aerie

A nest that's rent controlled

I walked up all those steps for you

Just wishing for some snow

 

And I played a mix of my new song

You said I got it kinda wrong

But I won't go that low for you, my friend 

I read the writing on your wall

But honey I can take a fall

Progress not perfection I agree

 

And then you bit into a gummy

Said you just had one a day

But you would eat that whole damn bag

Just to make those memories fade

 

'Cause that girl was gonna kill you

You found her gun and split in two

One part floated near her bed

She'd used her best voodoo

 

And you said you liked Folk City

When you were oh so young

You drank a lot in Gerdes' place

Now it's got you on the run

 

Well, you are such a gentle man

But the whiskey made you mean

Lashing out at those you love

Yeah, I've heard about that scene

 

And I played a mix of my new song

You said I got it kinda wrong

But I won't go that low for you, my friend 

I read the writing on your wall

But honey you can take a fall

You didn't need that four bucks anyway

 

You got snakebit in the desert

You hear the rattle in your ear

You think my song is fiction 

We can go with that, my dear

 

Still you took care of her jade tree

Its leaves like blades could cut 

But money showered in its wake

Or that's the scuttlebutt

 

I played CBGB's

When I was oh so young

I wanted more from Hilly's place

But still I had my fun

 

And it was a mild December

When he stepped from his car 

I lose you now and then, it seems

But you never go too far

 

Can we ever really change

So many cells to rearrange

I walked up those steep steps for you

Just the way he did before everything blew

 

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me

By Elliot Mintz

Dutton

293 pages

$32

 

If you were to pull all the sycophantic lines out of We All Shine On, Elliot Mintz's memoir about his relationship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, you'd have enough material to fill a small, stand-alone volume. The full effect of his obsequiousness doesn't hit you until you're well into the book. For me it reached a breaking point on page 262, when Lennon asks Mintz if there's anything he doesn't like about Double Fantasy, Lennon's final album, a collaboration with Ono. "I can't think of anything I don't love about it," Mintz says, not daring to utter a single word that might convey the slightest hint of negativity about Ono's questionable contributions, which make up half an LP that Lennon, in his own journals, called "mediocre." 

The harshest thing Mintz can bring himself to say about Ono is that it seemed risky "that she put so much faith in the occult." But he also notes that when he was working as a radio journalist she ruined his interview with Baba Ram Das, the psychologist, when she insulted him, saying that he sounded "a little phony," and she (and Lennon) constantly interrupted his interview with Salvador Dalí. (He took Lennon and Ono to the interviews because, he says, they wanted to go and "there was no way I could say no.") Otherwise he showers Ono with praise, saying that she is "a complicated woman, gaming out her future like a chess master thinking five moves ahead"; writes music that's "inspiring," "sweet," "poetic," and "comforting"; and manipulates John "with the cool precision of a doctor preparing for an amputation." Mintz also seems to agree with Lennon's assessment of Ono that she's "always right." 

Mintz does not treat Lennon with the same unflagging respect. Though he never criticized John to his face, the ex-Beatle's repeated verbal abuse seems to have left Mintz with a certain amount of resentment. And it comes across in his descriptions of Lennon's egregious and well-documented character flaws. But if he'd ignored them, the book's lack of credibility would be even more obvious. 

Lennon's alcohol-fueled ugliness casts a shadow over We All Shine On. Mintz is often "all but carrying" a drunken Lennon somewhere. A typical incident takes place in Tokyo in 1977. Mintz and Lennon are drinking in a sake bar. The crowd recognizes John and goes nuts. Mintz and Lennon flee into the street, but Lennon wants to drink more. Mintz insists they return to the hotel. Lennon grabs him by the lapels, slams him against a wall, and says, "If I want to have a fucking drink, you're not standing in my way." (On another occasion, a completely sober Lennon says to Mintz, "I'm gonna ask you to do anything I fucking feel like asking you. Don't ever tell me what I can or can't say to you.")

The worst episode occurs in 1973 after Lennon and Ono separate and he moves to LA with May Pang, his assistant who became his lover. Ono has instructed Mintz, based in LA, to look after John because, he says, he was "functionally a child when it came to taking care of himself." One night, while living at record producer Lou Adler's house, Lennon, in a drunken rage after a difficult recording session with Phil Spector, smashes Adler's gold records with a walking stick until security guards subdue him and tie him to a chair. Mintz arrives to find Lennon still raging and demanding to be untied. "Then," he writes, "John spat out an epithet so hurtful and offensive… I can't bring myself to repeat it." (Lennon, I'd imagine, used a more vicious variation of the "queer Jew" remark he said to Brian Epstein when Epstein asked him to suggest a title for his memoir—he called it A Cellar Full of Noise.)

Mintz's treatment of May Pang underscores the book's lack of credibility.

Where Pang was during this incident is unclear, and it's Mintz's treatment of her that underscores the book's lack of credibility. After he picked up John and May at the airport, he says, he seldom saw her again in LA and can't recall a single conversation, in LA or New York, in which John mentioned her name. He writes her out of the story, challenging Pang's perceptions of her relationship with Lennon and implying that she's delusional if she thinks Lennon had deep feelings for her. He says that her account of what happened in LA gives you the impression that "she was the red hot center of John's universe" when, in fact, her only job "was to make sure John was properly fed and cared for." The furthest Mintz goes is to admit that John had some "genuine affection for her." May, according to Mintz, was nothing, and Yoko was his only true love. 

If it's true that Mintz rarely saw John and May together in LA, it's because Lennon didn't want him to see them together and have Mintz report back to Yoko. And if John never spoke to Mintz about May, it's because John continued seeing her after he returned to Yoko. According to Lennon's own journals, he saw May anytime he could get away from Yoko and carried a flame for her until the end. John wanted them both but Yoko wouldn't allow it.

Yet We All Shine On, despite its credibility issues, is an entertaining book, and Mintz, who doesn't credit a ghostwriter, shows flashes of writing talent. Though there's the occasional cliché ("after what felt like an eternity"); the intermittent slip into PR-speak ("No one can capture the way Lennon talks in writing"); and a handful of overdone similes (in the same paragraph Mintz is "like a tragic character in an Edgar Allan Poe story" and a moment in the Dakota is "like a scene from a classic film noir thriller"), he knows how to tell a story. And there are a few stories that even the most avid Lennon fanatics probably haven't heard. For example, Lennon and Mintz, on their way to the airport in LA, stop, on John's command, at a seedy strip club, the Losers, and even as the dancers gyrate inches from Lennon's face, they don't recognize him—he's too out of context. And Mintz's melancholy recollection of Lennon and Paul McCartney's awkward Christmas reunion at the Dakota nicely illustrates how the ex-Beatles had grown apart and had little to talk about.

There are also some charming descriptions of Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s, when Mintz lived there, and of Karuizawa, Japan, in 1977, where he spent time with Lennon and Ono. 

Mintz does manage to make himself seem sympathetic with a relatable backstory. He grew up in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan, at the time a working-class Jewish neighborhood. His father, a Polish immigrant, worked in the garment business. Mintz was shy, awkward, and smaller than his classmates. He also stuttered, which led to his being bullied. Wanting to work in radio, he studied broadcasting at Los Angeles City College and overcame his stutter. His big break came while still in college, in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. One of his classmates was in the marines with JFK's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Mintz interviewed him, and by the end of the day the interview had been broadcast all over the city. Soon he had a job interviewing rock stars and beat poets on late-night radio. Impressed by Ono's experimental LP Fly, he interviewed her, it went well, and she started calling him all the time. Sometimes they talked for as long as seven hours. Then he interviewed Lennon and soon had a hotline installed in his house exclusively for Lennon and Ono, as well as a red light over his bed that flashed when they called in the middle of the night. (Mintz claims he has a photographic memory and can "reconstruct complete conversations" he had with Lennon and Ono a half-century ago. He most likely recorded them, a common practice among the Lenono company employees.) "I had come to accept that being at John and Yoko's beck and call was becoming my mission in life," he writes. "Why I accepted that mission, I couldn't tell you. I just did." 

Maybe Mintz's personal life was empty and the Lenono connection filled him with the identity he craved.

To venture a guess: Maybe his personal life was empty and the Lenono connection filled him with the identity he craved.

One of the book's oddities is Mintz's irrelevant and distracting emphasis on his girlfriends, which, to venture another guess, nobody really cares about. But he wants you to know that he did, indeed, have girlfriends. He refers a number of times to his impossibly demanding relationship with John and Yoko and their endless phone calls as the reason he never married and had children. "If only I'd had the strength to resist the undefinable magnetic pull [of John and Yoko], I might have ended up having a more balanced, traditional existence," he writes. Instead, he says, he was married to John and Yoko.

The girlfriend dynamic plays out in a story he tells about a "stunningly beautiful" woman he met at the Troubadour club, in LA, in 1971. He of the photographic memory can't remember her name but says she might have been his "soulmate." He's in bed with her when Ono calls at four a.m. Maybe, he thinks, he shouldn't take the call. But he takes it, and he's on the phone for more than an hour talking with her about losing weight. His girlfriend wakes up and wants to know what's going on. He can't tell her. John and Yoko are a secret, and divulging the friendship would be breaking their "unspoken code of trust" (which becomes spoken when Ono orders him, "Just keep us your secret"). Mintz's potential soulmate leaves and he never sees her again.

Another peculiarity is Mintz's take on his multitude of celebrity friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. The name-dropping is intense: Sal Mineo, Mickey Dolenz, David Cassidy, Donovan, Brian Wilson, Beau and Jeff Bridges, Alice Cooper, Paris Hilton, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, David Crosby, Stephen Stills. He says he doesn't know exactly why celebrities are attracted to him. "I never sought out relationships with famous people; they just somehow gravitated towards me…. It's the story of my life, being befriended by the fabled and adored." His best guess is that he's done so many celebrity interviews, he's not starstruck, and I'm sure that's part of it. But Mintz is also small (Ono size), unthreatening, discreet, takes abuse well, and follows orders. Most importantly, he had popular radio and TV shows that provided a safe space, devoid of uncomfortable questions, where celebrities could promote their work.

Mintz obliterates his last shreds of credibility when he tells the story of Fred Seaman, John and Yoko's personal assistant.

In the final part of the book, which covers the aftermath of Lennon's murder, Mintz obliterates his last shreds of credibility when he tells the story of Fred Seaman, John and Yoko's personal assistant and Lennon's paid companion—essentially one of Mintz's New York counterparts. I'm intimately familiar with this particular lie because it involves me. For a detailed account of what happened, I'd direct you to my own book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, especially a chapter titled "An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson." Golson was the Playboy magazine editor who, in 1984, shepherded into print a more elaborate version of the tale that Mintz has been peddling for more than 40 years and that he dictated to David and Victoria Sheff who are credited with writing the story. 

In We All Shine On, Mintz says that after Lennon's murder Seaman, portraying himself as "Lennon's true disciple," smuggled out of the Dakota five of John's personal journals, gave them to me, and instructed me to write a "tell-all book." 

One part of this is true: Seaman did give me Lennon's journals. As I describe in Nowhere Man, he told me that in the summer of 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda working on Double Fantasy, he had a premonition of his death—listen to "Borrowed Time," recorded in Bermuda—and if anything should happen to him, it was Seaman's job to tell the true story of his life and use any research material he needed.

As I later testified under oath, at Seaman's 2002 copyright infringement trial: Yes, I believed him. I had no reason not to. Seaman, a close and trusted friend, had always been supportive of my writing career and wanted me to help him write John's biography. The journals alone were proof enough that he was telling the truth. It didn't seem possible that he could just walk out of the Dakota with John's diaries unless he'd been authorized to do so.

The project blew up in my face in 1983 when Seaman ransacked my apartment while I was out of town, taking everything I'd been working on. I then came forward and told Ono what happened. She asked to see my diaries beginning from the day she hired Seaman. Mintz was one of the people she gave them to: 500,000 words, written in the heat of the moment, most of them on teletype paper run through an IBM Selectric typewriter—a Kerouac-inspired literary experiment. Mintz and the Playboy team combed through those pages searching for anything they could use in their article that would damage me and Seaman. From those half-million words they cherry-picked about 200, and distorted them with their own commentary.

One sentence pilfered from my diary originally described Ono's unparalleled ability to exploit the Lennon name only months after his death: "Dead Lennons equal big $" (as Mintz slightly misquotes it). Forty years ago in Playboy and now in his book, Mintz turns the line around to say it's a description of my own and Seaman's attitude toward Lennon's murder. Except Mintz now says that Seaman "scrawled" the line in his own diaries. Why he attributes it to Seaman and says it was scrawled rather than typewritten appears to be a gratuitous lie intended to do nothing more than further damage Seaman. 

Another probable (though harmless) lie is Mintz's account of how he found out Lennon had been murdered. He says his mother called him because she heard on the radio somebody had been shot "at that building on Seventy-Second Street you're always visiting." He tries calling the Dakota but can't get anyone on the phone. He turns on the TV. Nothing. (It doesn't occur to him to turn on KNX, LA's all-news radio station.) In a panic he decides to fly to New York and drives to the airport, but the radio in his Jaguar isn't working. Walking through the airport, he sees nothing, hears nothing. On the plane, a crying flight attendant emerges from the cockpit. He asks her what's wrong and she tells him John Lennon is dead. The story simply does not have the ring of truth, and it's a reminder that little in this book can be taken at face value and every word, especially about Lennon and Ono, should be regarded with extreme skepticism. 

More lies: When Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, The Lives of John Lennon, is published, Mintz asks Ono to do a radio interview to dispel "rumors" that "John's 'househusband' image was a public relations fraud" and that he was a devotee of prostitutes. It's more or less true that Lennon was kind of a quasi-househusband at times, but he did have a masseuse regularly come to the Dakota to manually pleasure him (Ringo walked in one such session) and he did visit prostitutes in South Africa when he went there in April 1980. He wrote about it in his journals.

Another one of Mintz's New York counterparts, Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros, Lennon's gardner, personal assistant, and friend (Ono's attorneys have blocked the publication of his memoir), disputes a number of Mintz's claims about what happened when he arrived at the Dakota after John's murder. Mintz says he saw Lennon's blood on the pavement as he entered the building. Medeiros says the blood was cleaned up long before Mintz arrived. Mintz says he spent a lot of time with Ono's employees "fielding a never-ending barrage of phone calls." According to Medeiros, one of the people fielding those calls, Mintz never fielded any phone calls.

Yes, these are minor threads in a tapestry of lies, and to point out more would be redundant. But they do show that the essential problem with the book is how to discern truth from Mintz's skillfully spun PR fantasies. Perhaps it's best to keep in mind that the author of We All Shine On gave up a journalism career to lie on command for Lennon and Ono, to be their G. Gordon Liddy—a man who would walk over his own grandmother for John and Yoko (as Liddy said he'd do for Richard Nixon).

We All Shine On is both a fairy tale and a masterpiece of propaganda. It's the flip side of Seaman's book, The Last Days of John Lennon, also a well-crafted, entertaining read with serious credibility issues but that has nothing good to say about Ono (and that Ono's attorneys were able to force out of print). 

In the case of both books, truth seekers would be well advised to look elsewhere.

 

Disponible en español

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

 

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Every holiday season I make available signed copies of many of my books. This year I'm offering the five you see above. I'm not set up for e-commerce, so if you're interested in buying one of these titles, contact me through the website and I'll send you the details. I can send the books anywhere, but if you live outside the US, be aware that postage is more than the price of the book. Here's the price list, which includes postage:

 

Nowhere Man (new edition, red cover) $23

Nowhere Man (old edition, yellow cover) $21

Nowhere Man (Spanish edition) $19

A Brooklyn Memoir (revised edition of Bobby in Naziland) $25

Bobby in Naziland $25

 

Wishing you all a happy and peaceful holiday!

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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 Instagram and Threads.

 

Last week's post about muralist Jorge Manjarrez went over so well on social media, for the holidays I'm posting another photo of Jorge's T-shirts. The two T-shirts seen here, with Robert Smith of The Cure printed directly on the shirt, and Jim Morrison as the King of Hearts printed on plastic and fused to the shirt, are only two examples of the wide variety of work Jorge does. He's best known for painting murals on Mexico City's subway stations, but also does illustrations for major Mexican newspapers and magazines, and has a line of playing cards illustrated with portraits of 54 (two jokers) different musicians and bands.

 

Julio Malone and I are collaborating with Jorge on turning our screenplay, The Diaries of Juan Dolio, into a graphic novel. This is the beginning of not only a beautiful partnership but what I think will be a most interesting collaboration.

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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 Instagram and Threads.

 

Jorge Manjarrez paints murals on the walls of Mexico City's subway stations. This is an official job, not graffiti. He also does illustrations for major Mexican newspapers and magazines; has a line of T-shirts featuring his portraits of rock stars, like the one above; and created a deck of playing cards, also illustrated with musicians' portraits. (You can see more of his work on Facebook.)

 

Jorge was recently in New York to paint a mural on the wall of a Mexican restaurant in Yonkers. Roberto Ponce, my editor at Proceso magazine, asked me to meet Jorge—because he's interested in turning a screenplay I wrote many years ago, in English and Spanish, with Julio Malone, into a graphic novel. The screenplay, The Diaries of Juan Dolio, was Roberto's idea. He thought he could get it produced in Mexico. The story is a fictional outgrowth of my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

In the screenplay, Juan Dolio is a diary-keeping Mexican rock superstar living in New York City. When he's murdered by an insane fan, his personal assistant, Luke, liberates the diaries, and with Dolio's widow's security thugs in hot pursuit, makes a run for the Mexican border intent on returning the diaries to the Mexican people as part of their cultural heritage.

 

Well, Jorge made it back to Mexico with the screenplay, and I look forward to sharing some of his illustrations for The Diaries of Juan Dolio, sooner or later to be a graphic novel.

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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 Instagram or Threads.

 

The events of November 5 reminded me of another election 52 years ago. The Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, running for a second term, was arguably more distasteful than the current president-elect. And the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, running to end the war in Vietnam, was doomed to lose, according to every poll. A scene in the book I'm working on, about a radical, antiwar student newspaper, OP, at the the City College of New York, takes place Election Day, 1972.

 

The reference to Geraldo Rivera needs some explanation. In 1972, Rivera was a superstar, quasi-hippie TV reporter who came to City College to give a speech in support of McGovern. He assured the crowd that McGovern was going to win.

 

Watergate by this time had already begun to consume Nixon. Yet the wise people of America voted for him anyway, in overwhelming numbers. But 18 months later the scandal would drive Nixon from the White House.

 

The scene below is a reminder of how quickly things can change. It's from Chapter 14, tentatively titled either "Rebuild Your Heads Like a Bombed-Out City" or "Hope Is the Only Illusion," both titles based on quotes from a speech Reverend Daniel Berrigan gave at City College just before the election.

***

 

I'm thrilled to pull the lever for George McGovern, voting for the first time in an election that matters—even though I understand like everyone (with the possible exception of Geraldo Rivera) that his chances are nil or close to it. Yet part of me continues to cling to the illusion of hope.

 

Naomi and I watch the election returns dribble in, and as the inevitable creeps closer I go home around midnight to witness the bitter end with my stoic mother, a nominal Democrat who voted for McGovern, and my law-and-order-Republican father.

 

"Who'd you vote for?" I ask him.

 

"That's my business," he says.

 

The outcome's worse than anyone predicted. Only Massachusetts and the District of Colombia go for McGovern. In the other 49 states it's a Nixon massacre. He finishes with 520 electoral votes and 60.7 percent of the popular vote, more than any Republican presidential candidate in history. The final score: Nixon, 47 million; McGovern, 29 million.

 

I sit in front of the TV imagining the despair of Steve and my other OP colleagues who'd fought so hard for so long for anything but this. Peace is not at hand or around the corner or anyplace else nearby. The "light at the end of the tunnel" is an oncoming train. The war might indeed go on for the rest of my life, and I know that even with my golden draft-lottery number I better find a way to stay in college, forever if possible, because if the war's still ongoing in, say, 1984 (to pick a year at random), the government could just end the lottery and draft everybody who's upright and breathing.

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For several years I've been working on a book about my experiences at a radical student newspaper, Observation Post, at the City College of New York, in the 1970s. I was a member of the first open admissions class, and I wouldn't have gotten into City if not for open admissions. My high school average and SAT scores weren't good enough for the "Harvard of the Proletariat." But after this experiment in higher education was implemented in September 1970, all you needed to get into CCNY was to graduate in the top half of your high school class. That much I'd done.

 

Open admissions wasn't meant for underachieving middle-class white kids. The student uprising that shut down City in the spring of 1969 came about because the school, in the middle of Harlem, was 97 percent white. The Black and Puerto Rican protest leaders wanted the student body to reflect the makeup of the neighborhood and New York City's public high schools.

 

Open admissions was a direct result of the protests.

 

The Five Demands, directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, is the story of the uprising told from a very different perspective than I tell it in a chapter titled "How I Got Into the Harvard of the Proletariat." In the spring of 1969 I had no idea what was going on at City College. But my free education, especially my tenure on Observation Post, was life-changing. That's why I spend my days writing about it, trying to make sense of what I now realize was a miracle.

 

You can stream The Five Demands 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, Instagram, or Threads.

 

Permit me to take a week off from analyzing conspiracy theories so I can celebrate Halloween, which is impossible to ignore in my neighborhood. New York's Halloween parade goes right by my building. It's big, loud, and long, and I'm expecting to see lots of Kamalas and Trumps. If you're unfamiliar with the Halloween parade, give this Lou Reed song a listen. It's called "Halloween Parade."

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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, Instagram, or Threads.

For the better part of the past 12 years I've been excavating my memory for material. A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush when I was a child, is one result of this excavation. I began writing the book with only an image in my head of my father in his candy store, in 1961, and a germ of an idea: Something interesting was happening at this time and in this place, and it was worth exploring. What I learned over the many years I worked on the book is that if you think about something every day for an extended period of time, you're going to remember things you thought were long forgotten, and the more you remember the more you remember.

 

I bring this up now because of my debate with a conspiracy theorist about the murder of John Lennon that will go live on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, sometime in December. As misguided as I find David Whelan and his theories about who really killed Lennon, and as sloppy and ill-informed as some of his research is (I discuss it here and here), I give him credit for getting me to consider certain things I haven't thought about in the 25 years since I wrote the Mark David Chapman section of Nowhere Man. For example, there's a scene where Lennon, the afternoon before the murder, signs Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. I wrote that Chapman asked him for a job. Whelan says that I'm the only one who reported this and demanded to know where I got the information. I told him I got it from Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman.

 

Whelan says that Seaman wasn't there to witness the exchange. According to Seaman's memoir, The Last Days of John Lennon, he was there.* A former Lenono Music employee reminded me who was also there to witness it. Paul Goresh, who died in 2018, is the photographer who took the picture of Lennon signing Chapman's album.

 

The week of December 8, 1980, Seaman came to my apartment. It was the first time I'd seen him since Lennon was killed. One of the things we talked about was Chapman asking John for a job. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear him say that he heard the story from Goresh. Can this detail of a 44-year-old memory be trusted? I don't know. But if he did hear about it from Goresh, it would make sense. Seaman and Goresh knew each other, they did talk on occasion, and it seems likely that they would have discussed the photo.

 

Whelan also got me thinking about the conversation I had with the publisher of Soft Skull Press when he asked me to write about Chapman. What I'd forgotten was that he'd originally wanted me to write that Chapman was part of a conspiracy. I refused. I told him I didn't believe it. At the time, I'd given little thought to the idea of a conspiracy—it would be several months before an insane conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA archivist who was somehow involved in the plot to eliminate Lennon. (Several years later, an even crazier conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA spymaster who plotted with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, to assassinate the ex-Beatle.)

 

I told the publisher I could write a better story if I wrote what felt true: Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, acted alone.

 

My only purpose in writing the Chapman section of Nowhere Man was to tell a compelling story that would give people some understanding of a seemingly inexplicable act. I wrote it as a thriller. I got inside Chapman's head just as I'd gotten inside Lennon's head. And to write about Chapman was liberating after feeling that Yoko Ono and her attorneys were looking over my shoulder as I was making the final corrections on the main Lennon section of the manuscript. I think it's this combination of style and information that has kept people reading Nowhere Man for a quarter of a century.

 

A critic for the British music magazine Mojo noticed. "Rather like reading a favorite detective story," he wrote. "Though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently."

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*During the Whelan debate, I'd forgotten that Seaman had written in his memoir that he was there when Lennon signed Chapman's album. In the unlikely event that Whelan was able to interview Seaman, as he said he was going to do, I'd like to know if Seaman contradicted his memoir. So numerous are Whelan's misstatements, I'm now also wondering if it's true, as he claimed during the debate, that Chapman's statement, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," is not in the court transcript. (See my previous post, "The 27th Round.")

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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, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

Last week, in a post titled "The 27th Round," I wrote about David Whelan, a conspiracy theorist whom I sort of debated—Whelan mostly talks, interrupts, and talks some more—on an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, scheduled to go live sometime in December. Whelan believes that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman, the man currently in prison for the murder of John Lennon, to be a Manchurian patsy who didn't shoot the ex-Beatle—the real killer is a professional assassin who got away.

 

I, in short, don't believe it.

 

Whelan went into his investigation with the preconceived notion that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. Consequently, everything looks to him like a clue pointing in the direction of conspiracy and nobody is above suspicion, with the possible exceptions of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who was five at the time of the murder (but now, Whelan says, knows more than he's letting on).

 

In an episode of SATB released October 10, after the debate was recorded, Rodriguez interviewed Whelan again. Whelan, who wrote a conspiracy-theory book, Mind Games, and shares his theories on Substack and in many interviews, says that much of what I say about Chapman in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is "laughable." This is an unsurprising response from somebody I've called a "conspiracy hustler" because he misrepresented himself to Lennon's assistant Michael "Tree" Medeiros in order to get him to agree to an interview. Whelan denies he did this.

 

"I gave the producers of the UK documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial extensive video interviews, which were never used in the final cut," Medeiros says. "A few days after those interviews, I got a phone call from David Whelan, who said he called to check my quotes for the doc. This turned out to be untrue. I believe he was fishing for additional info for his crazy conspiracy theory book."

 

It would be an exercise in tedium if I were to refute all of Whelan's misstatements in our debate, in his recent SABT interview, on his blog, and in his book, which I've made a point of not reading because it's clear what he thinks from reading his blog and listening to his interviews. But I do want to point out two of his misstatements in the October 10 SATB interview.

 

Whelan says that in Nowhere Man, I called Chapman "an art dealer," and that it's "laughable" that I say he raised the money to travel from Hawaii to New York City by selling a few pieces of art.

 

This is what I say in Nowhere Man:

 

Chapman fancies himself an art aficionado. For years he's been acquiring paintings, lithographs, objets d'art. First he sells a $5,000 Salvador Dali gold plaque, originally purchased with a loan from his father-in-law. Then, with a $2,500 loan from his mother, he purchases a Norman Rockwell print titled "Triple Self Portrait." Shrewdly, he's able to sell it to a collector for a good profit.

 

I based this paragraph on details I found in the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones, who interviewed Chapman in prison. The book was the definitive source of information about Chapman's life when I wrote about him in Nowhere Man in 1999. Whelan thinks Let Me Take You Down is worthless and questions if Jones is really a journalist. (He was a reporter and columnist on The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.)

 

It's the same book I cited in my "27th Round" post. Whelan, in the debate, said that I'm the only writer who quoted Chapman at his sentencing hearing saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." (Whelan questions if I really attended the hearing—yes, I did.) And he said that no information exists indicating that, as I wrote in Nowhere Man, this is what Chapman told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt. I directed Whelan to the page in Let Me Take You Down that has this information. Let Me Take You Down, apparently, is impervious to Whelan's research techniques. (Pro tip: Look in the index.)

 

Whelan gave me a sense of what his research techniques might be during the debate. He said that I was the only one who reported that Chapman asked Lennon for a job when John signed his copy of Double Fantasy outside the Dakota the afternoon before the murder. He asked me where I heard this. I said that Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman told me about it several days after the murder. If Seaman was not there to witness this, as Whelan claims, then somebody who was there must have told him about it. I saw no reason why Seaman would lie about this particular detail. So I took his statement at face value and included it in Nowhere Man.

 

"I'm going to ask Seaman," Whelan said.

 

Will Seaman remember what he told me in passing 44 years ago? Unlikely, but who knows? And even if Seaman remembers, would he deny it? Possibly. But let's stick to the most likely scenario of this imagined interview: Seaman doesn't remember, which gives Whelan what he wants—a contradiction that raises suspicions of... something.

 

Whelan's other misstatement in the October 10 podcast involves Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA employee in charge of their MK-ULTRA mind-control program, the agency's attempt to create programmed assassins (or patsies, as the case may be) with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. Whelan says it's "laughable" that I take Gottlieb at his word that MK-ULTRA was a failure. It's not that I take Gottlieb at his word, though he would have known more about the program than anybody, and the possibility exists that he could have been telling the truth. My point was that there's no credible evidence to prove that MK-ULTRA was successful. Of course, there's no credible evidence to prove that it was a failure, either. The CIA destroyed their MK-ULTRA files in the 1970s. It's this lack of evidence that conspiracy theorists use as proof that it's possible to create programmed assassins who will commit murder at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific way, and the CIA as well as some mysterious right-wing entities have, indeed, created such assassins (and patsies).

 

I have no doubt that it's possible to use MK-ULTRA techniques to get certain people predisposed to violence to commit mayhem. What I don't believe is that it's possible to control somebody for weeks and months at a time, as if they're a robot, before the command is given to commit mayhem—or to induce somebody to believe they're committing mayhem, as would have been the case with Chapman.

 

Like virtually all conspiracy theories, this one will never be proven or disproven. Without certainty, what's left is common sense and Occam's Razor, a philosophical concept that says if you have two or more theories to explain an event, the simpler, more straightforward one is usually correct.

 

And I do wonder: If a number of Whelan's statements about me are false, which he should have known from basic research, what else is wrong with the "facts" he uses to attempt to show that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy who did not kill Lennon?

 

I'll leave it to a more dedicated researcher to pick apart Whelan's thesis, line by tedious line.

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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, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

My book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has been under scrutiny for 25 years. Since early 2000, when the publisher first distributed advance reader copies, I've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 interviews. I often think I've been asked and have answered every possible question. But sometimes I'm surprised.

 

Last week I participated in a… let's call it a panel discussion though it was probably more of a debate, on Robert Rodriquez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, broadcast date TBA. Rodriguez and Carole Kirstein-Chase, an attorney, acted as moderators. The other panelist was David Whelan, author of Mind Games, a book that suggests a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy, that he did not shoot Lennon, and that there was a second shooter who got away.

 

My contention is that similar conspiracy theories have been circulating for 44 years, none of them have come to anything, and Chapman did it.

 

Nowhere Man's "Chapter 27," named after the so-called missing chapter of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, is about Chapman's sentencing hearing, which I attended. (Whelan disputes that I was there.) In the chapter, I quote Chapman saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." I also say that this is what he told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt.

 

Whelan asked me three questions about this quote that I'd never been asked: Why isn't it in the court transcript? Why did nobody else report it? Why is there no mention anywhere else of him saying this to a psychiatrist?

 

I didn't know, and I told the story behind the Chapman section of Nowhere Man: When Soft Skull Press accepted the book, in 1999, it was about Lennon's final years and ended when John was alive. There was no Chapman section. Soft Skull's publisher asked me to write one. I didn't want to. He insisted. I thought about it and decided that because I'd attended the sentencing hearing I could write something original and worthwhile.

 

In late 1999, I wrote Part IV of the book, "The Coda," about Chapman. It's based on my memory, accounts in newspapers and other books, and notes I took in August 1981 at the sentencing hearing.

 

In "Chapter 27" I say that Chapman said what he did about the bloodied prizefighter immediately after he read from The Catcher in the Rye but before the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life.

 

I suppose it's possible that the court reporter simply didn't hear Chapman say that.

 

But after thinking about it for a couple of days it occurred to me that maybe I had the events slightly out of sequence. Maybe Chapman said it after the judge sentenced him, the hearing was over, and the court reporter had stopped transcribing.

 

I flashed on a scene from 43 years ago: The judge pounds his gavel, dismisses the court, and Chapman, handcuffed, standing by his chair, facing sideways towards me, a cop on each arm, is about to be led out of the courtroom. That's when he says, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." But nobody's paying attention. The reporters have their stories, they're on deadline, and they're clamoring to get out. And that's when I write of Chapman, "He walks fearlessly out of the courtroom, holding his head high, veritably glowing with pride. He's done what he came to do."

 

Whelan questions if this description of Chapman is accurate because nobody else reported it.

 

Maybe I was the only reporter there who knew that the story wasn't over, and there was one more thing to see and hear.

 

And by the way, the following quote can be found on page 145 of the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones. This is Chapman speaking to a psychiatrist in Hawaii: "I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised."

 

Note to Whelan: Go to Let Me Take You Down in Google books and search for "twenty-seventh round." Comes right up.

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

 

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With election day little more than a month away, this seems like a good time to revisit the age-old question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

 

Four years ago my wife and I were holed up in our Manhattan apartment, afraid to so much as go to a supermarket because the Covid pandemic was ravaging the world. All too recently it had been killing a thousand people a day in New York City, where mobile morgues were parked outside every hospital to handle the overflow of dead bodies. As I recall, we had a president who was telling people to inject bleach; take ivermectin, a medication used to treat parasitic worms in animals and humans; and shine a strong light up your ass.

 

The people dying around me—relatives and acquaintances—trivialized whatever economic pain I might have felt from the cancellation of a promo tour for my book Bobby in Naziland (since re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir) published a few months before the pandemic began.

 

So, yes, things are a hell of a lot better now than they were four years ago, and you can probably guess who I'm voting for. (Spoiler alert: Kamala Harris.)

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

 

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In celebration of the upcoming Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, 5785, on October 2, I present John Lennon singing "Hava Nagila" at the Amsterdam Hilton. This took place March 1969 during John and Yoko Ono's Bed-In for peace while they were being interviewed by Israeli journalist Akiva Nof, a correspondent for the Voice Of Israel.

 

Nof had written a Hebrew song about Jerusalem and persuaded John to sing that, too. You can also hear John playing "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," which he says is "from the new Beatles album that was not released yet," meaning Abbey Road.

 

Muchas gracias to Mexican journalist Esteban Cisneros for bringing this video to my attention. And happy new year to one and all!

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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 the final weeks of her life, Sonja Wagner told her friends to go to her loft and take whatever pieces of art they wanted. There was much to choose from among the paintings, photographs, metal sculptures, and assemblages. Sonja, who passed away last year at age 85, was a prolific artist. My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I simply didn't have enough wall or storage space to take everything we loved.

 

As I was browsing the collection, I came across a framed photograph that Sonja had manipulated to look like a painting—that was one of her specialties. It was a gorgeous shot of pennants flying above a street in a Spanish city. One of the pennants said "Tio Pepe," a type of sherry.

 

"We need to take this one," I said to Mary Lyn.

 

Our friends Rocio and Jimmy Sanz own Tio Pepe, a Spanish restaurant that's been on West 4th Street, in Greenwich Village, for more than 50 years.

 

The other week, I brought the photo to Tio Pepe and told the manager, Leana Zittlau, about Sonja. She hung it on the wall in a conspicuous spot next to a Spanish flag, off to the left as you walk in. Leana then shot me standing next to the photo and posted it on Tio Pepe's Instagram.

 

The plan now is for Sonja's friends to gather by her photo for a meal at what I now call The Tio Pepe Museum of Fine Art and once again celebrate her extraordinary life.

 

You can see more of Sonja's artwork and read about her life in an article I wrote for The Village Voice.

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

 

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If you've been following this blog then you probably know that I've been working on a book about the 1970s, set at a radical student newspaper, Observation Post (OP), at the City College of New York. Below is an outtake from that book—a section I like because it captures a certain vibe. But it slows down the pacing too much at that particular point, so it had to go. (I hope I can find a place where it does work, maybe in a slightly different form.)

 

It's a description of everything I didn't read on March 10, 1974, in the 400-page, ad-laden Sunday edition of The New York Times as I searched the paper for an article about a cartoon that ran in OP and pissed off a lot of powerful people.

 

There's so much in here I don't want to read, like a story about a mortar shell that killed 23 South Vietnamese children playing in a schoolyard—no, the war isn't over, not even close—and a story about an exhibit in the Soviet Union about life in America, where a brainwashed Russian visitor asks the guide if Black Americans are allowed to own cars. And I have no interest in the price of copper, though a photo of a man wearing only tennis sneakers, shot in dick-obscuring profile, "streaking" across the Memphis State University campus, America's No. 1 streaking school, catches my eye, but just for a second. And I don't want to know about cops killing Black people in Queens bars or Aretha Franklin opening at the Apollo or straight white people getting married or the ongoing gas crisis or what's playing on Broadway or Off-Broadway or what rock bands are performing at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Academy of Music, the Capitol Theatre or what movies are now showing at local theatres, I mean who but a fulltime culture vulture can come close to keeping up with half the shit that's going on in New York? And I absolutely don't want to read about high inflation, the Dow Jones industrial average, the bear market, or the cost of cable TV, which nobody I know has. I'm not looking for a job, so fuck the help wanted ads. Do I care that Francisco Franco is no longer in charge in Spain or Spiro Agnew has been spending his weekends at Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs estate? No I don't. And I already know that Nixon's a criminal undermining the rule of law, and Jesus Freakin' Christ, is there anything more boring than the oh-so-respectable op-eds about foreign affairs? (Though I don't know what I'm missing with Russell Baker's Sunday Observer column, in which he suggests the Watergate conspirators shouldn't be sent to prison but be made to suffer in ways that are "crueler and more exquisitely retributive," like a 10-year stretch in high school.) Spare me the letters to the editor, too, 'cause I don't want to know about the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board, Norman Podhoretz, or instant Zionism (whatever that is), and I already know that homosexuals exist. And screw the sports section because I know the world champion Knicks beat Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Milwaukee Bucks, and I have no interest in ads selling new and used Renaults, Dodge Darts, Chevy Vegas, Saabs, Audis, BMWs, or Mercedeses no matter how cheap they are. And forget the whole magazine section, though my mother, when she gets her hands on it, will knock off the crossword puzzle in an hour, and there will be (as there always is) the perpetual ad for a summer camp, Olympus, which will neglect to mention the possibility of kangaroo courts and having a tube of Ben Gay rubbed into your balls as punishment for a guilty verdict. I've looked at the magazine enough to know their formula: Start with an interesting anecdote to grab your attention, then spin off into an endless web of facts and figures, until a blizzard of detail that goes on for thousands of words numbs your mind and you realize you're not reading anymore, as if the editors labor under the impression that if an article's too interesting or too much fun to read then it's not serious enough, and it's only endless data that gives it value, a point, a reason to be published—that an article consisting of nothing but interesting stories and ideas is pointless. Though an ad for those good-looking Adler electric typewriters makes me want one, and another ad in the Book Review for Quality Paperback Books reminds me how I ripped them off Abbie Hoffman–style for their free introductory books, ignoring their threatening letters when I didn't buy the full-priced books I'd agreed to buy. Though perhaps I should have read the article about how some book publishers are receiving 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts each year and are no longer accepting them.

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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.

 

Last week, in a post about "The Chaos of my Bookshelves," I wrote about Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I said I'd read it about 10 times and that Miller was a huge influence on my writing.

 

A couple of days later I found a box outside my door, from my brother, Jerry, who was vacationing in California. He'd gone to Big Sur, where Miller used to live, and visited the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The box contained T-shirts, a tote bag, and a photo of Miller, signed by Erica Jong, who wrote a book about him, The Devil at Large.

 

In the above photo I'm wearing one of those T-shirts, with a quote from Miller's book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. It says: "It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'AMEN.'"

 

Should I ever be called on the red carpet, this is what I'll wear. Then I can say, "I'm wearing Henry Miller."

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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 last week's post, "My Habitat," I said I might share a photo showing the chaos of my bookshelves. Well here it is. The two shelves in the photo are similar to my other bookshelves—a disorganized collection of books that have come to me randomly. Some of them I have no idea why they're there or where they came from. Others I've read and loved and will comment on a few of them below.

 

Before taking the photo, I removed the artwork and most of the tchotchkes on the bottom shelf so you could read the spines. The top shelf I left as is to give you the true flavor of my library.

 

I'll begin with some of the titles on the bottom shelf.

 

Lying horizontally in the second pile from the left is Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I've read it at least 10 times and it was a huge influence on my writing. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Miller—that's how taken I was by his voice. He taught me that it's possible to write a great book that's voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

 

On top of the horizontal pile on the far right is The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford. It's considered a classic, it's been lying around here since the dawn of time, and I finally picked it up about a year ago. It's boring.

 

Below The Good Soldier is On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It's another book I've read multiple times, beginning in my late teens. Kerouac turned me into a hitchhiking fanatic. Between 1970, when I took my first serious hitchhiking trip, and 1978, when I quit hitchhiking because the vibes on the road had gotten too threatening, I put on about 25,000 miles by thumb, through the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, more or less following the route Kerouac took in 1947.

 

Among the books standing upright on the bottom shelf is An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. I haven't read it, but it did remind me that in 1978 I read his earlier novel, Sister Carrie. I remember little about it other than in the early 1900s it was banned for its "sexual immorality," and I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would.

 

In the middle of the shelf is Household Hints & Handy Tips, a Reader's Digest book. I mention it only because my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, did much of the research for it, which means if you're looking for some handy household hints you can trust this book. We do. (Perhaps we should consult it for the proper care of bookshelves.)

 

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg, is the fattest book on the shelf. Everybody was writing about this tale of New York City in the 1970s when it was published in 2015—because the author received a $2 million advance, the most ever paid for a debut novel. I read it and it was pretty good. But $2 million good? This guy must have some agent.

 

On the top shelf, where all the spines are partially obscured, I'll comment on the artwork, tchotchkes, and other items. 

 

Long before Nowhere Man was published, I was working on a fictional version of the story, which I called Rockjesus. One of my former coworkers, Rita Trieger, designed the dummy cover, and I used it as part of the package I was sending to agents.

 

Other items on the shelf include a toy Space Shuttle; two paintings of trout by my friend the late John Babbs, a fisherman who lived in Oregon and was on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid bus; an antique menorah with a candle holder missing; and a couple of impressions of my teeth.

 

Behind the fish painting on the left is Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, one of the very few 19th-century novels I enjoyed reading. 

 

Behind the menorah is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. In college, one of my professors described it as "the crème de la crème" of English literature. It is, and I still refer to it on occasion.

 

Lying horizontally towards the right is a pile of videocassettes. The red one on top is a video of Jeopardy from December 26, 2003, the first time Nowhere Man was a question on the show. The second time was October 18, 2023. So, every 20 years. Cool.

 

Now, if I can only find that copy of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. I've been meaning to read it for years and it's rumored to be around here somewhere.

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All my books (the ones I wrote) 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.

 

Over on Facebook, there's a group called "The Rosen Book Salon," though perhaps a better name might be "The Rosen Book Saloon." I describe it as "A forum to discuss the wide-range of topics I explore in my my writing, especially my three books: Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, A Brooklyn Memoir, and Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography." The discussions are lively and civil, and if you haven't yet joined the group I'd urge you to do so.

 

Obviously, the Salon (or Saloon) is a virtual room. It's been around for many years, and after all this time I thought you might like to see the real Salon—the actual habitat where I live and write. So here's a photo of the main room of the Manhattan apartment (I can't call it a saloon) I share with my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, a singer songwriter who's also my editor, and our cat, Oiseau.

 

We're in Soho. The large windows face MacDougal Street and look east; the smaller window on the left faces north. Look out and you can see the Empire State Building. In the far left corner, between the windows, is the desk where I work. You can also see Mary Lyn's piano, and in the foreground, on the left, the neck of her guitar. There are also a lot of books here, probably more than you can imagine. But they're out of the frame, and they're not well organized. Maybe next time I'll share the chaos of the Rosen Book Salon Library.

 

Until then, I'll see you on Facebook, in The Rosen Book Salon or Saloon if you prefer.

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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 there's a better Beatles podcast than Something About the Beatles, I haven't found it. What makes SATB great is its host, Robert Rodriguez. His knowledge of the Fab Four is PhD level and his interviews often explore territory well beyond rock music. For example, in episode 286: Nowhere Man '24 with Robert Rosen, Rodriguez and I got into a discussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind-control experiments. In in the 1950s and 60s, the agency used drugs like LSD and heroin, mostly on unwitting prisoners, in an attempt to create programmed assassins commonly known as "Manchurian Candidates."

 

This subject came up because conspiracy theorists believe that the man who assassinated John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, was either a Manchurian Candidate or a "Manchurian Patsy"—someone who took the fall for the murder when there was really a second gunman who shot Lennon.

 

I don't believe this and I said so on the podcast and in my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, in the extensive Chapman section and in a chapter titled "A Question of Conspiracy." Rodriguez, though, doesn't discount this possibility. Yet our conversation remained respectful, informative, and factual, both of us presenting our evidence as if in a courtroom, and letting listeners make up their own minds.

 

We also discussed my trip to Spain earlier this year, where Beatlemania lives. At La Tregua nightclub, in Sevilla, I presented the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man, and my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, joined Aida Vílchez, Martín León Soto, and the Nowhere Band, to perform Beatles and original songs for a packed and enthusiastic house. You can watch a video of the event here.

 

In addition, we touched on Lennon's friend and gardener Michael "Tree" Medeiros and his memoir, In Lennon's Garden, that Yoko Ono continues to repress; how information in May Pang's documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, meshes with information in Nowhere Man; and Lennon's fascination with "lucid" or programmed dreams.

 

This was my fourth appearance on SATB. I look forward to a fifth, and after you listen to episode 286 (and perhaps a few others), I hope you'll understand why I think SATB rocks.

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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 read my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, you may recall a story about Bill Bottiggi, an editor I used to work with at Swank Publications who was murdered in 1991. 

 

A piece about Bottiggi in The Rialto Report, a website dedicated to the history of the adult entertainment industry, was recently brought to my attention. A number of Bottiggi's close friends were interviewed, and a portrait emerged of a beloved gay man with severe substance abuse issues. I'm referenced in the article as an associate editor who worked under Bill at Stag magazine, which is not quite correct—I was Bill's managing editor. One of his friends is quoted as saying that in Beaver Street I was "mean" to him.

 

In Beaver Street I describe what it was like to work for a boss who was in way over his head in a job he couldn't handle and would show up at the office reeking "like gin is coming out of his pores," as it says in The Rialto Report. I also describe how Bill damaged our working relationship by trying to demote me for making a few proofreading mistakes and hit on me when we went out drinking after work one night, and then got permanently pissed off when I made clear I wasn't interested. If this is being mean to Bill, then so be it.

 

It also says in The Rialto Report that I wrote in Beaver Street that Bill was extorting money from prisoners. This is false. I said he was soliciting correspondence from prisoners, selling their letters to porn magazines, and keeping all the money for himself, which is what I'd heard the police had theorized back in 2009 when I was writing the book. I suggested this might have been the motive for Bill's murder, though it seems more likely now that he was killed by somebody he picked up and took home.

 

I should add that several years ago I got a phone call from a cop who saw what I wrote about Bill in Beaver Street, which is in part why they reopened the case. That's how I found out that the police know who murdered him, they had the suspect in custody, but they let him go because the evidence was tainted.

 

According to The Rialto Report, the police encourage anyone with information about Bill's murder to call 800-577-TIPS.

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

 

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The story I posted last week, in memory of Happy Traum (May 9, 1938–July 17, 2024), is about a headline I wrote for a college newspaper that ended up on the cover of Happy and Artie Traum's Hard Times in the Country, released by Rounder Records in 1975. I'd never thought about how, exactly, "Traums At It Again" found its way onto the cover. It just was. But one of the many responses the post garnered on social media was from the man who designed the cover "a lifetime ago," as he said.

 

Pat Alger is a songwriter who collaborated with the Traums and toured with The Everly Brothers. In 1980 he released an LP with Artie, From the Heart. Later moving to Nashville, he wrote hits for Garth Brooks, Hal Ketchum, and Trisha Yearwood. Dolly Parton, Lyle Lovett, and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary are among the musicians who've recorded Alger's songs.

 

Alger explained in his comment how the cover for Hard Times in the Country came to be: "I designed this cover for Happy and Artie because I had designed quite a few of the early Rounder covers. I lived in Woodstock at the time and we were great friends—I sang on the chorus of 'Mississippi John' and 'I Bid You Goodnight.' This was a bulletin board at Happy and [his wife] Jane's house—essentially a collage of great photos and meaningful items to them which Guy Cross photographed and I cropped this way for the cover."

 

When I thanked him for working in my headline, he said, "It was a lucky shot—it was on the bulletin board and I was looking for an interesting slice of it and voila you made it!"

 

Listening note: Michael Mand played a Happy Traum tribute on his OWWR internet radio show, St. James Infirmary. The podcast is available here. It's the fifth set, beginning around 2:21:30.

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In the early 1960s, folk duo Happy and Artie Traum began playing music in Washington Square Park and in the cafés and clubs of Greenwich Village. The brothers were born in the Bronx—Happy went to the High School of Music & Art and NYU, in Manhattan—and are credited with carrying the spirit of the Village folk scene to Woodstock, New York, where they later lived. Happy, a fingerpicking legend, is probably best known for two songs he recorded with Bob Dylan on Greatest Hits, Vol. II: "I Shall Be Released" and "You Ain't Going Nowhere."

 

I found out about the Traums when I was at City College in the 1970s. They were regulars at an on-campus performance space known at various times as Cafe Finley and The Monkey's Paw. You could see them play there for $1.50, which included coffee and donuts. I saw them many times. The student newspaper I edited, Observation Post, often reviewed their shows.

 

In the days before computers, to write a headline that fit in the allotted space, you had to count every letter and punctuation mark. By this calculation, most lowercase letters were 1, most uppercase letters were 1½, and most punctuation marks were ½. The layout artist measured the space with a pica ruler and told an editor the letter count. The editor read the article and wrote a headline that fit, perfectly if possible.

 

This was difficult, especially for complex stories that had to be expressed in four or five words. It was like writing a haiku, and I wrote many awkward headlines I'd prefer to forget. But the headline I wrote for a review of a Happy and Artie show, in the November 28, 1973, issue, popped into my head after reading the piece about their sixth appearance at City College in recent years:

 

Traums At It Again

 

It fit!

 

Flash forward to early 1975. I'm living in Washington Heights with my roommate, a big Happy and Artie fan from the Bronx. He acquires a review copy of their latest LP, Hard Times In The Country, from Rounder Records. I look at the cover, a collage of photos and miscellanea tacked to a bulletin board. And there's my headline, "Traums At It Again," right in the middle, near the top.

 

Artie died on July 20, 2008, at age 65. Happy died last week, July 17, at age 86.

 

I never had a chance to thank them for the thrill of seeing my headline on an album cover.

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It's been hot in New York City. And humid. How hot is it? Nothing like the 120 degrees in Las Vegas or the 130 in Death Valley. But as I stepped off the elevator the other day after taking a walk, my neighbor asked if it was raining.

 

"No, I'm sweating," I said.

 

I'm dedicating this mid-summer post to memories of cooler days. The photo, taken in Washington Square Park the morning of February 13, 2024, was one of those days.

 

It doesn't snow much in New York anymore, not like it did in the 60s and 70s when you could count on three or four good blizzards every winter to shut down the schools. But it snowed that morning, coating the park in a pristine white frosting. By evening, every snowflake had melted.

 

That's just the way it goes these days.

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Larry David on Fridays in an episode from 1980.

 

While dining last week with a group of friends I used to work with at Vanity Fair, the conversation turned to what a miserable town L.A. can be, especially when it comes to dealing with entertainment industry people. They were, it was said, passive-aggressive; they avoid any kind of confrontation; they lie; they don't return phone calls, etc., etc. One person told a joke about how an agent goes to a screenwriter's house, douses his wife and kids with gasoline, sets them on fire, and burns down the house. The screenwriter comes home and the cops tell him what happened. "You mean my agent came to my house?" he says.

 

I told my L.A. story about an unpleasant encounter with Larry David back in 1980. (Has anybody ever had a pleasant encounter with him?) That summer I'd been invited to try out as a writer for Fridays, L.A.'s short-lived version of Saturday Night Live.

 

In the Montecito Hotel, where I was staying, and at the ABC production facility, ideas for cold openings kept popping into my head. I thought they were funny and inspired. So I wrote them on a portable typewriter and handed the finished scripts directly to one of the producers. I was so sure I was going to get the job, it didn't occur to me to keep copies.

 

I waited to hear if I had the job. The producers kept me in limbo, though allowed me to sit in on meetings, rehearsals, and broadcasts. One day at a writers' meeting, Larry David, the head writer and a cast member, asked if they'd hired me.

 

"I don't know," I said. "I'm still waiting to hear."

 

He called security and had me thrown off the lot.

 

A few weeks later, the show's cold opening was security guards throwing a writer off the lot.

 

Maybe I didn't get the job because the producers wanted to see more than cold openings. And maybe the openings were too edgy for network TV. The skit I remember best was Charlie Manson—as popular in L.A. then as Trump is in New York now—doing a song-and-dance number on a conference table for the producers: I can sing!/I can dance!/I can act!/Need a chance!

 

I'd have loved that job; it would have set my career on a different path. And I'd love to have those lost Fridays scripts. But after all was said and done, I didn't have to spend half my life stuck in traffic, possibly in an encroaching wildfire, in a city where the weather never changes. And then the show was canceled.

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Tomorrow is July 4, and I figured I'd take a week off from harsh realities past and present and contemplate a pleasant moment of summer past. And what says summer better than a bunch of cows lazing around a verdant pasture? (Okay, lots of things, but I happen to have a photo of cows.)

 

Mary Lyn Maiscott took this shot in June 2017, just outside the hamlet of Glen, New York. We were visiting Byron Nilsson and his wife, Susan Whiteman, owners of the Jollity Farm Collective. One morning Mary Lyn and I took a walk down Route 110, past the Glen Conservancy, past the old town cemetery, past the Amish farmers working their fields. And we came upon these content-looking cows of summer. So Mary Lyn captured the bucolic moment with my phone, as she'd forgotten to bring hers.

 

On the other hand, if you want a little reality, you can listen to Mary Lyn's protest song, "Fourth of July" which, in light of the events of the past week, now needs an additional verse.

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Fifty years ago, during my final undergraduate semester at City College, I created a new section in the culturally and politically radical newspaper Observation Post (OP). I called the section "Mind Ooze." It was, for the most part, a collaboration with the late Robert Attanasio, an artist whose greatest talent was stirring up outrage with his drawings and cartoons.

 

Attanasio was raised Catholic, and his childhood experiences at the hands of nuns and priests in his Bronx church had traumatized him, perhaps leaving him with a case of PTSD. He drew on these experiences to produce some of his most powerful artwork.

 

One of the set pieces in the book I've been working on involves an Attanasio cartoon published in Mind Ooze that The New York Times, in their inimitable way, described as "a nun using a cross as a sexual object." The Times was writing about Attanasio's art because ultra-conservative New York senator James Buckley was so outraged by the cartoon, which he described as "a vicious and incredibly offensive anti-religious drawing," that he called for the Justice Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to investigate OP for violating federal discrimination statutes, and demanded that City College suspend OP and expel the editors responsible for publishing the nun.

 

OP found itself in the eye of a media firestorm focusing on the First Amendment, free expression, and whether a student newspaper supported by student fees has the right to publish anti-religious material. Many people inside and outside the college came to OP's defense, and as I look back at an issue published March 13, 1974, at the height of the controversy, one story in particular stands out. Leonard Liggio, a Jesuit-educated history department lecturer, provided a scholarly analysis of the social and political implications of Attanasio's nun. That analysis remains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

 

Here are the main points of Liggio's essay:

 

· There has been a huge outflux of priests and nuns from the Catholic Church, principally because of their unwillingness to accept celibacy as a condition of remaining in the clergy.

· The nun cartoon is not the cause of the controversy; it's a reflection of an ongoing controversy in a society that was originally defined in Puritan terms.

· As American society attempts to find rational guides to a happy life in the wake of the failure of Puritanism, those still committed to Puritanism refuse to allow others the freedom to seek a happy life.

· Puritanism does not respect the autonomy of each person and his or her free choice. Therefore, it has always opposed tolerance.

· Puritanical politicians like Senator Buckley appeal to special interests and sub-groups. Therefore, they are opposed to tolerance.

· Catholic politicians like Buckley want to force non-Catholics to adhere to the demands of a Puritanical state.

· Catholic politicians would never dare interfere in the affairs of colleges operated by religious orders. Why should they have any say in non-Catholic higher education?

· Every person and newspaper on campus should be free to criticize any newspaper. Mutual exchange of commentary and criticism is an important part of the learning process and contributes to tolerance. No one is forced to read any of the several papers published at City College.

 

Spoiler alert: The First Amendment won. The editors were not expelled, and OP continued to publish for five more years until it finally found a way to push the authorities too far. 

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In early 2005, I was preparing for Nowhere Man events in Mexico and Chile, and I wanted to be able to speak more Spanish than hola, adios, and que será será. So I placed an ad for a Spanish tutor on Craig's List. Julio Malone was one of the people who responded. He offered to teach me Spanish if I'd help him with his English.

 

Julio's a longtime political columnist for Lístin Diario, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic. He also does commentary for NY1 Noticias and Univision 41 Nueva York; teaches journalism at a Bronx middle school; and wrote a book for middle-school students about Sammy Sosa, the steroid-using baseball superstar who twice hit more than 60 home runs in a season. Sosa is from Julio's hometown, San Pedro de Macorís. The Chicago Cubs had traded Sosa to the Baltimore Orioles, and Julio had an idea for a column for The Baltimore Sun. I helped him write it and the Sun published it as "Latin Grit."

 

When the Mexican newsweekly Proceso asked me to review the Broadway musical Lennon, Julio translated the review and the Proceso editors barely changed a word.

 

Thus was born a friendship.

 

I began venturing up to Julio's Bronx apartment in a castle-like building on the Grand Concourse for Spanish lessons. But we'd end up smoking weed, drinking wine, and arguing about politics, while Julio, whom I've urged to open a restaurant in the Dominican Republic, whipped up fabulous seafood dinners. My progress in Spanish was minimal, but I didn't care. I was having too much fun hanging out and eating his food.

 

Nineteen years later Julio and I are still hanging out, though the other night he came down to my place and I did the cooking—as Julio watched with a critical eye. He gave my pasta pesto with sautéed broccoli and garlic high marks (though he did call my non-dairy Parmesan cheese "gringo food"). Then, after consuming sufficient quantities of wine, THC gummies, and weed, we turned to politics and economics. Below, along with my responses, are some of the ideas put forth by a gadfly Dominican journalist who recently became an American citizen and is going to vote for the first time.

 

Julio: Biden is a warmonger in charge of a corrupt system that needs to be torn down.

Me: Do you prefer Trump? Do you want to live under a military dictatorship? Cause that's what he's going to try to do with the Insurrection Act if he's elected. And you're not going to be one of his favored citizens.

 

Julio: Trump would end the war in Ukraine.

Me: No he wouldn't. If he's able to arrange a surrender or ceasefire, and the Russians still occupy parts of Ukraine, it would become a never-ending guerilla war.

 

Julio: There are Russian hypersonic missiles in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. This is going to be worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62.

Me: I hope you're wrong.

 

Julio: Electric cars are a scam. It's a way for power companies to make more money. If they wanted to, they could build self-charging electric cars that have a generator on each tire like the little generators they have on bicycles for the headlight. 

Me: I'm sure somebody's thought of that. This is America. If there's money to be made, somebody's going to do it. There must be all kinds of technical and engineering problems to overcome before that would work.

 

Julio: The dollar is going to collapse.

Me: You've been saying that for 19 years.

 

Julio: Recycling is a scam. We wash it, sort it, store it, and bring it down to the basement so a mega-corporation can take it, turn it into something else, and sell it back to us for a profit. We're doing their work for free. They should be paying us.

Me: You might be on to something.

 

Epilogue: After 19 years, I can now read Spanish on the level of one of Julio's middle-school students. Progress.

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...but at least they mention Nowhere Man a lot.

 

I don't know what it is with News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, but in the course of destroying democracy with lies and propaganda, his various publications and Websites cite my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, more than anybody. They've been doing it since the 1980s, when the book was just a germ of an idea that I'd mentioned to a reporter.

 

Since then Murdoch's scribes have written about Nowhere Man in such places as the New York Post, mentioning it in the same breath as The Catcher in the Rye; in The Wall Street Journal; and on Fox News, as they did the other week. The stories aren't always complimentary and they don't always get their facts right, but it doesn't seem to matter. As long as they spell the title correctly it helps keep the book alive.

 

The recent story that popped up on various Fox News sites, as well as on the Argentine site El Cronista, is about a loft in New York's Soho neighborhood, once owned by Lennon and Yoko Ono, that sold for $5.5 million. The article said that according to Nowhere Man, the Lennons bought the property "around 1980." This is false. I don't specify when they bought it. All I say about the loft is that they allowed their tarot card reader, Charlie Swan, to live there rent free as part of a generous compensation package. This would have been an interesting detail to include in the article. But... whatever.

 

Of course I take issue with Murdoch's grotesque right-wing politics. All I'm saying is that it's hard to feel totally negative about something as malignant as News Corp when they've been so... helpful.

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I don't often write about current events because they're too depressing. The unceasing barrage of news about Trump, assorted wars, the corruption of the Supreme Court, and the latest Covid variant feels like an assault on my mental health. So I let other people who call themselves journalists spew their commentary, which I spend far too much time sifting through in search of a grain of truth or a crumb of good news, like, say, a malevolent ex-president being convicted of 34 felonies. Meanwhile, I lose myself in the 1970s, a time of similar despair, as I attempt to transform the raw material of those grim days into literature.

 

The other weekend I took a day off from this self-imposed masochism, and my wife and I journeyed to an obscure corner of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. We'd last been there in the 90s, when I was test-driving cars for a magazine I edited. At the time, we found Gerritsen Beach to be a quaint neighborhood of narrow streets, charming bungalows, boats docked in backyards, and a lighthouse. It was reminiscent of a fishing village.

 

This time we took the Q train to Sheepshead Bay and walked two-and-a-half miles. And what struck me was that in the far reaches of hipster Brooklyn we'd come upon a zone of "Real" America, or "Amerika," if you will. For one thing, the guard dogs who snarled and barked as if they'd tear us to pieces given the opportunity made us feel less than welcome and hesitant to venture down certain streets. And the high-flying Trump flags were disconcerting, especially in a borough where Trump got only 24 percent of the vote. But what really got me was the Christian nationalist flag hanging above a lovely little garden. I took it to mean that the flag's owner believes America should be a white Christian nation and Christianity should be the official state religion. I had an impulse to knock on the door and tell the owner that the First Amendment of the Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But the impulse passed quickly.

 

Among the things I say about Trump in the afterword of A Brooklyn Memoir is this: "The pervasive hatred and bigotry that I describe in this book is the same hatred and bigotry that Trump knows intimately, having grown up in Queens, the borough adjoining Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 50s." And based on my recent excursion, I'd say hatred and bigotry are still alive and well in certain pockets of Brooklyn.

 

At least the flag doesn't belong to a Supreme Court justice.

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The earliest video of Stephen Stills I could find is from his show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, March 23, 1979, five years after the concert I saw at Carnegie Hall.

 

I continue to excavate the detritus of the 1970s as I assemble a book about an underground newspaper at City College in the days of open admissions and free tuition. The other day I came across a music review I wrote, published in the February 13, 1974, issue of Observation Post. In the span of a month I'd seen Bob Dylan and The Band at Madison Square Garden, Joni Mitchell at Radio City, and Stephen Stills at Carnegie Hall.

 

Stills is the one I discussed in-depth. A blizzard paralyzed New York the night of the show, February 8. Only a sparse crowd showed up. I thought it would make for an intimate evening. But, I wrote, it was the kind of concert "that can make you never want to go to a concert again." Stills alienated himself from the audience. I said he acted like "a prick."

 

He opened strong with a rousing "Love the One You're With" but after three songs walked offstage and took his band with him. Twenty minutes later he returned alone to apologize. "If you're wondering why I'm acting so uptight," he said, "it's because the organ went out in the middle of the set. I've seen a lot of bands fall apart over a lot less. If you think I'm making excuses, I'm not."

 

I thought he was making excuses.

 

He launched into a solo acoustic set but got tripped up on the lyrics for "4 + 20" and "Blackbird." When he played a new song that wasn't greeted with enthusiastic applause, he said, "I like that song. I'm sorry if I bored you."

 

The band, recovered from their organ issues, came back and rocked out on songs like "Bluebird," the Buffalo Springfield classic. Stills and company were on the verge of redeeming themselves. But just when it seemed the crowd had forgotten what happened at the beginning, he waved goodbye and everybody walked offstage. The mandatory encore, "a half-hearted '49 Bye-Byes,'" was met with a standing ovation in an attempt to coax a few more songs out of him. But the "cheers turned to boos" when the audience realized Stills wasn't coming back. The show was over.

 

I spent 14 bucks on two orchestra seats (a lot of money at that time) and had fun tearing his performance apart. But on the basis of Déjà Vu alone, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young remain one of my favorite bands of all time.

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