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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