He bends down to inspect a bed of sweet-smelling trumpet-shaped blossoms. FREESIA DOUBLE FANTASY, he reads from the identifying plaque.

Double Fantasy—that’s a great title, he thinks to himself.

He and Yoko talk it over and share the excitement over the phrase, with its layered meanings. Not only is it a flower, John points out, but also, “without really saying anything, it says everything.”

Yoko likes that it references “a dream that we have—which we share.”

John is almost ready to go home.

Chapter 56

Chapter 56

Our life together

Is so precious together.

—“(Just Like) Starting Over”

I’m interested in doing something extra special,” John tells producer Jack Douglas.

He’s calling from Bermuda with some highly unusual directions for the recording wizard, who engineered Imagine and who throughout the 1970s was making records with the Who, Miles Davis, and Patti Smith as well as Aerosmith and Cheap Trick.

John directs the curious producer to a noon seaplane landing at Manhattan’s 30th Street pier. Douglas boards the plane, which is routed to Cold Spring Harbor and comes in for a landing on an unfamiliar beach. When Yoko meets the plane with a message, Douglas realizes he’s at Cannon Hill.

“John wants to do a record; he wants you to produce it.” She hands him an envelope marked “For Jack’s ears only.”

Douglas listens to the cassettes, mesmerized by the primitive yet affecting sounds of John playing his guitar and singing into two Panasonic cassette recorders, keeping time on pots and pans. Douglas can’t resist taking on the project. Once John is assured of Douglas’s participation, he reels off his requirements for recruiting the session musicians. They all have to be around John’s age, and they can’t know who’s behind the new record.

“I don’t want to make a rock album,” John says. “What I want to make here is a record about a middle-aged man. I want it to have that feel, a man who’s putting together his life, who’s survived, for me. The Beatles. And all of this other crap that’s going on in my life. I survived it all, I’m now a family man. I’m facing middle age, I’m looking at forty.”

Douglas rehearses bassist Tony Levin and Hugh McCracken on lead guitar, then leads them to an astonishing destination. At the Dakota, John Lennon greets the musicians: “I’ve been a househusband for the last five years and I want to get back to the music.”

And he’s relentless about the details. To Levin, John says, “They tell me you’re good, just don’t play too many notes”—and he hears every one of them. Levin comes away from the session marveling, “John Lennon had more of a clear vision of what he wanted from the bass than anybody.”