Credit: Far Out / Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library
“I regretted it for years and had that last take running through my head over and over again. The only way to put it to sleep was to do heroin,” Jack Douglas told me in 2024.
The producer, who died earlier this month at the age of 80, was in the studio with John Lennon hours before the former Beatle was fatally shot. “What was really tough for me was that we were neighbors,” Douglas explained. “We lived two blocks away. I always rode home in the limousine with John.”
But that night, he didn’t. “There was a young band that wanted to come in and work late that night,” he recalled. “I always think that if I had gone home with him, I probably would have found the guy, jumped on him, or gotten in the way.” Years later, those “ifs” and “buts” have died down, and Douglas is able to reflect on their beautiful friendship.
What he saw was a collaboration born from a similar spiritual perspective. “He was very open to suggestions and very easy to work with,” Douglas explained. “He had no problem directing me. He let me compile his vocals.” [the process of cutting pieces of vocal takes together] Stay in the room and don’t say anything. He left it completely up to me. ”
That was the core of John Lennon’s creative vision: to set people free. He was very focused on his own self-expression, once joking, “I like writing about myself, because you know me,” but he didn’t want to get in the way of anyone else’s self-expression. “I trusted him so much early on that he let me do arrangements for the songs on the cassettes he gave me,” Douglas recalled.
“I have arranged double fantasy “Lennon wasn’t there and it was just the rhythm section,” he added. This was the bohemian vibe Lennon always tried to foster in the studio. However, it was by no means lazy. As Douglas mused, it was like “making four records” at once. This is because, rather than sticking to one autocratic vision from the beginning, we needed to properly tessellate various interacting elements after the fact.
One might imagine this to be a very artist-friendly approach, but not everyone liked John Lennon’s approach, and in such cases the feeling was usually mutual. For example, Eric Clapton once said, “Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying down, I prefer lying down. There’s no conflict.”
Needless to say, that meant that despite his immense talent, he craved some framework when working with others. He wasn’t the type to confidently pitch ideas one after the other, regardless of his skills. So when John Lennon called him to work on “Cold Turkey,” a conflict seemed inevitable, and neither side could bear the unpleasant experience.
Of course, they had worked together before, when Clapton went into the studio to record the solo for the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weep.” However, by that time George Harrison had already worked out the entire song. All in all, the inclusion of Clapton was simply a ploy to keep the song from being cut from the record due to the acrimonious partnership of Lennon and McCartney at the band’s songwriting helm.
Clapton grew up in this environment and his performance was amazing. But when it came to “cold turkey,” he “choked.” The song was to be Lennon’s second solo single, and he was full of enthusiasm. However, things did not go as planned. There was a clear contradiction between the way the bespectacled Beatle and the former Creamman worked.
John Lennon’s dissatisfaction with the so-called virtuoso would become public record years later when Cheap Trick’s own Rick Nielsen was brought in. double fantasy.
“When I was playing in the studio, John looked at Jack Douglas and said, ‘Man, I wish Rick had done ‘Cold Turkey.'” Clapton choked up. ”
This was certainly a high rating for Nielsen, but it came at the expense of Clapton in a way that Douglas would have only imagined in hindsight. “In the studio with John, you had to be way ahead of him. If you get stuck and you’re waiting for him to record something, he gets very impatient,” Douglas recalled. “So I had to stay a few steps ahead of him.” Clapton didn’t. He hummed and huffed with more jazzy reflections.
Lennon disliked this cumbersome approach, feeling the passing of time away from his family, not to mention the weary loss of rock’n’roll’s galloping momentum. “As long as I was doing it and the rhythm section was careful, everything went really smoothly,” Douglas says. No matter how you look at it, the “Cold Turkey” session wasn’t all that convincing. While Lennon was on the phone with Paul McCartney, Clapton was pondering what he wanted from him on guitar. That didn’t work.
In other words, the Beatles’ ridiculous work ethic is often heralded as their secret weapon. But it was a distinctly bohemian work ethic built on creative freedom, selective collaboration, and leveraging the strengths of your peers. Clapton wasn’t neatly folded into that way of thinking. As such, the years of collaboration ultimately strained the friendship and perhaps even hindered Lennon’s nascent solo career potential in the process.
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