Bread and Babies
Background
John Lennon’s second son, Sean, was born on October 9, 1975, Lennon’s own 35th birthday. Then Lennon stopped. For five years he released no new music and stopped talking to the press. He stayed home at the Dakota in New York and looked after the baby while Yoko Ono ran the family’s business. He called himself a househusband.
In the fall of 1980, with a new album made with Ono, Double Fantasy, he started talking again. Two of those conversations ran long enough to cover the whole five years:
Three nights after the second one, on December 8, Lennon was shot and killed outside his home. He was 40. Sean was five. Cott wrote an obituary instead of the cover story and used very little of his tape; Rolling Stone printed the full conversation for the first time thirty years later, in December 2010.
The title here is Lennon’s. Asked what else he had been doing all that time, he said bread and babies were a full-time job. What follows is a summary of what he said about those years, with one line from each interview and links to both in full.
Why he stopped
Freedom was the reason. Asked why he became a househusband, he doesn’t start with the baby. He had been under contract since he was 22, he says, and it had come to feel like a prison. Facing himself mattered more than riding the ups and downs of public opinion, and he would not take the two standard exits in his business: the greatest-hits circuit in Las Vegas, or the way Elvis went. Playboy
Someone had to tell him it was allowed. He credits Ono with showing him there was an alternative, that he didn’t have to keep doing it. It did not sink in overnight; he says it took constant reinforcement. He compares stopping to what happens to a man of 65 who is sent home from the office and told his life is over. Playboy
“Walking away is much harder than carrying on.”John Lennon, Playboy
Nobody claps. He jokes that after baking the loaves he felt he had conquered something, then watched the bread get eaten and wondered where his gold record was. Playboy
What the five years were
Ordinary, by his account. He calls the idea that he was hiding or cut off a joke. He was working nine to five like anybody else: bread, diapers, the baby. He also traveled, to Singapore, South Africa, Hong Kong and Bermuda, and went to the movies. Rolling Stone
Why this child. He and Ono had tried for ten years, through miscarriages and a stillborn child. Doctors had told them it would never happen. When Sean came, they were not going to waste it; he says they didn’t move for a year. Rolling Stone Playboy
A trade, not a sacrifice. Ono took over the business, including the tangle the Beatles had left behind, and he took the home. He says the family worked better with both of them working for it, and that the first priority became her and the family, with everything else arranged around that. The arguments were the usual ones, reversed: she would come home tired, and he would point out that he had been with the baby for 24 hours. Playboy
He was proud of it. He wants it known that he looked after the baby and made the bread. He says he is the one who gained most, because he got to spend his son’s first five years with him. Playboy
The hard part
He does not claim to be good at it. In the last interview he says he is not the greatest dad on earth. He is irritable, he gets depressed, he withdraws and then gives, and Sean has had to live with that. He doesn’t know what it will do to the boy later. What he can say is that he has been “physically there.” Rolling Stone
Giving is not natural to him. He puts thinking about someone else, even his own child, alongside quitting drugs or taking up exercise: something he has to work at against his instincts. Rolling Stone
A song is the easy part. Told that he is clearly thinking of Sean in “Beautiful Boy,” he pushes back. Writing a song for your child is painting, he says, and he brings up Gauguin in Tahiti, working on a picture for a daughter who hadn’t seen him in twenty years. He would have done better to spend that time playing ball with his son. Then he admits that playing is the one thing he can’t do. He can draw, read to him, watch television with him and take him out for coffee. Rolling Stone
The first son. Julian, born in 1963, was 17. Lennon says plainly that it is not the best relationship between a father and a son, that he is a distant figure to him, and that he expects the two of them will have a relationship in the future. Playboy
Where it came from. His own father went to sea and did not come back until Lennon was famous. His mother, who had left him to be raised by her sister, was hit by a car and killed when he was a teenager. He bristles at the idea that this is why he stayed home with Sean, and says he did have a family: five strong sisters, his mother among them. Playboy
Other people’s expectations
He will not live up to a picture. He says he can’t meet other people’s expectations of him because they are illusions, and that critics’ pictures of an artist are no different from a parent’s or society’s. The job, as he sees it, is to not live by somebody else’s idea of how you should live. Rolling Stone
“But it’s more painful to try not to be yourself.”John Lennon, Rolling Stone
What success is. He says Ono taught him that real success is his relationship with her, with their child and with the world, and being happy when he wakes up. It has nothing to do with the machinery of rock. Rolling Stone
The press wanted the old Lennon. A month earlier an Esquire cover story had gone looking for him and reported back a rich 40-year-old businessman who watches a lot of television and dotes on his son. Had he given up? His answer is angry: he asks whether he is supposed to be a martyr, and says the press wants dead heroes and he is not interested in being one. In September he had said the same thing another way, that it is better to fade away than to burn out, and that the people he admires are the ones who survive. Rolling Stone Playboy
What the time off made
Three weeks, or five years. He says he didn’t write a thing while he was home. The songs for Double Fantasy were written in about three weeks, and he insists they took five years. He tells a Zen story he got from Ono: a king pays a painter for a picture and waits a year; when the messenger finally comes for it, the painter dashes it off on the spot, and answers the complaint by saying he had spent ten years thinking about it. He could not have written those songs, he says, without the five years. Rolling Stone
The money question
He is asked it directly. Playboy puts a figure on his fortune and asks why anyone needs that much. He answers that he used to feel guilty about money, which is how he lost a lot of it, and that giving it all away would not free him; the possessions that matter are the ones in the mind. Playboy
Ono concedes the point. Talking about how hard society makes it to raise a family, she says it can seem that only the privileged get to have one now. Playboy
How each one ends
Playboy ends with his message for the decade ahead: make your own dream. Don’t wait for a president, a rock star or a savior to do it for you. Nobody can wake you up but you, and what stops people is fear of the unknown.
Rolling Stone ends with a question. He believes we make our own reality and always have a choice, and he wonders aloud how much is decided for us anyway, and whether there is always a fork in the road.
Worth knowing
These are his accounts, given while he had an album to sell. Biographers have disputed parts of the picture, the household had staff, including a nanny, and by other accounts he recorded demos at home during the years he says he wrote nothing. He also says he was 16 when his mother died; he was 17. The interviews are valuable for what he chose to say three months and three days before the end, and both are worth reading whole.
Copyright. Both interviews are still under copyright: the Playboy interview © Playboy, the Rolling Stone interview © Rolling Stone. This page summarizes them and quotes one line from each. The full texts are at the links below.
Go to the source
The Playboy interview →
Republished by Playboy, as it ran in January 1981.
All We Are Saying, by David Sheff →
The complete Playboy conversations as a book. Sheff was 24 when he did the interview, and later wrote a memoir about his own son, Beautiful Boy.
John Lennon: The Last Interview →
Jonathan Cott’s full conversation, in Rolling Stone.
Uncommon Sense, by Derek Sivers →
On this site: another case for deciding what your life is for, and letting the rest go.