Thanks to Yoko I guess, I did not know much about it until I read, on crawdaddy.com, this interview of May Pang, Lennon’s girlfriend during this lost weekend of 18 months.
She had been working for John and Yoko since late 1970 as their personal assistant, but working is a weak word, since, the way she has described it, it seems she was completely dedicated to the couple, working long hours and doing whatever they wanted her to do.
And, around 1973, Yoko thought it would be a great idea for John to go out with May, as they were having a breakdown in their marriage; although May was against this idea, she ended up being his girlfriend and living with him at the young age of 23.
‘Lost weekend’, the name given to this time, may seem inappropriate as it ended up being a very productive period for Lennon as a solo artist (the ‘Mind Games’ and ‘Rock’ n’ roll’ albums are from this time) and he worked and collaborated with many artists (Harry Nilson, Ringo, Keith Moon, Johnny Winters, David Bowie, Elton John).
Lennon wrote ‘Surprise surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)’, the first song written for ‘Walls and Bridges’ for May Pang, and the whispering of John’s name on ‘#9 Dream’ is her voice with other people’s (credited as The West 44th Street Fairies), but not Yoko’s.
Their relationship ended up in 1975 and Lennon went back to live with Yoko Ono, but May stayed in touch with Lennon, him regularly checking on her until his death.
So why don’t we know more about this? Even ‘LennonNYC’ the film aired on PBS last November, minimized greatly their relationship. It is not as if Pang has not tried to put the record straight!
In 1983, she published a book, Loving John’, then edited it and republished it under the name ‘John Lennon: the lost weekend’ focusing more on the sensational aspects of their relationship, and then published in 2008 a book of photos ‘Instamatic Karma, Photographs of John Lennon’ that documented her story.
But it is still a mysterious time, in recent interviews she is painting a rosy picture of her life with Lennon, whereas it was not so great, Lennon was beating her and even attempted to strangle her; Harry Nilsson had once to pull Lennon off her!
So I am afraid she does not have more credibility than Yoko, and we may never know the complete truth about Lennon, with Pang rewriting her story with Lennon and erasing the bad parts, and Ono erasing Pang from Lennon’s life. On the DVD ‘Lennon Legend: The very best of John Lennon’, Ono edited herself for the song ‘#9 Dream’ making us believe she was singing the backup vocals originally sung by Pang.
But when you dig it, the story keeps giving and giving. In another interview, May Pang said that Yoko setup a stop smoking hypnosis session with John at the Dakota, which turned into a all weekend marathon session from which he never returned back to May. May believed that Yoko may have had John drugged, hypnotized and/or put into a trance and that he was told to break off with her and everything in his past so he could be with Yoko.
At the end, the story is very weird, first it is just bizarre to choose your husband’s mistress, then the whole thing ends up being a competition between two jealous women fighting for the first place into a dead man’s life. Of course Yoko is the winner because she controls everything related to Lennon.
Whatever happened, nobody ends up looking very good and Yoko Ono should look into her past before tweeting ‘peace and love’ every single day