John Lennon Felt There Was a ‘Jinx’ on 1 of His Celebrated Albums 

John Lennon began working on the 1975 album Rock ‘n’ Roll in 1975. During the recording process, Lennon spent late, drunken nights in the studio with producer Phil Spector. During more than one session, they got absolutely nothing done. While the album was successful, Lennon said he felt that it had a curse on it.

John Lennon felt like one of his albums was cursed

After 18 months of separation from Yoko Ono, Lennon returned home to her. He said it felt like he’d been on an arduous journey to get there.

“I feel like I’ve been on Sinbad’s voyage, you know, and I’ve battled all those monsters and I’ve got back. (long pause),” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “Weird.”

He said his work with Spector marked the beginning of a long, dark period in his life. He drank heavily, used drugs, and got into fights with friends and strangers alike. As a result, he felt that the album he worked on with Spector, Rock ‘n’ Roll, was cursed. 

The album took a long time to put together and the recording sessions were chaotic. Spector once fired a gun in the studio, and a bottle of whiskey spilled all over the mixing console. Spector later withheld the records from Lennon.

“It started in ’73 with Phil and fell apart,” Lennon said. “I ended up as part of mad drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can’t begin to say, it’s just barmy, there’s a jinx on that album.”

John Lennon didn’t think people paid much attention to the album

Lennon recorded Rock ‘n’ Roll during his “lost weekend,” or his period of separation from Ono. During this time, he often made headlines for his behavior, which he thought colored people’s perceptions of the record.

“There is so much of that ‘Oh, well, John is supposed to have things to say,’” he said in the book  All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I got locked into that business. I think, because of the way I had been behaving publicly, people got into the habit of reviewing my lifestyle and not my music. So nobody really listened to the album.”

He felt people were laughing at him rather than absorbing his art.

“It was more, ‘That drunken idiot made a record, ha-ha-ha,’” he said. “So I don’t think many people really listened to it without seeing a guy with a Tampax on his head. So maybe [laughing] in the future … If I forget about the way it was made and just hear it, it ain’t so bad.”

He said the time he worked on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was a strange one

For Lennon, his work on Rock ‘n’ Roll felt like a blur.

“It started, somehow, at the end of ’73, goin’ to do this Rock ‘n’ Roll album,” he said. “It had quite a lot to do with Yoko and I, whether I knew it or not, and then suddenly I was out on me own. Next thing I’d be waking up drunk in strange places, or reading about meself in the paper, doin’ extraordinary things, half of which I’d done and half of which I hadn’t done.”

He said he had to come back to himself when he returned to Ono.

“I’d been in many mad dreams, but this . . . It was pretty wild,” he said. “And then I tried to recover from that.”