John Lennon’s ‘Rock Bottom’ Was Like a Scene Out of ‘The Exorcist,’ Said a Friend
In 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono temporarily separated. The former Beatle went to Los Angeles at Ono’s suggestion and embarked on a campaign of debauchery that became known as his Lost Weekend. While at first Lennon seemed happy to be on his own, his behavior began to spiral. His friend, Elliot Mintz, recalled the singer’s rock bottom night was so shocking that it felt like a scene out of a horror movie.
John Lennon’s friend was shocked by the singer’s behavior
During Lennon’s Lost Weekend, his period of separation from Ono, he began recording with producer Phil Spector. These sessions often turned acrimonious, as everyone, including Lennon and Spector, was drinking and using drugs throughout.
One night was particularly bad. Spector’s personal security reached out to Lennon’s close friend, Elliot Mintz, because of how erratically Lennon was acting.
“I was about to walk into the nadir of the Lost Weekend, John’s rock bottom,” Mintz wrote in his book We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me. “The call came not on the hotline but my regular house phone, and the voice on the other end identified himself as a security officer working for Phil Spector. John was in trouble: Could I please hurry over to [Lou] Adler’s house and help ‘calm him down.’”
Mintz had grown accustomed to Lennon’s behavior, but even he could hardly believe what he was seeing when he got to the house. Spector’s security had tied a raging Lennon to a chair to keep him from destroying things.
“What I saw when I stepped into Adler’s living room some twenty minutes later looked like a scene out of The Exorcist,” Mintz recalled. “Drunk and wild-eyed, John was strapped to a high-backed chair, his arms and legs restrained with ropes, which he was struggling against with all his might as he seethed and shouted obscenities at his captors, a pair of beefy-armed bodyguards who stood in awkward silence nearby. The place was in shambles.”
Adler kept framed gold records on the walls, and Lennon had yanked them down and smashed them.
He said something shockingly horrible to Mintz
When Mintz tried to address Lennon, the latter began hurling slurs at him. Mintz felt so rattled by it that he wouldn’t repeat what Lennon said even 50 years after the fact.
“[J]ohn spat out an epithet so hurtful and offensive — so obviously fueled by drunken rage — I can’t bring myself to repeat it,” he wrote. “Suffice to say nobody in my entire life had ever talked to me that way, much less somebody I considered a dear friend. I couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d written and sung so powerfully about peace and love and understanding. I looked straight into his eyes, barely containing my disgust and disappointment.”
Mintz believed his reaction was what ultimately shook Lennon out of the haze of fury.
“[T]hat exchange of glances seemed to reach some shred of humanity buried deep in John’s alcohol-addled brain,” Mintz wrote. “Suddenly he became very, very quiet. Whatever fever had been simmering inside his troubled soul seemed finally to break.”
Mintz instructed the bodyguards to untie Lennon. He got up, stumbled to his bedroom, and fell asleep.
John Lennon said the album he made with Phil Spector was cursed
While Mintz celebrated Rock ‘n’ Roll, the album Lennon and Spector worked on, the former Beatle didn’t feel as thrilled with it. He described the album as cursed.
“It started in ’73 with Phil and fell apart,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “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.”
