Mintz Memoir Recounts Friendship with John Lennon & Yoko Ono

URL SlugAfter resisting repeated requests over the years, media veteran Elliot Mintz has finally penned a heartfelt, yet revealing memoir flashing back on his life-altering friendship with musicians-artists-activists John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon.

The 304-page “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me,” illustrated with more than a dozen color photos, many previously unpublished, landed in physical and online bookstores and as an audiobook on October 22, 2024, from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Mintz, 79, looks back on his nine years as a trusted friend and confidant of both Lennon and Ono (who married on March 20, 1969), as well as the couple’s son Sean Taro Ono Lennon (born October 9, 1975), and John’s first son, Julian Lennon (born April 8, 1963, to first wife Cynthia Powell Lennon), prior to and immediately after John’s murder the night of December 8, 1980, at the age of 40.

In the decades since, Mintz has remained close with Ono (who turned 91 on February 18, 2024) and Sean (who, as the first-time author details in the Q&A below, was the one who encouraged him to write this memoir), as well as Julian.

“We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me” provides a fascinating behind-the-shoji screen view of the Lennons’ life at home at the Dakota building on 72nd Street at Central Park West in New York City as well as on the road during the former Beatle’s last decade.

Mintz weaves a story of a friendship between three very different people who found they had many threads in common, and who celebrated their differences while reveling in their similarities — insomnia being just one.

Their friendship began in September 1971. Mintz, a radio talk show host on KLOS-FM in Los Angeles, was well aware of the Lennons’ bed-ins and other public pro-peace performance art when he reached out to Ono to request an on-air interview about her album “Fly” — not with John, whose “Imagine” album was also just out.

Mintz had picked up “Fly” from a stack of incoming promos, and was intrigued, first by the cover art (a Polaroid of Ono taken by Lennon), and then what was in the grooves.

“I’d never heard anything like it in my life,” Mintz writes of the 13-track double album, released on The Beatles’ Apple label. “It was conceptual and experimental, confusing and elusive, but also somehow inspiring.” After a second listen, he made contact with her label reps, then her personal assistant, and Mintz and Ono soon connected with a minimum of back-and-forth.

Mintz writes that as he started dialing Ono’s number, a few minutes before midnight New York time, he had “absolutely no idea how my life was about to change. … The phone rang only twice before she picked up.”

They talked about music, art, politics, peace, and her vision of utopia, among other things from the arcane to the profound.

“Our interview went on…for some forty minutes,” Mintz writes, “a swirling murmuration of thoughts and ideas — sometimes connected, oftentimes not — as I explored, for the first time, on live radio, the thronging aviary that was Yoko Ono’s mind.”

Mintz avoided asking her about John or her relationship with him. In Ono’s experience, that was rare: Media people usually only talked to her as a way to sneak in questions about her husband, the ex-Beatle.

So, the next day, she phoned Mintz to thank him for being the exception. They picked up their conversation where they’d left off. And she kept calling every day after that.

Lennon did soon join the telephonic fray; he’d heard from Yoko that Mintz had tried out physician-administered hCG weight-loss treatments with some success, and wanted some for himself. Lennon had been self-conscious about his weight at least as far back as 1965-66, what he called his “fat Elvis” era.

After numerous private conversations, about pretty much everything but not much about The Beatles, Mintz conducted his first on-air interview with Lennon on October 10, 1971, a day after John’s 31st birthday.

For the next nine years, the three of them engaged in what Mintz called one long ongoing conversation.

John and Yoko’s calls happened just about any hour, the three-hour time difference notwithstanding. The conversations went on so long, they began disrupting Mintz’s business (call waiting was too new to be a thing yet, and voicemail hadn’t been invented).

So, he had the phone company install a private hotline just for their calls. He even had a red light attached to his bedroom ceiling that flashed insistently when one of them was calling (which he concedes now was a bit over the top).

Why Mintz?

Why the Lennons befriended Mintz, and the myriad other ways his relationship with them has affected his personal life ever since, are central to his narrative in “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me.”

He theorizes they were attracted to him because he wasn’t starstruck, and more importantly, they felt he could be trusted not to betray their confidence, as so many others had done before.

Born February 16, 1945, son of an immigrant garment manufacturer from Poland, Mintz grew up Washington Heights, the Bronx. He was shy, awkward around strangers, developed a stutter as a teen, and a target for bullies. Yet after high school, he told his Pop he wanted to be a broadcaster, and headed west to Los Angeles in the summer of 1963. He landed in rustic, bohemian (read: cheap rent), Hollywood-adjacent Laurel Canyon, just as its celebrated music scene was blowing up.

He soon discovered his small $300 per month hillside bachelor pad off Oak Court was surrounded by hippie-musician-music biz neighbors and friends who were either famous or on the verge. Among them were Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Carole King, Micky Dolenz, and David Cassidy (though he’s not named, Jim Ladd, aka “The Last DJ,” also lived right next door and conducted a series of interviews with Mintz in the 2000s).

Mintz studied broadcasting at Los Angeles City College, took speech lessons to lose his NooYawk accent and stutter, and by 1971 was well-known on L.A. radio through his pop-culture interview shows on KPFK-FM, KLAC-AM, and KLOS-FM. His “gets” included interviews with scores if not hundreds of A-list celebrities (Jack Nicholson, Groucho Marx, John Wayne, Jayne Mansfield, Frank Zappa (another Canyon neighbor), Allen Ginsberg, and Sal Mineo, to name a handful).

Though Mintz preferred the anonymity of radio to TV (which would come later), his was a familiar face at places like the Troubadour and Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, and Dino’s nearby on the Sunset Strip, all frequented by Hollywood hipsters and A-listers.

As it happens, when one works and lives among famous people, young and old, straight and hip, long enough, one is not intimidated by celebrity. And celebrities in turn appreciate people they can trust not to betray a confidence.

Mintz writes that he went to great lengths to keep his relationship with the Lennons on the down-low (and how he lost a girlfriend who was jealous of this mysterious, unnamed other woman he was on the phone long-distance with so often).

Eventually, though, the Lennons visited him in Laurel Canyon and joined in a jam with some of his neighbors, and the secret of their friendship was out.

“I knew how I felt about both John and Yoko,” Mintz writes. “I loved them like family. I’d like to say they felt a similar familiar attachment to me — I hope they did — but again I was never completely sure with their true feelings were. All I knew was that when they called — which they did constantly — I felt compelled to answer. In the years we were together nobody spoke with them more than I did.

“I’ll never know exactly why mine was the number they so frequently child but I know I always did my best to be a true friend to them both. Even at the most challenging times, I was there for John and Yoko, refusing to take sides, telling them truths that could sometimes be hard to hear. They trusted me, and I trusted them in return. It was a relationship and responsibility that was almost always a joyous one.”

Ojai, June 1972: First In-Person Encounter

The Lennons had recently moved from Tittenhurst Park, their country estate outside London, to New York City when Mintz first spoke with Ono in September ’71.

They had rented an apartment on Bank Street in West Greenwich Village, and during fall 1971 and spring 1972, engaged with counterculture figures like Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. The couple leaned into anti-war, pro-pot, and racial and feminist politics in their music and art. They also connected with a local band called Elephants Memory to help them record their new musical statements.

John and Yoko fans as well as conservative “Middle America” got a healthy dose of all the above when the couple co-hosted “The Mike Douglas Show” on afternoon TV show in mid-February.

And each day that winter and spring, John and Yoko spent several hours on the phone jawing with Mintz, until the three of them finally met in person in June 1972.

The Lennons had cruised across the country from New York to California in a big green Chrysler Town & Country station wagon they dubbed the “Dragon Wagon.”

At the wheel was their driver and designated reefer-roller, Peter (“The Dealer”) Bendrey. John and Yoko chose this road trip as a novel way to kick methadone, a legacy of the couple’s earlier heroin use. Pot “did wonders to alleviate the discomfort,” Mintz notes.

After several days and nearly 3,000 miles, the Dragon Wagon pulled into Ojai, a hip artist’s enclave nestled in the mountains north of Los Angeles and east of Ventura, and parked at the home of a liberal attorney friend of the Lennons. John and Yoko were convinced they were under government surveillance — and as history has shown, they were correct.

The Lennons surprised Mintz with a call from Ojai, and invited Mintz to meet them. Following meticulously detailed directions, he drove his mechanically sketchy Jaguar the roughly 75 miles northwest from Laurel Canyon, a 90-minute trip at best, to the attorney’s remote hideaway.

They hung out at the pool, but without talking much, fearing the place was bugged. Later, in a bathroom, with water running in the tub to make noise, Yoko quietly updated Mintz on what they thought was going on with the Feds.

(As Mintz writes, Nixon Administration officials were out to get Lennon deported back to England, using the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a club and citing his 1968 pot bust in London. They wanted to keep John from performing political benefit concerts or otherwise campaigning against Nixon’s re-election in November 1972. But after John and Yoko’s “One to One” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden that August 30, government pressure would effectively kneecap their political activism.

(After Nixon’s resignation in disgrace on August 8, 1974, the heat cooled. Through the relentless effort of his attorney, Leon Wildes, Lennon finally won the battle to stay in the U.S. on July 27, 1976. (And the London cop who busted him later admitted it was bogus.) History professor Jon Wiener‘s book “Come Together: John Lennon in His Time” and author-educator-filmmaker David Leaf’s documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” illuminate that dark chapter in the Lennons’ saga.)

How John & Yoko Got Elliot Fired

But the Ojai encounter was brief because Mintz had to be back in L.A. for his airshift on KLOS-FM. As he was leaving, John and Yoko gave him an advance pressing of their brand-new “Sometime in New York City” album (to be officially released June 12), and the OK for him to world-premiere it on his radio show that night.

Mintz sped back to L.A., barely making it to the studio on La Cienega Boulevard in time for his 9 p.m. airshift. Without ever hearing any of the four-sided album, he had his engineer cue up Side 1, and after a brief intro to his audience, they let it fly.

About 15 seconds into the opening track, Mintz knew he was in deeeeeep trouble.

“When John started crooning the n-word on the record’s first track — a proto-feminist screed titled ‘Woman is the N—– of the World’ — I saw the engineer’s jaw drop,” Mintz writes. “We stared at each other in shocked panic. But there was no way to stop now. … John and Yoko weren’t actual bomb-throwing radicals, but they certainly knew how to throw a musical Molotov cocktail into the cultural zeitgeist.”

Fired as anticipated the next morning, Mintz called the Lennons to report he’d indeed played the whole album on the air and commercial-free.

“‘Fucking great!’ John shouted, sharing the good news with Yoko.

“‘The bad news,’ Mintz added, ‘is that I’m out of a job.’

“‘And Mother [John’s nickname for Yoko] — they fired him!'” Lennon added.

Both John and Yoko thought the abrupt demise of Mintz’s broadcast career was hilarious. So they invited the freshly footloose DJ to hop into the Dragon Wagon with them and cruise up the scenic California coast from Ojai to San Francisco, their next destination.

“‘Come with us, Ellie,’ John said, using their favored nickname for him. ‘Join the circus!’

“‘What else could I do?’ Mintz pleads to the reader. ‘I said yes.'”

Joining ‘the Circus,’ Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend,’ ‘God’

Along with describing a memorable joint break in Big Sur on the way (“a potent doobie,” he confirmed in an email), Mintz details the other reasons why the Lennons had driven from coast to coast.

They were also destined for San Francisco to see an herbalist about fertility therapy because they wanted to keep trying to have a baby (Ono had miscarried at least once by then).

And they were following up leads in their ongoing search for Kyoko, Yoko’s daughter from her previous marriage to Tony Cox. He had won a post-divorce custody battle and disappeared with the girl. (Finding Kyoko was the primary reason the Lennons had moved from England to NYC.) The Lennons didn’t find Kyoko then (a reunion didn’t occur until 1994), but that summer ’72 road trip firmly established the bond between John, Yoko, and Mintz.

He observed how the Lennons’ relationship deteriorated in the months after November 1972. More troublesome than Nixon’s re-election was John’s blatant infidelity with another woman in a bedroom during an election-night watch party at Jerry Rubin’s place, while Ono and other attendees sat mortified in the living room just on the other side of the wall.

Lennon attempted to make amends in the ensuing months. But by October 1973, after he had finished writing and recording “Mind Games” but shortly before its release, Ono decided she’d had enough, Mintz writes. So she dispatched John to Los Angeles with their then-assistant May Pang, and asked both her and Mintz to keep him out of trouble.

That was some tightrope to walk.

Lennon and Mintz had become close friends and confidants through countless phone calls and visits, sharing views on everything from music to politics to art to celebrity.

If The Beatles came up in the conversation, Lennon could at one moment diss them and defend them the next. Though an early Bob Dylan fan, John didn’t buy into Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in late 1978 (he would return to Judaism a few years later).

Mintz sometimes found out the hard way what landmines not to step on. He discovered it wasn’t a great idea to opine about Lennon’s lyrics. When the two of them were talking about “God,” from John’s 1970 solo debut album “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” with its litany of “I don’t believes,” Mintz suggested maybe he shouldn’t have personalized it so much.

“Fuck off!” Lennon fired back.

During Lennon’s “Lost Weekend” separated from Ono, which wound up stretching to a year and a half (during which he recorded his “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Walls & Bridges” albums), Mintz indeed did his best to keep him out of trouble, and remain Switzerland between all four of them. But as he writes, he wasn’t always successful.

On one occasion, after extricating Lennon from a sketchy love nest with a random female Troubadour fan, Mintz told him never to put him in that position again. Lennon angrily told Mintz NEVER to tell him what to do or what not to do.

On another, amidst a booze-and-blow fueled meltdown after one of his infamous October 1973 “Rock ‘n’ Roll” sessions with producer Phil Spector, Lennon hissed something so vile at Mintz that he refused to repeat it in this memoir.

John later apologized, admitting, “I’m not always the ‘Imagine’ guy.”

Dakota Reunion, Sean’s Birth, Househusband Years

Mintz recounts what he knows about the Lennons’ reunion in late 1974, including Paul and Linda McCartney’s visit to L.A. in late March, as John was about to produce the “Pussy Cats” album for his party partner Harry Nilsson; John and Yoko’s “chance” meeting backstage at Elton John’s Madison Square Garden show that November 28; and how their separation ended in early 1975 when John left the New York City apartment he was by then sharing with May Pang and rejoined Yoko at the Dakota.

Once again, as on his pre-split visits to see the Lennons, Mintz would spend untold hours ensconced in his designated spot, the wicker chair next to their bed, as they talked, read, listened to music, and watched the tube together.

Mintz shares John and Yoko’s joy when she gave birth to the couple’s son Sean that October 9 (also his dad’s 35th birthday — and her C-section was not timed to coincide), and reflects on the relative tranquility of Lennon’s happy “househusband” years doting after their son while Yoko managed the house and took care of the family’s business.

Sal Mineo’s Murder

On February 12, 1976, Mintz happened to be in New York when he learned that Sal Mineo, a close friend and an Oscar-nominated actor (“Rebel Without a Cause”), had been murdered on the doorstep of his apartment in Los Angeles. Mineo had been alone, no bodyguard, no security.

The Lennons invited Mintz to visit the Dakota and consoled him, displaying great empathy, in their inimitable ways.

John also told Elliot he didn’t believe in bodyguards for his own protection: “If they’re going to get you, they’re going to get you.”

It’s hard for most of us to fathom the murder of a close friend in such circumstances, famous or not.

Mintz would experience that twice in his lifetime.

Elvis’ Death; Road to Japan, 1977

A year and a half later, on August 16, 1977, Mintz was packing his bags in L.A. to join the Lennons and their toddler son Sean on an extended vacation in Japan, Yoko’s homeland. He heard the news his early rock ‘n’ roll hero, Elvis Presley, had died in Memphis.

Mintz put in a trans-Pacific call to Lennon, an OG British Elvis fan, to share the news and commiserate.

“Elvis died when he went into the Army,” was John’s initial response, before asking Mintz to send condolences to the Presley family from him and Yoko.

After Mintz journeyed the 5,500 miles to Japan, he stayed with the Lennons for a few weeks at a hotel called the Mampei in the town of Karuizawa.

While staying at the Mampei they took a side trip to Kyoto and visited a Shinto temple, where Lennon seemed especially reverent.

Then, when Yoko’s spiritual advisors said the time was right, John, Yoko, Sean, and Elliot boarded a bullet train to Tokyo for business meetings and family get-togethers.

Holed up in Tokyo’s Okura Hotel, Lennon at one point decided he needed to escape, and roped Mintz into breaking out with him.

They hit a sake bar, Lennon quickly got drunk, and was nearly mobbed by fans. They barely made it back to their hotel unscathed. When Yoko scolded Mintz for failing to keep John out of trouble (again), all he could do was sheepishly apologize.

Christmas Lunch with Paul & Linda

Back in the States, one holiday season soon after Sean’s birth, the Lennons invited Mintz to join them and Paul and Linda McCartney for a Christmas lunch. The couples went to tony Elaine’s restaurant, but the food was so bad, they ordered pizza and had it delivered to the kitchen to be served on Elaine’s dinnerware.

Mintz recalls how back at the Dakota, Yoko and Linda paired up to chat and got along famously, but John and Paul’s conversation was awkward, with long periods of silence:

“‘Are you making any music?’ Paul asked at one point.

“‘I’m not working on anything,’ John said. ‘Music isn’t what’s driving me at this point. It’s all about the baby. What about you?’

“‘Oh, I’m always recording,’ Paul said. ‘I couldn’t live without the music in me life.’

“Then for a spell, they fell back into silence.”

NYE 1979: ‘Club Dakota’

On a snowy New Year’s Eve 1979, after the Lennons purchased next-door Apartment 71, they invited Mintz to help them celebrate by redecorating the apartment and dubbing it “Club Dakota.”

With just the three of them members, dressed up in (semi-)formal wear for the occasion, the club opened and closed the same night, as they “danced and laughed (and smoked) together without a care in the world, the jukebox filling the room with glorious old tunes from the ’40s and ’50s.”

At midnight, from the Dakota’s 7th floor, they watched the fireworks blowing up over Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.

“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life,” Mintz writes. “And I’d never seen John and Yoko looking more content and in love. It was that rarest, most precious thing in life — a perfect moment.”

‘Double Fantasy,’ December 8, 1980 & Aftermath

By June 1980, Lennon was writing songs and recording home demos again, in Bermuda, where Ono had dispatched him on a top-secret working vacation. He returned to New York with more than a dozen songs demo-ed and several more tunes in progress.

The Lennons made contact with producer Jack Douglas, swore him to secrecy, and Douglas likewise secretly assembled the musicians who would back both Lennons on the sessions for “Double Fantasy,” which began at the Hit Factory on August 4 and wrapped on October 19. In that time they also recorded basic tracks for a planned follow-up, to be titled “Milk and Honey.”

Capitol released the advance single “(Just Like) Starting Over” on October 23, and it was gaining traction at radio when the album followed on November 17.

In what is probably the most gripping chapter of “We All Shine On,” Mintz recounts how his mother called him in Los Angeles from New York the night of December 8. She shared the breaking news that someone had been shot at that building on 72nd Street she knew he visited often.

He quickly called Yoko’s number but got no answer. He tried the Dakota’s front desk, but the operator answered, then hung up. Without knowing any more details, but fearing the worst, Mintz rushed in a panic to LAX and caught a red-eye flight to JFK. Aboard the plane, a flight attendant tearfully confirmed to him it was that Lennon who’d been murdered.

For the next few hours, caught in a metal tube flying at 35,000 feet (fortunately, with few other passengers), gut-punched and doubled over, Mintz did his best to process his friend’s death. By murder.

He recalled how the Lennons had consoled him after Sal Mineo had been stabbed to death.

Now, Mintz writes, he wanted to be strong for Yoko and Sean by the time he arrived at the Dakota, a couple hours after dawn, and for Julian, who soon arrived from the U.K.

Mintz recounts the sad, surreal scene outside the building the morning of December 9, as thousands of fans had gathered overnight to mourn and sing and play Lennon songs. He shares how Yoko was devastated, he tried to just be there for her in the moment of her deepest grief. She told him he didn’t have to say anything; his presence was a comfort. Seven floors up, they could hear the mourners down on 72nd Street.

In the weeks that followed, Mintz stayed close to Yoko, aiding with police and press, welcoming well-wishers like Ringo Starr and fiancée Barbara Bach, and fending off opportunists.

Mintz also noticed items seemed to be disappearing from the Lennons’ apartments and offices. As Ono grieved, it appeared that once-trusted employees and acquaintances were ripping off items as artifacts and souvenirs to keep, exploit, or sell.

Because of this, Ono tasked Mintz with conducting a thorough inventory of all the Lennons’ personal effects and music and film archives. He dived into the cataloging in February 1981, and documented what he found on videotape.

The cataloging is Mintz’s point of entry for “We All Shine On,” noting early in Chapter 1 that some of the archival music tapes he discovered would first be heard in “The Lost Lennon Tapes” radio series, which he hosted (this reporter was the series’ original writer-producer, 128 hour-long shows broadcast from January 1988 to July 1990).

From there, Mintz flashes back to his first encounters in fall 1971 with Yoko, then John, and in the ensuing chapters he brings the story forward through Lennon’s murder and its excruciating aftermath.

The Warning

In the penultimate chapter, Mintz recounts one of the few times he questioned Yoko, who had long relied heavily on mystical beliefs like numerology and tarot readings in making the Lennons’ family and business decisions.

“‘If these advisors as good as you believe they are, why is it that none of them saw what was going to happen to John?'” he asked her. “‘Why was there no warning? How could they miss that?’

“‘Yoko’s answer astonished me.

“‘Elliot,’ she said, ‘how do you know I wasn’t warned? Did you ever ask me if there were warnings?'”

What Yoko said next left Mintz speechless. You’ll have to read his account for yourself.

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫

Exclusive Q&A with Elliot Mintz

On October 18, 2024, a few days before Dutton published “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me,” and between dozens of other interviews with major media, Mintz and I spoke about his memoir on the phone for half an hour. The Q&A follows (slightly edited for continuity).

Peeples: Why now? Why do you think now’s the time to tell this story?

Mintz: Well, Stephen, two events occurred that conspired with each other and made me make my decision. One, I was attending a birthday party for Yoko’s 91^st with Sean, some family members, and a very small group of friends were in attendance. During that time, and, in fact, for some time before that, Sean had encouraged me to write a book.

He recognized my proximity to his parents and for a brief time, five years, to him. The reality is that probably nobody spent more time speaking to his mom and dad during that last nine-year period, and with Yoko since.

The other thing was that as Yoko was celebrating her birthday on February 18, I was having mine on the 16th and realized I was 79 years old. About four months from now, I’ll turn 80.

The reality just slapped me across the face and said, “Kid, if not now, when?” The only other option was to communicate this book through an Ouija board. So, it had to be now, or never.

But even with Sean’s encouragement, I procrastinated for a while. I thought about it, but I’ve never written a book. It seemed like such an arduous task. And then, it just happened.

Peeples: There are hundreds of specific questions I could ask, but our time is limited, so I’ll refer the reader to your book for lots of fascinating minutiae, and ask about the larger picture.

I will say I thought your memoir was refreshingly free of braggadocio. You didn’t insinuate yourself into the story more than was appropriate. Your self-deprecating tone also helped you avoid the typical celebrity memoir trap. I appreciated reading the story of your friendship with the Lennons without that extra layer of nonsense.

Mintz: Thank you for that. It’s something I consciously worked on. Some people expected this book would be written from the point of view of a Lennon-Ono sycophant, that it would be a just love poem to John and Yoko. I didn’t want to do that. Others may have thought, well, he’s just decided now to cash in and spill the beans, and we can expect some salacious coverage of what the two of them were like. People who are anticipating either of those extremes will be disappointed.

I tried to engage in a form of first-person reportage that only favored the truth as I believed it to be. Think of the George Harrison phrase “I, me, my, mine.” Try these days to get through a paragraph without using those four words. And I only try to bring that to light in the actual narrative or telling of the story. It wasn’t about me as much as it was about them.

But my publisher did think it would be important to establish a little bit about me to try and frame whatever it was that drew John and Yoko to me, and why they invited me into their lives, so I indulged myself. A little bit.

In Judaic folklore, pride is a deadly sin, and one must not engage in it. So, I’m proud of nothing. I don’t wave my own flag. I have not found a cure for cancer. And I have not lived my life as Mother Teresa, Saint Teresa, and others have. So, I tried to give it a comprehensive overview, only injecting “I, me, my, mine” when I felt it was appropriate and served the greater interest of the reportage.

Peeples: Your point of entry for the story — February 1981, two months after John’s murder, when Yoko asked you to catalog everything. You mention in passing that some of the material you were unearthing would appear in “The Lost Lennon Tapes” radio series on Westwood One sometime in the future.

Then you flash back to tell the story of how you met Yoko and John in 1971, and bring the chronology forward from there. You recount many of the most memorable adventures, conversations, and controversies you were party to over the next nine years, leading up John’s murder and immediate aftermath. Was that construction your idea or the publisher’s?

Mintz: No, it was my idea when I first sat down to take two fingers and hit the keyboard of my laptop. One speaker has been broken now for a year — I’ve been reordering that part and it still breaks down. I like to listen to music loud on YouTube.

I stared at a blank page and thought, “Where could I begin?” I could have taken the linear approach, saying that I was a local L.A. talk show host and did an interview with Yoko. It just seemed like a pedantic entry into the narrative. I stared for a while. And what came to mind was when I was taking the inventory of John’s possessions for Yoko, and how difficult that task was.

I saw myself in the basement and in the room where I did the actual cataloging and putting things in cartons.

And then the items I touched … In my attic, I have a small carton that contains some of the things my father left that my sister found in his old apartment, some old Art Deco ties, things like that. It’s been more than 20 years, and I still haven’t been able to open that carton.

Touching John’s shirts — the shirts that actually clung to his body, shirts I recognized having been photographed in recording sessions, or during our trip to Japan, or when we went to a used clothing store on Melrose Avenue to pick up a bunch of Hawaiian shirts — touching them downstairs and trying on his eyeglasses, going through those attaché cases, things that were in his hand that belonged to him that had special meaning that he wanted to save…it was the Grail, in some sense.

It was deeply moving, and reminded me to remain on Channel B. Channel A is the way I talk and live my life, and Channel B is focused on the mission to complete the task I was assigned. So I wanted to let the reader in on what that task involved.

Once I got that on the screen, then it became natural to return to the beginning of the journey. I’m glad you like that first chapter. Many people have remarked about it. And again, I was in a unique position, because nobody else spent as much time with them.

Peeples: I’ve come across a short video clip you shot during the cataloging, and the Polaroids you took of the bound volumes you assembled. With your kind permission, I’d like to include them in this story because they’re not in the book.

Mintz: I videotaped and audiotaped everything I was doing. If I came across a document, I held it up to it, there would be a timestamp, people would see it, never left my hands until it went into a carton, then the carton was sealed, my initial would be placed on the label, each item, would be assigned a number, etc.

I did a test run to see how the camera angles worked. There was nobody else in the room videotaping me. So I did see that little piece of tape drift by. I have no objection to you using it, of course.

When I finished the inventory, I believe each one of the bound volumes contained, give or take, 400 pages. That also included previous inventories of films of theirs that may have been done in England and from their old house and receipts.

Whatever I found, I just wanted it to be included. Again, I didn’t know what Yoko or Sean would do with them. I don’t know how many of those items still remain. They’re in a secret vault somewhere. My job was to just get it done.

When it was, Yoko and I went to an underground vault in New York City, in a very high-security section where the vault was the size of 10 large clothing closets, and we stacked all the cartons in there, and left.

She even mentioned to me that she had been given the combination to the vault, and wanted me to have a backup copy of the combination, and I declined that offer. That’s when I left the custody of those materials.

Peeples: Along with the narrative’s structure, I thought you did a good job with dialog. You mentioned that your memory is excellent, but how did you remember your conversations with Yoko and John so well, after all these years? Did you have tapes or notes? Or were the conversations so burned into your memory that you found it relatively easy to recall them?

Mintz: A very important question, and I understand that it begs the listener to vest me with a degree of credibility that doesn’t seem to be substantiated other than by my word.

Outside of my on-air interviews with John and Yoko on radio or television, I never tape-recorded our private conversations, never kept a diary or journal, never took notes. There’d be no reason to. I’m having a conversation with a couple of friends of mine that I felt would go on forever. I imagine other people like to keep journals of conversations they’ve had with girlfriends or boyfriends, employers, whatever. But I was never one of them.

In response to the question, if Elliot doesn’t have an absolutely photographic memory, how can he recall those conversations? I answer by asking, in your own lives, can you recall conversations, verbatim, you may have had with a parent, an ex-lover, an ex-wife, or a husband? When you went in with your job application and the man behind the desk said, you’ve got it, can you report to work on Monday? Or any one of the myriad conversations when somebody first broke the news to you that they were going to get married, or that someone close to us had just passed? I believe that most people, if they quiet down enough and reflect upon those moments, are able to pull them up in an instant.

I remember conversations with the two of them where the things being shared were either so unusual, or profound, or funny, or puzzling, that I have no problem recalling them.

And I’m also one of those people who if I meet somebody and they give me their phone number, I can’t memorize it. If I go to a gathering, a party, or something, after the introductions are made, I don’t remember the names of the people. I don’t know if that’s something other people of a certain age experience.

But how could I forget those conversations with John and Yoko?

It would be more puzzling to me if somebody had the kind of relationship I did with them, and said, “We had a great time together, but frankly, I can’t recall anything they told me.”

‘The Lives of John Lennon’

Peeples: Was there a sense that you might be able to set the record straight on some of the other books written by so-called insiders and people who claimed to know or be acquainted with the Lennons?

Mintz: That was part of my motive. After John’s death, I spent a lot of time reading books that had been written about him. Yoko never read any of the books, but she asked me to read them and kind of summarize them to her very briefly, raising a red flag if something was particularly objectionable.

I read 20 or 30 books. I’m reading them by people who never met John Lennon or Yoko Ono and, in some cases never spoke to them. Some of them were making outrageous claims that would infect the ethos with a perception of these two people that would ultimately be read not only by their children but also by their grandchildren. Then they would find their way into libraries and would become the truth.

Stephen, when the lion doesn’t roar, the hunter wins.

So, yes, part of this was correction and part of it was just a desire to share this singular point of view about people who I know with people who I know are interested. As things turned out, it seems more people are interested than I even expected.

Peeples: Eight years after Lennon’s murder, you found the biography by Albert Goldman [“The Lives of John Lennon,” 1988] especially troublesome, so much so that you suggested Yoko participate in a radio special to address many of the blatant inaccuracies in the book.

Mintz: It was Yoko and Sean’s way of coming to the defense of their husband and father. It was something that simply needed to be done. My interview with Yoko in the wake of the Goldman book was brilliantly produced and disseminated by you on the Westwood One Radio Network [“’The Lives of John Lennon’: Fact or Fiction?,” broadcast September 14, 1988, as a special edition of “The Lost Lennon Tapes” weekly series then in production at WW1)]. It was listened to by an enormous number of people. Your technical wizardry and tight turnaround time on that show and on that subject is something I’ve never forgotten.

Peeples: Well, thank you, I wasn’t looking for that, but it’s much appreciated. The special was a huge production challenge, let’s just put it that way [props to co-producer/engineer Dave Kephart]. It did win a Bronze Medal from the International Festival or Radio Festival of New York for “Best Radio Special” that year.

Genesis of ‘The Lost Lennon Tapes’

By the way, “The Lost Lennon Tapes” origin story — I’ve never really asked you how the deal between the Lennon Estate and Westwood One for a radio series based on John’s audio archives came about.

Mintz: While I was doing the inventory, with the keys to the kingdom, I would go to various apartments the two of them occupied, opening drawers, opening closets, poking behind them, going through shoeboxes, looking for hiding places, looking for things John and Yoko may have placed somewhere for historical purposes.

After John was murdered, Yoko left the bedroom they shared and moved to another bedroom in the Dakota building. John and Yoko’s bedroom together is now a guest room. Her new room was much larger. She redecorated it and it was very beautiful. And the room had a stairwell that led up to a little second level that was shaded by shoji screens.

Behind the shoji screens, running the distance of maybe 15 or 20 feet, things were stored up there. No lock and key, but just items were there. One day I crawled up the stair, opened it, started going through the items, and I saw this container that was filled with cassette tapes.

I started looking at some of them for the inventory, and I realized that they were John’s private tapes of things that he had recorded. I’m not certain how they got from where they were before to behind the shojis. But I took note of those tapes.

Sometime in 1987, I was having a conversation with my friend Norman Pattiz, the CEO of the Westwood One Radio Network, one of the largest distributors of radio programs around the world. I mentioned the tapes to him in passing, and he said something to the effect, “Wow, I would be very interested in knowing what’s on the tapes. Maybe we could do something with them on the radio.”

Shortly thereafter, Yoko came to town. I mentioned my friend Norm Pattiz and suggested a dinner. She was up for it and the three of us went out and had a nice meal. During the conversation, Norm said he’d be very interested in acquiring or licensing those tapes so we could share them with lots of people, and Yoko thought it was a grand idea.

She felt at the time that none of the tapes would ever be used to make new records and either she was going to keep them behind the shojis or share them with as many people as she could. I think Yoko and Norm came to a handshake or a nod agreement during the dinner. A day or two later, the attorneys exchanged some documents, and I was told to send the tapes to Westwood One [headquartered in Culver City, California].

I’ll tell you something, Stephen, I’ve never revealed before. I put all the tapes in a series of large FedEx containers because I couldn’t physically carry them on an airplane, and sent them off, overnight delivery with a lot of insurance. When I got back to L.A. and checked on it, that FedEx delivery had not yet arrived. When I checked tracking, they were temporarily missing.

Needless to say, I went into a panic. Those were his original tapes and could never be replaced. It took a couple of days for FedEx to locate the packages and send them on to Westwood One. I didn’t share this with anyone, but for two or three days, I had no idea where those cassettes were. The Lost Lennon Tapes were truly lost.

Now, I want to say something else about this, because you were so heavily involved, the primary person, in the research and writing and production — all that goes into preparation before air.

Not only does the show hold up so well, and not only do people write to me still, wondering if they’ll ever be released again, et cetera, but I believe they constituted what we now call bonus tracks. I believe it was the first presentation of an artist’s material that was released in addition, or instead of, the actual and completed version.

There may have been some old Folkways recordings of outtakes, maybe there are a couple of jazz albums where there was an outtake thrown in as a bonus track, but I think you, we, Norm, may have opened the door to what now is commonplace. You can’t buy anything without bonus material, previously unreleased material being included in it.

Peeples: My. Thank you. I think for a long time the recording process was a mystery to most people. When we were kids, we’d hear something on the radio and have no idea what went into making it. It just came out of nowhere. Recording artists and record companies kept it mysterious for a reason. One of the reasons I became a music journalist was to find out more about the creative process, how people did what they did.

Through “The Lost Lennon Tapes,” because John had recorded so many iterations, we had a golden opportunity to trace the evolution of many of his songs from his first recorded idea or fragment to the finished track.

I think that was groundbreaking. I had no precedent as a writer-producer. But it just seemed logical, because we had all the pieces. So those song-evolution segments are among my very favorites of “The Lost Lennon Tapes.”

Some of the more recent Lennon releases have also included montages and other similar treatments done with demos and various takes.

Mintz: Those also required the kind of research that you put into the evolution of those early tracks, which remain my favorite part of the series as well.

Sean Ono Lennon has just done a gorgeous package around the album “Mind Games,” where he traces the etymology of the material in marvelous detail and even presents newly created pieces from the original material. He has taken a very artistic approach to it.

With “The Lost Lennon Tapes,” I viewed us as being more documentarians. We were just completely true to the material. To listen to any artist create a song that we’ve all come to know and love from the seed is still thrilling to me.

‘Tennessee’

Peeples: Absolutely. On that note, did you ever witness John in the process of writing a song or overhear him in another room working on a song that you might have recognized later after hearing the final version?

Mintz: Naturally, if I’m sitting in a room or in the kitchen with him, he wouldn’t have his notepad with a pen in hand while I’m there, creating a song. For at least five of those years, there was a period after Sean was born, where he wasn’t composing much of anything.

But one comes to mind immediately. I went to visit John at the Dakota, and the housekeeper let me in. John was in the White Room, their name for their living room. I took off my shoes by the door, put my bag down, and just walked into the living room. And as I was opening the door, John was at the piano, that big white piano that’s photographed in the “Imagine” video, and he was playing something on the piano. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.

But one comes to mind immediately. I went to visit John at the Dakota, and the housekeeper let me in. I took off my shoes by the door, put my bag down, and just walked into the White Room, their name for their living room. John was at the piano, that big white piano that’s photographed in the “Imagine” video, and he was playing something: [sings] Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.

I didn’t interrupt him, just sat down on the couch. He could see me out of the corner of his eye, he noticed me, and apparently just wanted to finish what he was doing. Then he stopped playing and looked at me, and I asked, “What are you working on?” “I saw a movie, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ the other night,” he said, and I said I’d seen it as well. He said, “Tennessee Williams just had a way of putting you there, didn’t he?”

I agreed. “So, I was just working on this song about him,” John said. Then he put his fingers on the keyboard again and softly sang, and I’m paraphrasing: “Tennessee, oh Tennessee, your faded denim glory will not die…” He played a little bit more of it on the piano and said, “That’s the bit I’ve gotten so far. How ya doing?” So that was one I heard him working on, until I interrupted him.

[Demo takes of “Tennessee” first aired in “The Lost Lennon Tapes” radio series, in Episodes #5 (show 88-09, w/o February 22, 1988), #45 (88-49, w/o November 21, 1988), and #201 (91-48, w/o November 25, 1991). They’ve been bootlegged but never released commercially. Lennon never completed the song or recorded it in the studio.]

Unrepeatable

Peeples: John said something to you during a Lost Weekend meltdown in fall 1973, while he was a guest at Lou Adler’s place — something you said was so vile, you would not repeat it in your book.

Mintz: Yes.

Peeples: Did it have anything to do with your ethnic background?

Mintz: That’s a clever way of coming at that question. It’s like opening the door in a deposition. If I give you any information about the epithet, it would be the same as revealing what the epithet was. The reader will just have to accept the fact that he spouted something at me that was just really vile and it shattered me. That’s a moment I’ll never forget.

Peeples: But later in the book you write how your relationship with him rebounded and over the last five years of his life became stronger than ever.

Mintz: That’s correct. I really absorbed a phrase he had told me early on, that he was “not always the ‘Imagine’ guy.” The fact is, he did have that edge that was part of Lennon, and when he was drinking, that part of his Jekyll and Hyde duality came front and center. I don’t think he could have helped himself.

And yes, it was deeply wounding and did alter our friendship for a while. I came to grips with the fact that saying something with such venom seemed uncommon with John Lennon. But people use those kinds of hateful words every day now on Instagram.

I just had to suck it up. It was better for me to resolve it than to allow it to be a deal- breaker. He ultimately was more important to me than a few fleeting moments in nine years where he made me feel very uncomfortable. It’s a good track record.

[Mintz interviewed Lennon as they walked on a beach in Malibu on October 29, 1973, and the piece aired on KABC-TV in Los Angeles in November.]

Peeples: In your book, why John and Yoko latched onto you, of all people, as a trusted confidant is a recurring question. You’d encountered scores if not hundreds of celebrities by the time you met them, and were not star-struck. And you knew how important it was to keep a secret, and didn’t try to cash in on your relationship with them.

Mintz: I loved them dearly as friends. I never asked them for a dollar. I was never paid. I was there. They knew they could talk to me about things that wouldn’t appear the next day in a magazine or a newspaper. And I lived alone. There wasn’t anybody next to me who could be listening in or pick up a piece of gossip from what I was saying to them. It was in many ways one of the purest relationships I ever had. All these years later, I still miss the guy.

Peeples: And Yoko is still with us. How is she?

Mintz: I tell everyone who asks how a woman in her early 90s is doing — when people are in their 90s, they behave in different ways. I’ve resisted any inquiries as to her physical health, any of those things. She’s just at a place now where her privacy needs to be respected.

Peeples: You write that the way Sean looks after her is inspiring.

Mintz: Sean is the best son any mother could have ever wished for.

Peeples: I think that’s a great place to end it for now. Elliot, thank you so much. I appreciate your time, and we’ll see you at the Barnes & Noble book signing event on Tuesday.

Mintz: I look forward to it. And just know, for the record, that among the people in my life that I’ve encountered, who have helped maintain a historically accurate, honest portrayal of John Lennon, you are among the handful on the top. I’m forever indebted for all the work you did on “The Lost Lennon Tapes” and for all you’ve done with me personally. We’ll celebrate on Tuesday.

Peeples: Thank you, Elliot.

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫

Four days after the interview above, on October 22, 2024, the official publication date of “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me,” Elliot Mintz appeared in a Q&A and signing event at the Barnes & Noble store at The Grove in Los Angeles.

He fielded questions about the book for an hour from moderator David Leaf, author-historian-educator and “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” writer-director-producer, then members of an audience numbering close to 100 (among them model-actress-activist Paris-Michael Jackson and musician-actor-radio host Michael Des Barres). For another hour after that, Mintz signed books and took photos with attendees.

Here’s the Q&A, in four parts (videos by Stephen K. Peeples).

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫

Santa Clarita journalist Stephen K. Peeples was the original, award-winning producer of “The Lost Lennon Tapes” radio series for the Westwood One Radio Network (first 128 hour-long programs, 1988-1990). He began his career writing about rock ‘n’ roll and pop culture for Cash Box, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, the Los Angeles Free Press, Circus, Picking Up the Tempo, Modern Recording, Performance, RePlay, Music Retailer, Rocky Mountain Musical Express, Rock Around the World, and other publications from 1975-1977. Peeples is a Grammy-nominated record producer (“Monterey International Pop Festival,” MIPF/Rhino, 1992), a veteran record industry media relations executive (Capitol Records, Elektra/Asylum Records, Rhino Entertainment, 1977-1998), and website content manager (Warner New Media, 1998-2001). At Westwood One, he was editorial director and ad copy writer as well as a program writer-producer (1983-1990). He was a features writer, entertainment columnist, copy desk chief, and Opinion Editor for the Santa Clarita Valley Signal newspaper (2004-2011), as well as The Signal’s award-winning online editor (2007-2011). He then wrote news and features for Santa Clarita’s KHTS-AM 1220 News (www.hometownstation.com) and SCVNews.com (2011-2016 and 2017-2021), and hosted, wrote, and co-produced the WAVE-nominated “House Blend” music and interview show on SCV community TV station SCVTV (2010-2015). Peeples was also Senior Vice President/New Media & Editorial with Los Angeles-based multimedia pop culture company Rare Cool Stuff Unltd. (2010-2016). See the “About” page on his website. More original stories and exclusive interviews are posted there and on his YouTube channel. For more information, email skp (at) stephenkpeeples.com or visit https://stephenkpeeples.com.

Article: Mintz Memoir Recounts Friendship with John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Category: News and Reviews
Author: Stephen K. Peeples
Article Source: StephenKPeeples.com