The Beatles were over. Not officially yet. The lawyers were still working. The papers were not yet signed. The public announcement had not yet been made in the form that would make it permanent and real. But John Lennon knew. He had known for months. And in the autumn of 1970, he walked into Record Plant Studio in New York with no band, no safety net, no four-part harmony to hide inside, and began making the most frightening record of his life.

The official announcement had come in April. Paul McCartney had released a statement and the statement had been turned into a headline and the headline had circled the world in the way that certain pieces of news circle the world, not gradually but all at once, landing in every city and every home simultaneously, so that the moment of learning it was the same moment for everyone. The Beatles were finished.

Jon had not been surprised. He had been the one who had sat in a room with the others and said with the directness that was characteristic of him, it is most certain that he wanted a divorce. That had been September 1969. The months between that statement and Paul’s public announcement had been spent in the legal and financial complexity of dismantling something that had become over 10 years so large and so interwoven with the infrastructure of the music industry that separating it into its component parts required a team of lawyers and accountants working continuously. During those months Jon had been in New York, he had been with Yoko. He had been thinking about what came next, which was the question that the end of the Beatles raised in a way that nothing else could have raised it. What did John Lennon do when he was not being a Beatle? He had been a Beatle since he was a teenager. The band had been the container for everything. His ambition, his

creativity, his public identity, his relationship with the world. It had also been, he was beginning to understand, a place to hide. Not deliberately, not consciously. But the band had given him cover in ways he was only recognizing now that the cover was gone. Paul wrote melodies that everyone loved.

George had his spirituality. Ringo had his warmth. And John had his wit, his sharpness, his armor of intelligence that kept the world at the right distance. Together they had been something that transcended any of them individually. Apart they were just people, talented, famous, singular people, but people nonetheless exposed to the full weight of what it meant to exist without the protection of the most famous band in the world.

He went to see Arthur Janov. Janov was a psychologist who had developed a theory he called primal therapy. The idea that the source of adult neurosis was unresolved childhood pain and that the path to genuine psychological health ran through rather than around that pain. You had to go back.

You had to feel what you had not been allowed to feel at the time it happened. You had to scream if screaming was what it required. Jon had read Jonov’s book and recognized something in it that he could not have named precisely, but that felt like the description of his own interior architecture. The losses of his childhood, his father’s absence, his mother’s complicated presence and sudden violent absence, the specific loneliness of a child who has been handed from one set of adults to another and never quite understands why. All of it was there, unprocessed, carried forward through the years of fame and success in a sealed container that he had never known how to open. He and Yoko spent several months in primal therapy with Janov. Jon did not discuss the specifics of what emerged in those sessions publicly, and the details were never fully known. What was known was what came out of them. Not peace exactly or resolution, but access.

Access to the things he had sealed away. access to the specific quality of feeling that his childhood had produced and that the years had not dissolved. He brought that access into the studio. The sessions for what would become John Lennon/plastic ono band began in September 1970 and continued through October. The band was minimal.

Ringo Star on drums, Klaus Vorman on bass, Billy Preston on some tracks, and in some cases nobody else at all except John and Yoko and a piano. The producer was Phil Spectre, though the approach was almost the opposite of everything Spectre was known for. No wall of sound, no layering, no orchestration, no production that stood between the song and the listener.

Just the songs as bare as they could be made. The engineer on the sessions was a young man named Dan. He was 24 years old and had been working at record plant for 8 months. This was his first major session, the first time he had sat behind the board for something that anyone outside the building would ever hear.

He had been told in the manner of briefings given to junior engineers before significant sessions that John Lennon was coming in, that the material was personal, that his job was to be invisible and competent in equal measure. He had agreed to these terms without fully understanding what they meant until the first day when John sat down at the piano and began to play the opening of a song called Mother.

Mother was about Julia, about the specific experience of being a child whose parents were absent, his father gone to sea, his mother present and then not present and then present again and then killed by a car on Menlo Avenue when Jon was 17. The song did not approach this experience with the oblique poeticism of his earlier writing. It named it.

It said directly with the plainness of someone who has decided that metaphor is a form of evasion. Exactly what had happened and exactly what it had produced. The opening was a funeral bell, slow tolling, the sound of something ending or being mourned. Then John’s voice singing the word mama in a register that was not the register of performance.

It was the register of something that had not been said to the person who needed to hear it and was being said now decades too late into a microphone in a New York studio. Dan sat behind the board and kept his face still and his hands on the controls and did not look at Jon through the glass. The sessions moved through the album with the logic of something that had been planned in advance, not as a sequence of songs, but as a sequence of confessions.

Working Class Hero, the sarcastic, furious account of growing up workingclass in England and having the mechanisms of society trained on you from birth to keep you in your place. It had a rawness that was unlike anything Jon had recorded with the Beatles. A rage that had nowhere to be redirected into melody or arrangement or the collaborative compromise of a band.

It was just the rage set to two chords and a voice that was not trying to be pleasing. Isolation, the song about what it felt like to be famous and invisible simultaneously, to be surrounded by the apparatus of celebrity while being genuinely completely alone. John had written about alienation before, but always threw the protective distance of abstraction. This was not abstract.

And then God. God was the last major track recorded for the album, and it was the one that Dan would remember for the rest of his life with the particular vividness that attaches to things witnessed at close range when you are young enough for them to leave marks. The song was a list. A list of things John Lennon did not believe in.

magic, the Bible, the tarot, Hitler, Jesus, Kennedy, Buddha, Mantra, Gita, Yoga, Kings, Elvis, Zimmerman, and finally, after a pause that seemed to last longer than it was, the Beatles. I don’t believe in Beatles. The line was sung in the same tone as everything that preceded it.

not dramatically, not with the weight of a grand announcement, simply as the next item in a list of things that had been examined and found to be insufficient containers for whatever truth he was looking for. The song ended with what was either a statement or a question, depending on how you heard it. The dream is over. What can I say? The dream is over yesterday.

And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The dream is over. Dan was watching through the glass when Jon finished the final take. Jon sat at the piano for a long time without moving. The room was very quiet. Yoko was there, but she did not speak. Nobody spoke. Eventually, Dan’s voice came through the intercom, the engineer’s voice, the voice of someone whose job was to keep the session moving.

He said the take was good. He said they had it. Jon nodded without turning around. Then he said something that Dan repeated in every account he gave of those sessions in the years that followed. Always with the same care, always using the same words because he understood that the exact words were the point.

John said, “Play it back. I want to hear what I sound like when I’m telling the truth.” John Lennin/plastic Ono Band was released in December 1970. The reviews were unlike anything John had received before. Not the pop criticism of Beatles albums, not the assessment of hooks and melodies and commercial potential, but the response of people who had encountered something that did not fit the categories they had prepared for it.

Some critics called it the most personal record ever made by a rock musician. Some found it difficult to listen to. Some wrote about it with the tentative language of people trying to describe an experience for which they did not have the right words. Ordinary listeners responded with the particular quality of recognition that attaches to art that has been honest enough to become universal. They wrote letters.

They called radio stations. They stopped John on the streets of New York and said things that were difficult to say. That the album had made them feel less alone in something they had not been able to name. That hearing someone else say the things Jon had said in those songs had given them permission to feel what they had been feeling. John read the letters.

He read all of them or as many as he could in the months after the album’s release. He was not surprised by the response exactly. He had understood what he was making while he was making it. But the scale of the recognition, the reach of it still produced something in him that he had not entirely anticipated.

He had been afraid of what would happen when he told the truth this completely. And what had happened was that the truth had reached people. That was what truth did when you let it. Dan the engineer went on to work on dozens of significant sessions in the years that followed. He became, in the language of the recording industry, a name, someone sought out by artists who wanted a particular quality of attention in the room, a particular willingness to be present for difficult material without flinching.

He was asked in interviews over the years which session had mattered most to him. He always gave the same answer. He described the day John had finished the final take of God and sat at the piano in the silence after it. He described the question John had asked, “Play it back. I want to hear what I sound like when I’m telling the truth.

” He said that in all the years he had spent in recording studios, he had never heard anyone ask that question. He said he did not think most artists could ask it because asking it required already knowing the answer. Already knowing that what you had just recorded was in fact the truth and being willing to sit with it. John Lennon had known.

He had been frightened of it. Dan was certain of that because you could hear the fear in the record if you knew where to listen. But he had made it anyway. He had stripped away everything that had made it possible to be less than entirely honest. the band, the armor, the four-part harmony, the machinery of the most famous group in the world.

And he had sat down in front of a microphone and said what was true. The album still exists. The fear is still in it. So is everything else. That is what it costs to tell the truth completely. And that is what it sounds like when someone pays that