JUST LIKE STARTING OVER: THE RECORDING OF DOUBLE FANTASY
FIRST PUBLISHED: Uncut Legends, December 2005 By Chris Hunt
John Lennon felt really alive. For the first time since those distant days as a leathered-up rock’n’roller in the bierkellers of Hamburg, he felt that his destiny was in his own hands. Alone at the helm as 20-foot waves crashed down on the bow, he gripped tightly to the wheel, carving a path for his vessel through the squall with just a yellow Sowester for protection, screaming seas shanties in the face of the tempest.
He had locked himself away in the Dakota for five years, watching TV, reading books, ringing-up late-night radio phone-in shows, bringing up his son, baking bread, and above all avoiding most forms of confrontation and danger. Now, with the rain lashing his face and tears streaming down his cheeks, John felt a different man. At the helm of the Megan Jaye, a 43-foot sloop bound for Bermuda, he knew that he was fighting for survival against elements more powerful than himself, a force of nature infinitely more potent than the Beatle machine that had drained away the control he once exercised over his own life – and he felt the rush of blood all the more keenly, the surge of adrenaline in a way that he had forgotten possible. Here was a man in the process of rediscovering that life was for living. From this point on, for John it would be just like starting over!
In May 1980 John Lennon had been a man seeking adventure. Having been dispatched to his recently acquired summer home in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s north shore, as far as Yoko was concerned he was out of sight and out of mind. Away from the watchful eyes of ‘Mother’ and her helpers at the Dakota, who provided a regime of round-the-clock policing that could save him from his own more cavalier gut instincts, John set in motion a plan to fulfil what he claimed to be a lifelong ambition. He wanted to learn how to sail.
"All my life I’ve been dreaming of having my own boat,” he confided that summer, embroidering this desire with tales of haunting the Liverpool docks as a child, wistfully following the boats with a longing stare as he wondered whether each vessel might be the craft carrying his errant father out to sea. This nautical fascination had developed with age. The househusband of the Dakota was an avid reader, with plenty of time to ponder the possibility of a Viking ancestry. He devoured books on the subject, on Eric The Red and Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Early Man And The Ocean’, and meekly confessed to violent seafaring fantasies, where John the fearless Viking would rape and pillage at will.
Splashing out on a 14-foot sailboat from Coneys Marine, a family-run enterprise in nearby Huntington Bay, John recruited 25-year-old Tyler Coneys to show him how to handle his new toy, named Isis by the former Beatle after the Egyptian fertility goddess. After work each evening Tyler would swing by the Canon Hill mansion to show John the ropes, and soon Lennon and his young bosun were at ease with each other’s company, taking the sailboat around the bay and shooting the breeze, chatting openly about music, relationships, guy-talk.
