Robert Rosen

 

Wednesday, October 4, at 6 p.m., I'll be doing my first live event in almost four years, since the beginning of the pandemic. If you're in the St. Louis area, please join me at Subterranean Books. I'll be reading from and answering questions about the new and expanded edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

The book has endured for 23 years and achieved cult-classic status because it takes you on a journey through Lennon's consciousness. Read Nowhere Man and you'll feel what it was like to be John. I was able to write such a biography because five months after Lennon was murdered, his personal assistant gave me the diaries Lennon had been keeping for the last six years of his life and asked me to turn it into a book—it's what John had told him to do, he said.

 

The diaries struck me as a rough draft of the tell-all memoir that Lennon never had a chance to complete—which raises a question I've been asked repeatedly: What right did I have to reveal the personal information in a man's private diaries? In other words, did I have a right to tell this story?

 

I'll discuss this at the event. Of course you should feel free to ask me about anything else.

 

I'm also going to read three short excerpts from chapters in the "Dakota 1980" section of the book: "Being Rich," "That Magic Feeling," and "Money." They all take place towards the end of John's five-year hiatus, before he returned to the studio to record his final album, Double Fantasy. 

 

If you're unfamiliar with me or my work, please listen to my recent appearance on the Something About the Beatles podcast. This will give you a sense of what the Subterranean event will be like.

 

I look forward to meeting you in St. Louis. To paraphrase the Beatles, been away so long I hardly know the place anymore.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Had my father, Irwin Rosen, lived, he would have turned 100 on September 23. But he left us in 2005, a vigorous man who had to be dragged to doctors and refused to take certain tests that might have saved his life. If it's true that everybody is born with a finite amount of courage, my father spent most of his on the battlefields of World War II and had little left over to face the verdicts rendered by men of medicine. My last memory of him when he was still healthy was playing touch football on my brother's front lawn. At age 80, he could still move and fling the ball with zip. I prefer not to think of him lying in a hospital bed.

 

My relationship with my father was challenging, and it was only after he was gone that I considered writing about it and trying to make sense of it. When I was a kid, he owned a candy store on Church Avenue, in Brooklyn, around the corner from where we lived. He put in 12-hour days, then came home and went to sleep. Pretty much the only time I ever saw him awake was when he was behind the counter in the store, whipping up egg creams and malteds for his customers and selling them cigarettes. I worked in the store from the time I was seven, making change for newspapers and eventually graduating to the egg-cream bar. I liked listening to my father and his cronies talk about the war, football, and the dirty books he kept on a special rack in the back of the store. But I also got an advanced education in bigotry—I was carefully taught whom to hate. It was ugly stuff, some of the things they said, and I wrote about it in detail in A Brooklyn Memoir, which ends in 1964, when I was 12, just before my father sold the store.

 

Then came my teenage years, which I've yet to write a book about. My father was a law-and-order Republican, I was a hippie, and things in the Rosen household grew so strained, we froze each other out. It was a cold war. Months went by when I didn't exchange a word with my father or my mother. The root of the trouble was the length of my hair and my refusal to cut it. I spent as much time away from my parents as possible, while still technically living in the same house. I moved out in 1975, when I was 22.

 

By the time my parents moved to a retirement community near West Palm Beach, in 1995, my father had mellowed, even toning down the bigotry, and I'd become more accepting of his and my mother's flaws. We were talking again, and I enjoyed visiting them and spending time in Florida. Despite their adamant opposition to my career choice—"You'll starve!"—they were thrilled when Nowhere Man became a best-seller, and they kept a file of newspaper clippings about the book, in many languages. Though the thing that finally persuaded them that I'd achieved some degree of success was when Nowhere Man was a question on their favorite show, Jeopardy. ("Rock & Roll Bookstore for $400, Alex.") 

 

Now, in my own advanced age, I find myself missing the old man and wishing he'd taken the damn medical tests so I could have had him around a few more years. And my mother, who's closing in on 97, misses him, too—despite their 56 years of bickering about everything. That's just the way it goes. The lucky ones get old and some of them do make it to 100.

 

So, on the occasion of my father's 100th birthday, I'll leave you with an excerpt of A Brooklyn Memoir. This is how Chapter 11, "Fragments of My Father," begins:

 

Yes, my father wore his hatred on his sleeve like a badge of honor—because that's what he wanted people to see. He thought it made him look like a tough son of a bitch who was not to be fucked with, and maybe it did. But it was possible for certain people—like me, my mother, and perhaps a few others—to occasionally get beyond this facade, and if you managed to do that, what you'd find lurking just beneath the surface was a seething mass of contradictions.

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Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon on Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m., at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

I'd never seen this episode of The Joan Rivers Show from 1991, but it popped up on YouTube a few months ago and has already gotten more than 234,000 views and 2,000+ comments. Rivers's guests were Fred Seaman, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's former personal assistant; Lennon's former lover May Pang; and Michael Medeiros, aka "Mike Tree," also a former Lennon and Ono assistant. The theme of the episode was "Former Staffers Tell All," though Seaman was the only one who had something to sell that day: his book, The Last Days of John Lennon: A Personal Memoir. 

 

I've written about Seaman, Pang, and Medeiros in my book Nowhere Man, on this blog, and in the case of Medeiros, in The Village Voice.

 

Seaman was an old college friend who, the day Lennon hired him, in 1979, asked me to collaborate with him on a book about Lennon and, after his murder, gave me Lennon's diaries to use as source material for that book. I'm not going to deconstruct, line by line, everything Seaman tells Rivers. Suffice it to say that like his book, it's a skillful blend of truth and lies, and he begins the interview with a fire hose of lies about Lennon's diaries and about me.

 

If you want my perspective, read Nowhere Man. I detail the diary story in a chapter called "John Lennon's Diaries." Or  listen to any of the interviews I've given over the years, many of which are available on the home page and John Lennon page of this Website. Or if you're in St. Louis, please join me October 4 at Subterranean Books. I'll be discussing and answering questions about Nowhere Man. You can ask me anything, and I hope you will.

________

Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon on Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m. at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

I never met James L. Buckley, but he was familiar with my work and he did have an impact on my life. Buckley, who died August 18 at age 100, was William F. Buckley's brother and an unlikely Conservative senator from New York, who served from 1971 to 1977, occupying a seat once held by Bobby Kennedy.

 

During Buckley's term in office I was editing Observation Post, or OP, a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York. I often published in OP the surreal drawings of the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio. Attanasio, who was brought up in the Catholic Church and later rejected its teachings, had strong feelings about the church's myriad hypocrisies, which he expressed in his art.

 

In 1974, the church had yet to be exposed as a haven for pedophilic clergy and was considered by many, including Buckley, to be untouchable—an institution off limits to criticism by anybody for any reason. One did not criticize those who spoke for God. It was also a time, one year into Richard Nixon's second term, that the despair and rage his presidency and his endless war in Vietnam engendered were giving rise to a punk sensibility whose mode of expression was outrage for the sake of outrage. OP was a font of this sensibility, and that's why I published an Attanasio cartoon that The New York Times would later describe as "a nun using a cross as a sexual object."

 

The cartoon infuriated Catholic organizations on campus and beyond. In a speech before the senate, Buckley characterized Attanasio's nun as "a vicious and incredibly offensive antireligious drawing" and called for a federal investigation of OP and the expulsion of the students responsible for publishing it. The media firestorm that ensued galvanized OP, giving it a newfound sense of purpose: defending the nun in the name of transgressive art.

 

But there would be no investigation and nobody would be expelled. The First Amendment and a Times editorial in support of the student press (despite "inexcusably irresponsible or offensive actions by undergraduate editors") got in the way of politicians who wanted to cut off all funding for campus newspapers at public colleges. OP, a bastion of free expression, would continue publishing for five more years. And thanks to James L. Buckley, I learned more about the Constitution and the power of the press than I learned in any class I took as an undergraduate.

 

May the senator rest in peace.

________

Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon on Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m. at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.