Robert Rosen

If my business—if you can call what I do a business rather than a grand delusion that I've been pursuing for more than 50 years—needed a slogan, something like, "Just Do It" or "Finger Lickin' Good," it would be: "Pissing People Off Since 1971." This occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about all the people whom my writing has enraged or who have been infuriated by cartoons that other people have created and that I published in newspapers and magazines I once edited.

 

It's true that in the 1970s I did publish things to intentionally piss people off. In those days of emerging punk and outrage for the sake of outrage, it was a generational response to coming of age in a society run by criminals and hypocrites and seeing no path forward into a bleak-looking future. The Sex Pistols had good reason to sing, "No future for you." 

 

The best-known episode of this protopunk era was the publication, in 1974, in Observation Post (OP), a radical college newspaper I edited, of a cartoon of a "nun using a cross as a sexual object" (as The New York Times put it), drawn by the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio.

 

The drawing was Attanasio's statement on his childhood abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, which left him with what I now think was a case of PTSD. And the public reaction to the cartoon, which I touched on in Beaver Street, and which I'm exploring in detail in the book I'm currently working on, was so extreme, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

 

A very pissed off ultra-conservative New York Senator, James Buckley, led the charge against OP, calling for a federal investigation and the expulsion of the editors responsible for the cartoon. But nothing of the sort happened. Student newspapers, the courts declared, have a constitutional right to criticize religion in any manner they see fit, and the Catholic Church is not above criticism—which I'd think is especially true for those who've been subjected to the Church's abuse.

 

The people who became enraged at my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, were Yoko Ono's media flacks as well as Lennon fans who didn't like the inherent truth I communicated in the book. The media flacks were just doing what they were told to do. But fans of the man who sang "Just give me some truth," yet are opposed to learning the truth of who Lennon was in real life, have always puzzled me. It wasn't my intention to piss anybody off with Nowhere Man. It just happened naturally.

 

Beaver Street, my history of the adult entertainment industry, pissed off a lot of people, too. Some of them were enraged that I treated certain characters with what they thought was too much sympathy. Others were angry for the opposite reason. But nobody was more pissed off than the late Gloria Leonard, a former porn star and figurehead publisher of High Society magazine. Leonard demanded I make clear that she was the real publisher, not a figurehead. I refused. The barrage of junior-high-school-level insults she lobbed at me were reminiscent of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. The episode saddened me. I'd met Leonard several times and I liked her. But she was not the publisher of High Society. That would be Carl Ruderman, who hid behind Leonard's skirt.

 

I've run into only one person whom my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, pissed off. It happened at an event where I read from the book and then took questions from the audience. A woman, making no effort to hide her rage, said that she grew up in Flatbush, only a few blocks from where I did, and what I described in the book was nothing like what she experienced. She implied that I was lying. My response: "Each block was like a mini-neighborhood and everybody had their own experiences." And I moved on.

 

There are more recent examples that I prefer not to get into here. Because there's no need to re-infuriate people whose wounds are still raw. But it does remind me of an old adage: If your stories don't piss anybody off, what you're writing is public relations, not journalism.  

 

And, of course, there are the immortal words of Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

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I don't know why it didn't occur to me to look at John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by British author Ian Leslie. Last month, in a post about David Sheff's Yoko Ono biography, I said that anytime a new Beatles or Beatles-related book appears, I always check to see if I'm in it, and if I am, what the author said about me—it's a good litmus test for the book's overall truthfulness.

 

Maybe it didn't occur to me because I'd never crossed paths with Leslie and didn't think a high-profile book that's been portrayed as scholarly would include any information from Nowhere Man, a work of investigative journalism and imagination—a combination that's been known to short-circuit the brains of certain writers and critics.

 

I was surprised to see my name listed in the index and even more surprised by what Leslie wrote:

 

The author Robert Rosen is one of the few people to have read the journal that Lennon kept at the Dakota (after John's death, the diaries were stolen by Fred Seaman, who showed them to Rosen in 1981). Rosen says that Lennon wrote about Paul a lot—almost every day. When he was asked, in 2010, what the most disturbing elements of the diaries were, Rosen cited John's jealousy of Paul ("pretty shocking"), his love of money, and his obsession with the occult.

 

This is surprising because it's simple, straightforward, and true. And it's unusual for writers to present my point of view without embellishments, qualifiers, or footnotes that have called me unreliable, dishonest, a criminal, a sociopath, or a fabulist, or have said that John's diaries contain nothing of interest or don't exist.

 

So Leslie wrote three true sentences about me, and (to the best of my knowledge) nobody has threatened him, canceled him, arrested him, sued him, slandered him, or libeled him for doing so.

 

Going by my litmus test, John & Paul is an honest book. So I'm going to have to read this one. I might even learn something.

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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 Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

Tony El, host of the podcast Project Third-Eye Opened, invited me to come on his show and talk about my life and my books. Our conversation started out with John Lennon. But it evolved into a discussion of racism, Donald Trump, and the effects of being exposed to virulent bigotry as a child living in Flatbush in the aftermath of World War II.

 

This is Tony's synopsis of the show: What really happened in John Lennon's final days? How does growing up in Brooklyn shape a writer's journey? In this deep-dive and light-hearted interview, Robert Rosen shares insights from his bestselling book Nowhere Man and his most recent book, A Brooklyn Memoir. Check out this very intriguing and fascinating conversation about music, memory, and the power of storytelling.

 

You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or YouTube.

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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 Instagram and Threads.

When my first book, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, was published 25 years ago, I had no idea what to expect. The manuscript had been kicking around for 18 years before Soft Skull Press brought out the first hardcover edition. One thing I didn't expect was that it would become an instant bestseller in the US and UK. But that's what happened, and since then, there have been many editions in many languages. And here I am, still writing and talking about the book.

 

What is it about Nowhere Man that's enabled it to endure for a quarter century? Well, from what I've been told, people enjoy reading the book—it takes you into Lennon's head and has the feel of a novel. But more than good writing is necessary for a book to survive this long. So I'd also suggest that the heat and friction generated when accolades and attacks collide (there've been plenty of both) leave people wondering what's true and what isn't, and they want to figure it out for themselves. So they seek out the book. A generation not born when Nowhere Man was originally published have since discovered it.

 

No writer enjoys being subjected to vicious personal attacks from (mostly) anonymous trolls or having critics rip apart their work. But praise from both readers and professional critics counterbalances the attacks. As Oscar Wilde said, "When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself."

 

Apparently I've given critics a lot to disagree about. Is Nowhere Man an irresistibly gripping read that's obsessive, corrosive, and unforgettable? Or is it vulgar gossip and lies?

 

Twenty-five years ago, an excerpt of Nowhere Man that ran as the cover story in Uncut magazine, along with positive coverage in The Times of London, launched the book into the stratosphere. Mojo magazine and Court TV loved it, too. So did Booklist, which is one of the places libraries turn to when deciding which books to acquire. Then Christianity Today (of all places) included Nowhere Man on its list of the 10 best books of 2000. Foreign editions came next, and perhaps the most unexpected thing was the reaction of the media in Spanish-speaking countries. They treated Nowhere Man as literature, especially in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and eventually Spain. Invitations to discuss the book followed. During a 2003 visit to Mexico and a 2005 visit to Chile, it was as if I'd entered an alternate universe where everything I'd ever worked for had come to pass in a language I didn't speak. (Muchas gracias a los traductores.)

 

It was enough to make me forget about the attacks, which had begun in 1984, 16 years before Nowhere Man was published. That's when it became public knowledge that I'd had access to Lennon's private diaries and had written a book about what I'd learned.

 

Forty-one years ago, three articles ran in Playboy, People, and the New York Post. By all appearances, it was a coordinated attack, organized by Yoko Ono, to make me look like a criminal and prevent the story I told in Nowhere Man from ever being published. The day the articles came out, in January 1984, the New York District Attorney's Office informed me that I'd be arrested on criminal conspiracy charges, having to do with my access to Lennon's diaries, unless I signed a document forfeiting my First Amendment rights to tell the story. But the scheme fell apart when David Lewis, a high-powered criminal attorney more accustomed to defending mafiosi, took my case pro bono. A simple phone call Lewis made to the district attorney, telling him, "You're in gross violation of my client's constitutional rights," ended it. I signed nothing. I wasn't arrested. I never heard from the DA again. (I tell this story in more detail in Nowhere Man.)

 

Years later, after a couple of conspiracy theorists accused me of being a CIA operative involved in Lennon's murder, the Mexican news magazine Proceso ran a piece I wrote, which they titled (translated from the Spanish) "I just believe in one conspiracy: Yoko Ono's against me." (Check out Lennon's song "God" if you don't get the reference.)

 

Ironically, in 2002, Ono's attorneys subpoenaed me to testify at the copyright infringement trial of Fred Seaman, Lennon's personal assistant who gave me the diaries. My sworn testimony was the very story Ono had tried to suppress in 1984: the "John Lennon's Diaries" chapter of Nowhere Man.

 

I've come to understand that those who see me or any of my books as a target for their hatred can't help themselves. The best thing I can do is ignore them. Still, personal attacks, often based on the 41-year-old discredited Playboy story, are disturbing. But three years ago, in the Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias, Nowhere Man appeared on a list, compiled by playwright Paúl Salazar, of five indispensable books that also included One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. That, to me, felt like vindication, and it was the kind of recognition that makes me glad I wrote Nowhere Man.

 

I write not to get rich quick, as some have ludicrously suggested, but because I feel a primal need to communicate. And I take inspiration from people who've reached out to me to say that Nowhere Man made them want to be a better father or that reading the book out loud to their brother who was recovering from cancer had helped him get through the ordeal.

 

And speaking of cultural impact, let's not forget about this.

I can hardly wait to see what the next 25 years hold in store.

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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 Instagram and Threads.

At a time when the soon-to-be president of the United States is a felonious man-child constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth...

 

At a time when vast swaths of the American people either don't care that their leaders are lying to them or are unable to distinguish truth from lies...

 

At a time when a new conspiracy theory is born every minute...

 

...it seems absurd, especially on the first day of this consequential year, to expend any energy writing about two liars of little consequence.

 

While there's nothing I can do to change anybody's mind about Donald Trump, perhaps I can still get through to the handful of people who give credence to Elliot Mintz and David Whelan.

 

If those names mean nothing to you, I applaud your ability to ignore celebrity gossip and conspiracy theories involving the murder of well-known individuals. But having written a book, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, that touches on both topics, I've had occasion to encounter both Mintz and Whelan.

 

Elliot Mintz is a professional liar who would walked over his own grandmother for John Lennon and Yoko Ono (as G. Gordon Liddy said he'd do for Richard Nixon). Critics have panned his memoir, We All Shine On, for its grotesque display of sycophancy towards the ex-Beatle and his wife (see the Irish Independent). The Mexican news agency Amexi picked up "A Masterpiece of Propaganda," my review of the book, and ran it as a feature, "Refuta Robert Rosen las memorias sobre John y Yoko en 'We All Shine On', de Elliot Mintz," detailing my refutation of the lies that permeate the book.

 

David "Don't Call Me a Conspiracy Theorist" Whelan believes a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy—that he did not shoot Lennon and that there was a second shooter, a professional assassin, who got away. Similar conspiracy theories, in circulation for 44 years, have come to nothing. Whelan is aware that his quest to prove this theory is pointless but chooses to continue.

 

I believe that Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, shot Lennon.

 

My issue with Whelan is the lies he weaves into his interviews and blog posts (I've not read his book), especially when information surfaces that casts doubt on his theories. Three months ago, I wrote about his research techniques after we both recorded an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles (SATB). I learned after the show that Whelan had made a number of false statements. This is what I wrote at the time:

 

The 27th Round

 

The Conspiracy Hustler

 

Did John Lennon's Killer Ask Him for a Job?

 

SATB 297 was broadcast last week. I said on the show that Whelan came to my attention when he misrepresented himself to Lennon's friend and gardener, Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros, as a fact checker for 72 Films, the production company that made Murder Without a Trial. (Medeiros had been interviewed for the film.) So I knew Whelan was capable of lying, but I wasn't prepared for his style of conversation—interrupt, interrupt, interrupt, and attempt to never stop talking. Bury the listener under too much information and disinformation. Create confusion and doubt rather than illumination and clarity. It's the same game all conspiracy theorists play.

 

Reading Whelan's blog is like drowning in a cesspool. The hatred towards me that comes across in his writing is extraordinary. His efforts to discredit me read like a cry for help. When it comes to his critique of my work on SATB, he's wrong when he says there's no record of Chapman saying to a psychiatrist that he felt "like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," as I wrote in Nowhere Man. (There's an easily accessible record.) He's wrong when he says he knows I wasn't at Chapman's sentencing hearing because I didn't explicitly say in Nowhere Man, "I was there." (I wrote the story in the third person.) He's wrong when he says my description of Chapman looking proud of what he did can't be true because nobody else described him that way. (That's how he looked as police marched him out of the courtroom.)

 

What else does he say on his blog, in his book, and in his interviews that isn't true? I don't know, but my guess would be plenty more.

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I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.

 

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

As Robert Rosen's wife, I've sometimes felt as if I were also living with the spirit of John Lennon. This has been mostly good, but I once told a journalist in Mexico City that there had been times when I never wanted to hear the words "John Lennon" again. (I imagine anyone who's lived with a biographer can relate.) That was long ago, and since then Bob's connection with Lennon has become a beautiful, if intricate, part of the fabric of our life together. Last January we both took part in an event in Seville centered on Bob's book Nowhere Man. I'm a singer-songwriter and aside from doing a few original songs, I performed "I'm Losing You," "You Can't Do That," and "Now and Then," which had just come out a couple of months before.

The phrase "now and then" also figures into a song I wrote and recently released as a digital single. "Mild December" was partly inspired by last Christmas evening, which Bob and I spent with our friend Michael Medeiros, aka "Mike Tree," as Lennon called him when he was John's gardener. After dinner, we settled into Michael's cozy living room to listen to music and talk. Lennon seemed to hover over us that night, and when I looked up the weather for December 1980, I saw that it was mild then too.

 

The recording was produced by Adam Tilzer, with Danny Bradley on drums, and mastered by Nick Miller. You can read the lyrics below:

 

Mild December

 

It was a mild December

When we had our Christmas meal 

Spicy puttanesca

Red wine for the reveal

 

You played a tape just for me 

I heard the stops and starts

Then we went out on the fire escape

Those geraniums had heart

 

And you said you were unwanted

But you screamed that all away

Then you strutted with a puffed-up chest

To a Central Park West subway

 

And now you've got an aerie

A nest that's rent controlled

I walked up all those steps for you

Just wishing for some snow

 

And I played a mix of my new song

You said I got it kinda wrong

But I won't go that low for you, my friend 

I read the writing on your wall

But honey I can take a fall

Progress not perfection I agree

 

And then you bit into a gummy

Said you just had one a day

But you would eat that whole damn bag

Just to make those memories fade

 

'Cause that girl was gonna kill you

You found her gun and split in two

One part floated near her bed

She'd used her best voodoo

 

And you said you liked Folk City

When you were oh so young

You drank a lot in Gerdes' place

Now it's got you on the run

 

Well, you are such a gentle man

But the whiskey made you mean

Lashing out at those you love

Yeah, I've heard about that scene

 

And I played a mix of my new song

You said I got it kinda wrong

But I won't go that low for you, my friend 

I read the writing on your wall

But honey you can take a fall

You didn't need that four bucks anyway

 

You got snakebit in the desert

You hear the rattle in your ear

You think my song is fiction 

We can go with that, my dear

 

Still you took care of her jade tree

Its leaves like blades could cut 

But money showered in its wake

Or that's the scuttlebutt

 

I played CBGB's

When I was oh so young

I wanted more from Hilly's place

But still I had my fun

 

And it was a mild December

When he stepped from his car 

I lose you now and then, it seems

But you never go too far

 

Can we ever really change

So many cells to rearrange

I walked up those steep steps for you

Just the way he did before everything blew

 

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

It was a mild December

 

Every holiday season I make available signed copies of many of my books. This year I'm offering the five you see above. I'm not set up for e-commerce, so if you're interested in buying one of these titles, contact me through the website and I'll send you the details. I can send the books anywhere, but if you live outside the US, be aware that postage is more than the price of the book. Here's the price list, which includes postage:

 

Nowhere Man (new edition, red cover) $23

Nowhere Man (old edition, yellow cover) $21

Nowhere Man (Spanish edition) $19

A Brooklyn Memoir (revised edition of Bobby in Naziland) $25

Bobby in Naziland $25

 

Wishing you all a happy and peaceful holiday!

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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 Instagram and Threads.

 

Last week's post about muralist Jorge Manjarrez went over so well on social media, for the holidays I'm posting another photo of Jorge's T-shirts. The two T-shirts seen here, with Robert Smith of The Cure printed directly on the shirt, and Jim Morrison as the King of Hearts printed on plastic and fused to the shirt, are only two examples of the wide variety of work Jorge does. He's best known for painting murals on Mexico City's subway stations, but also does illustrations for major Mexican newspapers and magazines, and has a line of playing cards illustrated with portraits of 54 (two jokers) different musicians and bands.

 

Julio Malone and I are collaborating with Jorge on turning our screenplay, The Diaries of Juan Dolio, into a graphic novel. This is the beginning of not only a beautiful partnership but what I think will be a most interesting collaboration.

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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 Instagram and Threads.

 

Jorge Manjarrez paints murals on the walls of Mexico City's subway stations. This is an official job, not graffiti. He also does illustrations for major Mexican newspapers and magazines; has a line of T-shirts featuring his portraits of rock stars, like the one above; and created a deck of playing cards, also illustrated with musicians' portraits. (You can see more of his work on Facebook.)

 

Jorge was recently in New York to paint a mural on the wall of a Mexican restaurant in Yonkers. Roberto Ponce, my editor at Proceso magazine, asked me to meet Jorge—because he's interested in turning a screenplay I wrote many years ago, in English and Spanish, with Julio Malone, into a graphic novel. The screenplay, The Diaries of Juan Dolio, was Roberto's idea. He thought he could get it produced in Mexico. The story is a fictional outgrowth of my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

 

In the screenplay, Juan Dolio is a diary-keeping Mexican rock superstar living in New York City. When he's murdered by an insane fan, his personal assistant, Luke, liberates the diaries, and with Dolio's widow's security thugs in hot pursuit, makes a run for the Mexican border intent on returning the diaries to the Mexican people as part of their cultural heritage.

 

Well, Jorge made it back to Mexico with the screenplay, and I look forward to sharing some of his illustrations for The Diaries of Juan Dolio, sooner or later to be a graphic novel.

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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 Instagram or Threads.

For the better part of the past 12 years I've been excavating my memory for material. A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush when I was a child, is one result of this excavation. I began writing the book with only an image in my head of my father in his candy store, in 1961, and a germ of an idea: Something interesting was happening at this time and in this place, and it was worth exploring. What I learned over the many years I worked on the book is that if you think about something every day for an extended period of time, you're going to remember things you thought were long forgotten, and the more you remember the more you remember.

 

I bring this up now because of my debate with a conspiracy theorist about the murder of John Lennon that will go live on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, sometime in December. As misguided as I find David Whelan and his theories about who really killed Lennon, and as sloppy and ill-informed as some of his research is (I discuss it here and here), I give him credit for getting me to consider certain things I haven't thought about in the 25 years since I wrote the Mark David Chapman section of Nowhere Man. For example, there's a scene where Lennon, the afternoon before the murder, signs Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. I wrote that Chapman asked him for a job. Whelan says that I'm the only one who reported this and demanded to know where I got the information. I told him I got it from Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman.

 

Whelan says that Seaman wasn't there to witness the exchange. According to Seaman's memoir, The Last Days of John Lennon, he was there.* A former Lenono Music employee reminded me who was also there to witness it. Paul Goresh, who died in 2018, is the photographer who took the picture of Lennon signing Chapman's album.

 

The week of December 8, 1980, Seaman came to my apartment. It was the first time I'd seen him since Lennon was killed. One of the things we talked about was Chapman asking John for a job. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear him say that he heard the story from Goresh. Can this detail of a 44-year-old memory be trusted? I don't know. But if he did hear about it from Goresh, it would make sense. Seaman and Goresh knew each other, they did talk on occasion, and it seems likely that they would have discussed the photo.

 

Whelan also got me thinking about the conversation I had with the publisher of Soft Skull Press when he asked me to write about Chapman. What I'd forgotten was that he'd originally wanted me to write that Chapman was part of a conspiracy. I refused. I told him I didn't believe it. At the time, I'd given little thought to the idea of a conspiracy—it would be several months before an insane conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA archivist who was somehow involved in the plot to eliminate Lennon. (Several years later, an even crazier conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA spymaster who plotted with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, to assassinate the ex-Beatle.)

 

I told the publisher I could write a better story if I wrote what felt true: Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, acted alone.

 

My only purpose in writing the Chapman section of Nowhere Man was to tell a compelling story that would give people some understanding of a seemingly inexplicable act. I wrote it as a thriller. I got inside Chapman's head just as I'd gotten inside Lennon's head. And to write about Chapman was liberating after feeling that Yoko Ono and her attorneys were looking over my shoulder as I was making the final corrections on the main Lennon section of the manuscript. I think it's this combination of style and information that has kept people reading Nowhere Man for a quarter of a century.

 

A critic for the British music magazine Mojo noticed. "Rather like reading a favorite detective story," he wrote. "Though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently."

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*During the Whelan debate, I'd forgotten that Seaman had written in his memoir that he was there when Lennon signed Chapman's album. In the unlikely event that Whelan was able to interview Seaman, as he said he was going to do, I'd like to know if Seaman contradicted his memoir. So numerous are Whelan's misstatements, I'm now also wondering if it's true, as he claimed during the debate, that Chapman's statement, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," is not in the court transcript. (See my previous post, "The 27th Round.")

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

 

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Last week, in a post titled "The 27th Round," I wrote about David Whelan, a conspiracy theorist whom I sort of debated—Whelan mostly talks, interrupts, and talks some more—on an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, scheduled to go live sometime in December. Whelan believes that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman, the man currently in prison for the murder of John Lennon, to be a Manchurian patsy who didn't shoot the ex-Beatle—the real killer is a professional assassin who got away.

 

I, in short, don't believe it.

 

Whelan went into his investigation with the preconceived notion that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. Consequently, everything looks to him like a clue pointing in the direction of conspiracy and nobody is above suspicion, with the possible exceptions of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who was five at the time of the murder (but now, Whelan says, knows more than he's letting on).

 

In an episode of SATB released October 10, after the debate was recorded, Rodriguez interviewed Whelan again. Whelan, who wrote a conspiracy-theory book, Mind Games, and shares his theories on Substack and in many interviews, says that much of what I say about Chapman in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is "laughable." This is an unsurprising response from somebody I've called a "conspiracy hustler" because he misrepresented himself to Lennon's assistant Michael "Tree" Medeiros in order to get him to agree to an interview. Whelan denies he did this.

 

"I gave the producers of the UK documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial extensive video interviews, which were never used in the final cut," Medeiros says. "A few days after those interviews, I got a phone call from David Whelan, who said he called to check my quotes for the doc. This turned out to be untrue. I believe he was fishing for additional info for his crazy conspiracy theory book."

 

It would be an exercise in tedium if I were to refute all of Whelan's misstatements in our debate, in his recent SABT interview, on his blog, and in his book, which I've made a point of not reading because it's clear what he thinks from reading his blog and listening to his interviews. But I do want to point out two of his misstatements in the October 10 SATB interview.

 

Whelan says that in Nowhere Man, I called Chapman "an art dealer," and that it's "laughable" that I say he raised the money to travel from Hawaii to New York City by selling a few pieces of art.

 

This is what I say in Nowhere Man:

 

Chapman fancies himself an art aficionado. For years he's been acquiring paintings, lithographs, objets d'art. First he sells a $5,000 Salvador Dali gold plaque, originally purchased with a loan from his father-in-law. Then, with a $2,500 loan from his mother, he purchases a Norman Rockwell print titled "Triple Self Portrait." Shrewdly, he's able to sell it to a collector for a good profit.

 

I based this paragraph on details I found in the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones, who interviewed Chapman in prison. The book was the definitive source of information about Chapman's life when I wrote about him in Nowhere Man in 1999. Whelan thinks Let Me Take You Down is worthless and questions if Jones is really a journalist. (He was a reporter and columnist on The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.)

 

It's the same book I cited in my "27th Round" post. Whelan, in the debate, said that I'm the only writer who quoted Chapman at his sentencing hearing saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." (Whelan questions if I really attended the hearing—yes, I did.) And he said that no information exists indicating that, as I wrote in Nowhere Man, this is what Chapman told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt. I directed Whelan to the page in Let Me Take You Down that has this information. Let Me Take You Down, apparently, is impervious to Whelan's research techniques. (Pro tip: Look in the index.)

 

Whelan gave me a sense of what his research techniques might be during the debate. He said that I was the only one who reported that Chapman asked Lennon for a job when John signed his copy of Double Fantasy outside the Dakota the afternoon before the murder. He asked me where I heard this. I said that Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman told me about it several days after the murder. If Seaman was not there to witness this, as Whelan claims, then somebody who was there must have told him about it. I saw no reason why Seaman would lie about this particular detail. So I took his statement at face value and included it in Nowhere Man.

 

"I'm going to ask Seaman," Whelan said.

 

Will Seaman remember what he told me in passing 44 years ago? Unlikely, but who knows? And even if Seaman remembers, would he deny it? Possibly. But let's stick to the most likely scenario of this imagined interview: Seaman doesn't remember, which gives Whelan what he wants—a contradiction that raises suspicions of... something.

 

Whelan's other misstatement in the October 10 podcast involves Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA employee in charge of their MK-ULTRA mind-control program, the agency's attempt to create programmed assassins (or patsies, as the case may be) with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. Whelan says it's "laughable" that I take Gottlieb at his word that MK-ULTRA was a failure. It's not that I take Gottlieb at his word, though he would have known more about the program than anybody, and the possibility exists that he could have been telling the truth. My point was that there's no credible evidence to prove that MK-ULTRA was successful. Of course, there's no credible evidence to prove that it was a failure, either. The CIA destroyed their MK-ULTRA files in the 1970s. It's this lack of evidence that conspiracy theorists use as proof that it's possible to create programmed assassins who will commit murder at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific way, and the CIA as well as some mysterious right-wing entities have, indeed, created such assassins (and patsies).

 

I have no doubt that it's possible to use MK-ULTRA techniques to get certain people predisposed to violence to commit mayhem. What I don't believe is that it's possible to control somebody for weeks and months at a time, as if they're a robot, before the command is given to commit mayhem—or to induce somebody to believe they're committing mayhem, as would have been the case with Chapman.

 

Like virtually all conspiracy theories, this one will never be proven or disproven. Without certainty, what's left is common sense and Occam's Razor, a philosophical concept that says if you have two or more theories to explain an event, the simpler, more straightforward one is usually correct.

 

And I do wonder: If a number of Whelan's statements about me are false, which he should have known from basic research, what else is wrong with the "facts" he uses to attempt to show that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy who did not kill Lennon?

 

I'll leave it to a more dedicated researcher to pick apart Whelan's thesis, line by tedious line.

______

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

 

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My book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has been under scrutiny for 25 years. Since early 2000, when the publisher first distributed advance reader copies, I've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 interviews. I often think I've been asked and have answered every possible question. But sometimes I'm surprised.

 

Last week I participated in a… let's call it a panel discussion though it was probably more of a debate, on Robert Rodriquez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, broadcast date TBA. Rodriguez and Carole Kirstein-Chase, an attorney, acted as moderators. The other panelist was David Whelan, author of Mind Games, a book that suggests a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy, that he did not shoot Lennon, and that there was a second shooter who got away.

 

My contention is that similar conspiracy theories have been circulating for 44 years, none of them have come to anything, and Chapman did it.

 

Nowhere Man's "Chapter 27," named after the so-called missing chapter of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, is about Chapman's sentencing hearing, which I attended. (Whelan disputes that I was there.) In the chapter, I quote Chapman saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." I also say that this is what he told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt.

 

Whelan asked me three questions about this quote that I'd never been asked: Why isn't it in the court transcript? Why did nobody else report it? Why is there no mention anywhere else of him saying this to a psychiatrist?

 

I didn't know, and I told the story behind the Chapman section of Nowhere Man: When Soft Skull Press accepted the book, in 1999, it was about Lennon's final years and ended when John was alive. There was no Chapman section. Soft Skull's publisher asked me to write one. I didn't want to. He insisted. I thought about it and decided that because I'd attended the sentencing hearing I could write something original and worthwhile.

 

In late 1999, I wrote Part IV of the book, "The Coda," about Chapman. It's based on my memory, accounts in newspapers and other books, and notes I took in August 1981 at the sentencing hearing.

 

In "Chapter 27" I say that Chapman said what he did about the bloodied prizefighter immediately after he read from The Catcher in the Rye but before the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life.

 

I suppose it's possible that the court reporter simply didn't hear Chapman say that.

 

But after thinking about it for a couple of days it occurred to me that maybe I had the events slightly out of sequence. Maybe Chapman said it after the judge sentenced him, the hearing was over, and the court reporter had stopped transcribing.

 

I flashed on a scene from 43 years ago: The judge pounds his gavel, dismisses the court, and Chapman, handcuffed, standing by his chair, facing sideways towards me, a cop on each arm, is about to be led out of the courtroom. That's when he says, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." But nobody's paying attention. The reporters have their stories, they're on deadline, and they're clamoring to get out. And that's when I write of Chapman, "He walks fearlessly out of the courtroom, holding his head high, veritably glowing with pride. He's done what he came to do."

 

Whelan questions if this description of Chapman is accurate because nobody else reported it.

 

Maybe I was the only reporter there who knew that the story wasn't over, and there was one more thing to see and hear.

 

And by the way, the following quote can be found on page 145 of the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones. This is Chapman speaking to a psychiatrist in Hawaii: "I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised."

 

Note to Whelan: Go to Let Me Take You Down in Google books and search for "twenty-seventh round." Comes right up.

______

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

 

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In last week's post, "My Habitat," I said I might share a photo showing the chaos of my bookshelves. Well here it is. The two shelves in the photo are similar to my other bookshelves—a disorganized collection of books that have come to me randomly. Some of them I have no idea why they're there or where they came from. Others I've read and loved and will comment on a few of them below.

 

Before taking the photo, I removed the artwork and most of the tchotchkes on the bottom shelf so you could read the spines. The top shelf I left as is to give you the true flavor of my library.

 

I'll begin with some of the titles on the bottom shelf.

 

Lying horizontally in the second pile from the left is Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. I've read it at least 10 times and it was a huge influence on my writing. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Miller—that's how taken I was by his voice. He taught me that it's possible to write a great book that's voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

 

On top of the horizontal pile on the far right is The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford. It's considered a classic, it's been lying around here since the dawn of time, and I finally picked it up about a year ago. It's boring.

 

Below The Good Soldier is On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It's another book I've read multiple times, beginning in my late teens. Kerouac turned me into a hitchhiking fanatic. Between 1970, when I took my first serious hitchhiking trip, and 1978, when I quit hitchhiking because the vibes on the road had gotten too threatening, I put on about 25,000 miles by thumb, through the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of my hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, more or less following the route Kerouac took in 1947.

 

Among the books standing upright on the bottom shelf is An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. I haven't read it, but it did remind me that in 1978 I read his earlier novel, Sister Carrie. I remember little about it other than in the early 1900s it was banned for its "sexual immorality," and I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would.

 

In the middle of the shelf is Household Hints & Handy Tips, a Reader's Digest book. I mention it only because my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, did much of the research for it, which means if you're looking for some handy household hints you can trust this book. We do. (Perhaps we should consult it for the proper care of bookshelves.)

 

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg, is the fattest book on the shelf. Everybody was writing about this tale of New York City in the 1970s when it was published in 2015—because the author received a $2 million advance, the most ever paid for a debut novel. I read it and it was pretty good. But $2 million good? This guy must have some agent.

 

On the top shelf, where all the spines are partially obscured, I'll comment on the artwork, tchotchkes, and other items. 

 

Long before Nowhere Man was published, I was working on a fictional version of the story, which I called Rockjesus. One of my former coworkers, Rita Trieger, designed the dummy cover, and I used it as part of the package I was sending to agents.

 

Other items on the shelf include a toy Space Shuttle; two paintings of trout by my friend the late John Babbs, a fisherman who lived in Oregon and was on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid bus; an antique menorah with a candle holder missing; and a couple of impressions of my teeth.

 

Behind the fish painting on the left is Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, one of the very few 19th-century novels I enjoyed reading. 

 

Behind the menorah is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. In college, one of my professors described it as "the crème de la crème" of English literature. It is, and I still refer to it on occasion.

 

Lying horizontally towards the right is a pile of videocassettes. The red one on top is a video of Jeopardy from December 26, 2003, the first time Nowhere Man was a question on the show. The second time was October 18, 2023. So, every 20 years. Cool.

 

Now, if I can only find that copy of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. I've been meaning to read it for years and it's rumored to be around here somewhere.

______

All my books (the ones I wrote) are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

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If there's a better Beatles podcast than Something About the Beatles, I haven't found it. What makes SATB great is its host, Robert Rodriguez. His knowledge of the Fab Four is PhD level and his interviews often explore territory well beyond rock music. For example, in episode 286: Nowhere Man '24 with Robert Rosen, Rodriguez and I got into a discussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind-control experiments. In in the 1950s and 60s, the agency used drugs like LSD and heroin, mostly on unwitting prisoners, in an attempt to create programmed assassins commonly known as "Manchurian Candidates."

 

This subject came up because conspiracy theorists believe that the man who assassinated John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, was either a Manchurian Candidate or a "Manchurian Patsy"—someone who took the fall for the murder when there was really a second gunman who shot Lennon.

 

I don't believe this and I said so on the podcast and in my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, in the extensive Chapman section and in a chapter titled "A Question of Conspiracy." Rodriguez, though, doesn't discount this possibility. Yet our conversation remained respectful, informative, and factual, both of us presenting our evidence as if in a courtroom, and letting listeners make up their own minds.

 

We also discussed my trip to Spain earlier this year, where Beatlemania lives. At La Tregua nightclub, in Sevilla, I presented the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man, and my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, joined Aida Vílchez, Martín León Soto, and the Nowhere Band, to perform Beatles and original songs for a packed and enthusiastic house. You can watch a video of the event here.

 

In addition, we touched on Lennon's friend and gardener Michael "Tree" Medeiros and his memoir, In Lennon's Garden, that Yoko Ono continues to repress; how information in May Pang's documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, meshes with information in Nowhere Man; and Lennon's fascination with "lucid" or programmed dreams.

 

This was my fourth appearance on SATB. I look forward to a fifth, and after you listen to episode 286 (and perhaps a few others), I hope you'll understand why I think SATB rocks.

______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

...but at least they mention Nowhere Man a lot.

 

I don't know what it is with News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, but in the course of destroying democracy with lies and propaganda, his various publications and Websites cite my John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, more than anybody. They've been doing it since the 1980s, when the book was just a germ of an idea that I'd mentioned to a reporter.

 

Since then Murdoch's scribes have written about Nowhere Man in such places as the New York Post, mentioning it in the same breath as The Catcher in the Rye; in The Wall Street Journal; and on Fox News, as they did the other week. The stories aren't always complimentary and they don't always get their facts right, but it doesn't seem to matter. As long as they spell the title correctly it helps keep the book alive.

 

The recent story that popped up on various Fox News sites, as well as on the Argentine site El Cronista, is about a loft in New York's Soho neighborhood, once owned by Lennon and Yoko Ono, that sold for $5.5 million. The article said that according to Nowhere Man, the Lennons bought the property "around 1980." This is false. I don't specify when they bought it. All I say about the loft is that they allowed their tarot card reader, Charlie Swan, to live there rent free as part of a generous compensation package. This would have been an interesting detail to include in the article. But... whatever.

 

Of course I take issue with Murdoch's grotesque right-wing politics. All I'm saying is that it's hard to feel totally negative about something as malignant as News Corp when they've been so... helpful.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

Dak Mills, an easygoing New Yorker, wanted to talk about all aspects of my life and career on his podcast Comfortable Being Uncomfortable. And I was completely comfortable chatting with him about the three books I've published—Nowhere Man, Beaver Street, and A Brooklyn Memoir—as well as the untitled book I'm writing about an underground student newspaper at City College in the 1970s, as the antiwar movement was giving way to the despair of punk. So Dak and I jump around from the days of free tuition and open admissions, to John Lennon's dairies, to industrialized pornography, to post-traumatic stress disorder in Flatbush in the aftermath of WWII. I even throw in some hard-earned writing advice.

 

Please do give it a listen, either on YouTube (above) or on Spotify, Apple, or iHeart.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

Colombia is one of the many Spanish-speaking countries where readers embraced Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. The book appeared on best-seller lists, and El Heraldo, in Barranquilla—the newspaper where Gabriel García Márquez once worked as a reporter and columnist—ran an excerpt as the cover story in their Sunday magazine supplement.

 

This was back in the mid-2000s, but Colombia's fascination with Nowhere Man continues. The other week, the book came to the attention of a columnist at the first newspaper to publish Márquez, El Espectador, in Bogotá. (I keep mentioning Márquez because the Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias listed Nowhere Man as one of "Five Indispensable Books" along with Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Novelist and poet Luis Fernando Charry's May 4 column is titled "Los últimos días de Lennon
." (You can also access it on MSN.)

 

He starts out talking about the multitude of Lennon biographies and memoirs, including books by Albert Goldman, Philip Norman, Cynthia Lennon, May Pang, and John Green. This is a setup for his impressions of Nowhere Man. I wouldn't agree with all of Charry's interpretations. I don't know why, for example, he finds Lennon's yoga sessions "disturbing" or why he implies that Yoko Ono was a student of yoga (she wasn't). But he does a good job of making the book sound interesting, describing such things as Lennon's paradoxical diet that wavered between health food and sweets; his obsession with his weight; the "miracle" of his son Sean's birth; and how fatherhood had an adverse effect on his career. This being Latin America, he also mentions that the New York Daily News mistakenly reported that Ono worked for the CIA. And he ends, of course, on how Mark David Chapman put an end to the legend.

 

I'll count it as a positive review.

 

Which brings us to the perennial question: Why has Nowhere Man endured for 24 years? The short answer: Because people keep reading it and writing about it. I hope they continue.

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

 

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May Pang's relationship with John Lennon began in 1973 after he separated from Yoko Ono. Eighteen months later, in early 1975, Lennon returned to Ono. Pang's 2023 documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, covers the same ground as her book Loving John, published in 1983. It's not surprising that it took Pang almost 50 years to get the movie version of her story into theatres and onto streaming services. As I've discussed in my book Nowhere Man, in The Village Voice, and elsewhere on this blog, Ono, now 91, uses the threat of legal action to try to control what other people say about Lennon. And she's often successful at repressing stories that go against the official narrative of Lennon as a happy househusband and secular saint. (Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros's unpublished book, In Lennon's Garden, is an especially egregious example.) What Pang went through to make and release The Lost Weekend must be quite a story in itself. That the film exists is a tribute to her tenacity.

 

If you know the story of Pang and Lennon, The Lost Weekend, set in LA and New York, will seem familiar. It's a diary-like collection of still photos of the two of them, some iconic, some taken by Pang; video of Lennon and Ono; video of Pang on various talk shows; recent video of Pang with Lennon's son Julian; and a bit of animation to fill in the gaps. Pang provides the narration and does a nice job of it. The entire film is well done and has garnered a wide array of mostly positive reviews, like the one in Variety.

 

What I found most interesting about The Lost Weekend is that Pang confirms virtually everything I wrote about her relationship with Lennon in Nowhere Man, a book that grew out of my access to diaries the former Beatle kept during the final six years of his life. Lennon's diaries begin in 1975, when he's living with Pang in her apartment on the east side of Manhattan and enjoying himself very much. The diaries confirm that he had deep feelings for Pang and carried a torch for her the rest of his life. They were in love, she says in the film.

 

"John was torn between May and Yoko," I write in Nowhere Man. "He wanted both of them but that was out of the question. May was fun, and pure sexual passion." But Yoko "was survival." May, with some hesitation, talks about their active sex life and mentions that the last time she spoke to John was when he called her from Cape Town, South Africa, a "directional" journey he took in April 1980. This is all detailed in Nowhere Man.

 

One thing May didn't know was that Lennon had learned to program dreams and many of the dreams he programmed were about making love to May. It was often the only way he could be with her after he returned to Yoko.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

The Glass Onion podcast.

 

I always read comments posted about interviews I've done. I find it helpful to get a sense of the vox populi—voice of the people. Though I rarely respond to anything posted in a public forum, I  appreciate positive comments. (Please contact me directly through this website or on Facebook if you'd like me to respond.)

 

The other day I was poking around the Internet and stumbled on an interview I did three years ago with Glass Onion, a podcast devoted to John Lennon. I was surprised that people were still listening to it and had posted a number of comments I hadn't seen. Those comments, I thought, are emblematic of the kind of feedback I've been getting about Nowhere Man since it was published more than 24 years ago.

 

Naturally, there are those who insist on calling me a "con artist" whose only goal was "to profit off of John's death." Their evidence: a discredited hatchet job Yoko Ono's spokesman Elliot Mintz dictated to two Playboy magazine reporters in 1984, in a failed attempt to insure that Nowhere Man would never be published. If you want to know why this libelous work of half-truths and gross distortions has been discredited, please read "An Open Letter" to former Playboy editor G. Barry Golson in the latest edition of Nowhere Man.

 

But as has been the case since 2000, most people like what I've written and said and have commented accordingly. Below is a sampling, edited for clarity, of some of the recent comments posted on Glass Onion's YouTube channel.

 

@stevenrufini3515
Maybe John would have published his memoirs or diaries in some form himself later on! Didn't John not like Elliot Mintz and call him a sycophant? He's always remained loyal, maybe he's paid to be! Robert seems a good guy.

 

@favouritemoon4133
This seems to me to be a seriously under-listened to interview.

 

@keriford54
It'd be a good thing to have John's journals published, I suspect he wouldn't have minded. They were probably his main form of expression for the years he wasn't producing music. I've just ordered Nowhere Man. I like that Rosen used imagination to recreate something he knew was there. I think it is more honest to give an approximation than to remain silent because you can't be sure it's exactly right.

 

@glassoniononjohnlennon6696 [podcast host]
Robert's book is both entertaining and fairly truthful (as much as we can possibly know). It's pretty messy what goes on with the Lennon estate. Have a listen to Robert on Something About The Beatles, an episode about a year ago called "Catch The Kill," all about claiming and reclaiming narratives.

 

@keriford54
@glassoniononjohnlennon6696 Thanks, I listened to that, it was good. I am looking forward to getting his book. I live in New Zealand and it takes about a month for things to arrive. I am currently reading Fred Seaman's book, I understand he's not that well thought of, but I understand that's mainly because of his legal issues with taking the diaries and conflicts with Yoko. The book itself I am finding really interesting and it seems to me to be quite a nuanced portrait. While he doesn't have much love for Yoko I do think that he tries to see things from her perspective. It doesn't feel to me like a character assassination. But the portrait of John is fascinating. John comes across as incredibly intellectually curious, a voracious reader and able to move from anger to humour. For me, the portrait he paints makes John more interesting than the kind of bland popular portrait. It also inspires me to get the John Green book Dakota Days. I had not really previously appreciated that line "The Oracle has spoken, We cast the perfect spell," from "Cleanup Time." I wonder if that line was meant as a humorous dig at McCartney and the spell to keep him from staying at their favourite hotel.

 

And that's how a book endures for 24 years. People keep talking about it. So I guess I did something right.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I arrived in Sevilla, Spain, for my presentation of Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon at La Tregua, I did a lot of rehearsing. My plan was to read in Spanish a brief introduction and then the opening paragraphs of the Siendo Rico chapter, enough to give people a sense of what the book is like. So I read both parts out loud over and over until the Spanish words started to feel comfortable coming out of my mouth.

 

The problem is I don't speak anything resembling fluent Spanish, and though I can make myself understood when necessary, I cannot understand what people are saying, especially when they talk fast. For the Q&A part of the presentation, I was going to need somebody to translate. Martín León Soto and Aida Vílchez made that possible. Martín and Aida had invited me and my wife, singer-songwriter Mary Lyn Maiscott, to come to Sevilla and stay at their house. They organized the event, arranged for publicity, and arranged for the Nowhere Band to join them and Mary Lyn in playing Beatles songs and original music for the second part of the show.

 

Aida was my language coach, Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle—The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain until I got it. A typical session would go like this: "The word is reclusión, not seclusión... You do not pronounce the 'u' in seguir... It's él, not el." And so on. But she was a good teacher, and by the time I took to the stage at La Tregua, though nobody would ever think Spanish was my mother tongue, I felt confident that the audience would understand everything I said.

 

Martín and I had never worked together, but he proved to be an excellent translator for both the audience questions and my answers. I did my best to keep my answers short, and we'd discussed beforehand what to do if I went on too long. "Oh, just slap me across the face," I said. But violence was unnecessary. A comical hand signal drew a laugh from the audience and got me to shut up so he could translate. Click here to see a video of the Martín & Bobby Show. It begins at 6:55.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

If you habla español, then you can understand my interview on El Flexo de Paco Reyero on Canal Sur radio in Sevilla, Spain. I talk about Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. Since I don't speak fluent Spanish (or even close to it), the interview is done NPR style—I say a few words in English and it switches to the Spanish translation. The interview begins at 7:55 and runs for 17 minutes.

 

If you don't speak Spanish and want to learn about Nowhere Man, then please check out any of my other interviews. Most of them are in English. Or read the English edition of the book.

 

Many thanks to Martín León Soto (aka Maleso) for arranging the interview with Paco.

_______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

Antonio Cabral, a Sevilla-based photographer specializing in the culture and architecture of Spain, is best known for directing the photography for a 2016 National Geographic documentary about the restoration of the Fountain of the Lions in the Alhambra, in Granada. In recent years he's worked exclusively as a photographer, shooting mostly in black and white.

 

I met Antonio and his wife, Lorena, when they came to see my Nowhere Man presentation at La Tregua, in Sevilla. They asked if I'd be willing to pose for some photographs. After looking at the artful images on Antonio's website, I said yes and joined them one Saturday afternoon in Plaza de España, an enormous public square in Sevilla's Parque de María Luisa. You might recognize the square's colonnade from a scene in the Star Wars film Attack of the Clones. In the photo below, I'm reading Nowhere Man in the colonnade, and it's behind me in the color photo further down the page.

 

 

"I try to be objective," Antonio said, explaining that his concept of photography is to "see things as they are" but as a "sensitive human being" rather than a machine. He added, "I think that photography is the only language that can be understood throughout the world."

 

Taking photographs involves not only your eyes, but your sense of touch and smell, Antonio said. "Beauty is in everything, in the sublime and in the ordinary," and taking a great picture "has little to do with the things you see and a lot to do with how you look at them."

 

 

Antonio also offered some advice for aspiring photographers: "There are those who think that with a better camera they will be able to take better photos. A better camera won't do anything for you if there's nothing in your head or heart. One becomes a photographer when the camera becomes an extension of oneself. Then creativity with the five senses begins."

_______

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

 

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Why has Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon (Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon) endured for more than 24 years? Because people keep talking about it and writing about it.

 

The book has generated a miraculous amount of media coverage over the decades, in a variety of languages. The most recent example appeared in Diario de Sevilla the day before a Nowhere Man event last month at La Tregua café in that beautiful Spanish city. (Click here for the English translation.)

 

The article, "Nowhere Man, o todo lo que siempre quiso saber acerca de John Lennon" (Nowhere Man, or everything you ever wanted to know about John Lennon), by José Miguel Carrasco, is a retrospective of my career. But José also talks about how the presentation at La Tregua came about with a lot of help from Aida Vílchez and her "partner in life and art," Maleso (Martín León Soto), musicians in the Nowhere Band who performed Beatles and Lennon songs at the café along with my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, who sang some of her own songs, too.

 

Maleso must also be given a huge amount of credit for providing the translation during the Q&A portion of my presentation.

 

José's article certainly got word out about the show. The turnout at La Tregua was fantástico, the most people who've come to any event I've participated in since the Nowhere Man New York City launch party in 2000. And the crowd's enthusiasm for literature and music was electrifying. All I can say is, "We slayed in Sevilla!"

 

But enough talk about the show. If you want to see what it was like and get an idea of why Nowhere Man is the book that refuses to die, there's a video of the complete event. You can watch it here.

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If you couldn't make it to La Tregua, in Sevilla, on January 28, here's a video of the complete show. Martín León Soto provides the translation for my Nowhere Man presentation. Bajo Cuerda, La Tregua's house band, covers a few Beatle tunes. And the Nowhere Band performs the Beatles, John Lennon, and Mary Lyn Maiscott originals. That's Mary Lyn on vocals and guitar; Martín on keyboard, guitar, and vocals; Aida Vílchez on guitar and vocals; Juan Carlos León on guitar, and Jorge Collado on percussion and vocals.

 

Here's the set list:

00:00:50 Grow Old With Me - Aida Vílchez & The Nowhere Band
00:04:05 Oh, My Love - Adelardo Mora
00:07:00 Presentación de Robert Rosen
00:11:12 Lectura
00:14:38 Questions from the audience
00:54:08 Nowhere Man - Bajo Cuerda
00:57:22 Things We Said Today - Bajo Cuerda
01:00:38 And I Love Her - Bajo Cuerda
01:03:43 I'm Losing You - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:08:43 Jezebel - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:13:12 Midnight in California - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:17:48 You Can't Do That - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:21:41 My Cousin Sings Harmony - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:26:20 Now And Then - Mary Lyn Maiscott & The Nowhere Band
01:30:50 If I Fell - The Nowhere Band
01:33:26 One After 909 - The Nowhere Band
01:36:08 (Just Like) Starting Over - The Nowhere Band

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

 

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Hola a todos. Yo soy Robert Rosen. Escribí el libro Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. Ahora estoy en Nueva York pero estaré en Sevilla el 28 de enero en café La Tregua. Voy a leer un poco del libro y responderé preguntas al respecto. Espero verte allí. Aquí un poco del capítulo uno.

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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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

This is my last blog post before Mary Lyn Maiscott and I leave for Sevilla, Spain. There, on January 28 at 7 p.m. (19:00), at La Tregua café, I'll be reading en español from Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon and answering questions (in translation) about the book. Both the Spanish and English editions of Nowhere Man will be available.

 

My presentation will be followed by the Nowhere Band, featuring Mary Lyn and Sevilla locals Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto, and backed by Bajo Cuerda, La Tregua's house band. They will perform Beatles and Lennon covers, original songs by Mary Lyn, and more. I hope you can join us for a memorable evening of literature and music.

 

You can read more about the event here, in la revista Yuzin.

 

If you're unfamiliar with Nowhere Man, here's a link to an interview I did recently with Adam Scull on WPRN Public Radio that does a nice job of summing up both the book and the story behind it.

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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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well...

 

The opening line of Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam" came to mind when I heard about the death of Matthew Flamm the other day. Matt was a good friend whom I didn't know very well but who helped me a lot. The last time I saw him was December 14, 2019, when he and his wife, Diane Keating, came to the New York launch event at the Killarney Rose for my book Bobby in Naziland (since retitled A Brooklyn Memoir). I knew something was wrong when I had a disjointed phone conversation with him several months ago. I couldn't bring myself to ask what it was, and he didn't say. It never occurred to me that he had brain cancer. 

 

Matt was one of the few people I've met in publishing who was in a position to help an author and was willing to do so. He was a writer, poet, and critic who retired a few years ago from his longtime gig as a reporter at Crain's New York Business. I met him over the phone, in 1999, when he was writing "Between the Lines," a column about the book-publishing world, for Entertainment Weekly. This was one of the first Nowhere Man interviews I'd done, and in the course of our conversation he asked what I was currently working on. I told him about Beaver Street, a book about the history of the pornography industry, based in part on my experiences editing men's magazines, as they're euphemistically known. He mentioned that his old college roommate, whom he'd lost touch with, wrote fiction for such magazines. "Do you happen to know David Katz?" he asked.

 

"I worked with David all the time," I said. "He once did a 12-installment porno parody of David Copperfield—you know, a serialization like Dickens."

 

Two things happened next: Matt's item in Entertainment Weekly lit the fuse for the wall-to-wall coverage of Nowhere Man that landed it on bestseller lists. And I began hanging out with Matt, David, and another friend, Neil Wexler, one of the main "characters" in Beaver Street (I call him "Izzy Singer" in the book). We sometimes went to dinner at John's, an Italian joint in the East Village. Matt, David, and Neil were big Godfather fans—Mario Puzo once worked at the magazine publishing company where Neil and I used to work—and John's had that Godfather atmosphere, the kind of place where you half-expected to see somebody get rubbed out over a plate of lasagna.

 

We were eating in John's one night in 2002. Matt had just published in The New York Times a review of W.S. Merwin's poetry collection The Pupil. He wrote that Merwin sounded so worn out it was easy to forget he was once exciting to read.

 

"That was harsh," I said.

 

Echoing Sonny Corleone talking to his consigliere about somebody who had to be whacked, Matt said, "I like the guy. It's not personal. It's strictly business."

 

Later that year, Matt published another piece in the Times that was enormously helpful. As I continued to work on Beaver Street, he wrote a profile of literate writers, including me, who'd toiled in the salt mines of smut. "A Demimonde in Twilight" gave mainstream legitimacy to a topic that many publishers found too taboo to touch (though the Times was too prudish to print the title of my book). In the article Matt also profiled Neil and David, who used a pseudonym.

 

Matt's final work is a book of poetry, Grieving for Beginners, published in October. I was looking forward to reading it and discussing it with Matt. Then I saw the news of his death in "Publisher's Lunch," a daily mailing I get. I only wish I'd picked up his book sooner, because Matt spelled out his situation in a devastating poem, "Night Before Surgery, Lenox Hill." It begins:

 

It could be anything the surgeon said.

In my darkened room, he showed me

on his phone the black-and-white slides

of the mass in my brain.

 

I extend my deepest condolences to Diane and their two daughters, Gabrielle and Allegra.

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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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my  recently launched Threads.

In these first days of 2024, as I prepare to travel to Sevilla, Spain, to read from and answer questions about Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon, at La Tregua café on January 28, I've been thinking about what a miracle Nowhere Man has been. A book that publishers spent 18 years rejecting has now been in print 24 years in a variety of languages, and it's been a life-transforming odyssey. In 1981, when I began writing the book, I was an obscure freelancer. Suffice it to say that's no longer the case.

 

To celebrate my upcoming journey and the book's longevity, and to remind myself that what's happened is real, I've put together the above collection of ten print editions of Nowhere Man. This does not include another half-dozen print and ebook editions with identical covers. I invite you to join me in this celebration and, if possible, come to see me in Spain for a night of literature and music featuring the Nowhere Band: Mary Lyn Maiscott,  Aida Vílchez, and Martín León Soto.

 

Till then, happy New Year and ¡Feliz año nuevo!

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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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my  recently launched Threads.

 

 

Here's another reminder of the many talents of Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto, who will be our hosts on January 28 when Mary Lyn Maiscott and I travel to Sevilla, Spain, and appear with Aida and Martín at La Tregua café for an evening of literature and music. I'll be reading from the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon and answering questions about the book. Mary Lyn will be singing Beatles covers, her own songs, and more with Aida and Martín, backed by La Tregua's house band.

 

In the above video, created with AI, CapCut, and a homemade green screen, Aida takes over for Diane Keaton in a scene with Woody Allen from Annie Hall, dubbed in Spanish. Who said you can't improve on a classic?

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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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my just-launched Threads.

 

Aida Vílchez and Martín León Soto will be our hosts when Mary Lyn Maiscott and I travel to Sevilla, Spain, next month for a January 28 show at La Tregua café. I'll be reading from the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man and answering questions about the book. Mary Lyn will be singing Beatles covers, her own songs, and more with Aida and Martín, backed by La Tregua's house band.

 

As I learned recently, Aida's and Martín's talents go far beyond the musical. With a little help from AI, CapCut, and a homemade green screen, here's Aida, in the role of Yoko Ono, sitting in with John Lennon for a few bars of "Imagine." Stay with it till the end of this transcendent 42 seconds.

 _______

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 or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my just-launched Threads.