In August 1980, after five years away from making records, John Lennon booked a studio on West 48th Street under his accountant’s name. The musicians he hired never learned who they would be playing for. Over ten weeks, Double Fantasy at The Hit Factory became the last album he finished — and he chose that studio precisely because nobody would think to look for him there.
Music History | The Miami News
The building at 353 West 48th Street had one great virtue in the summer of 1980: it was boring.
It sat far west, toward Tenth Avenue, in a stretch of Manhattan that nobody photographed. The studio occupied the sixth floor, and you reached it by a private elevator that ran on a key. There was no lobby to loiter in, and no reason for anyone to loiter there.
Jack Douglas picked it for exactly that reason. He was about to produce a comeback record for the most recognizable musician alive, and the one thing his artist could not survive was an audience watching him try.
Five Years Off
Sean Lennon arrived in October 1975, and his father effectively stopped.
No albums. No tours. No sessions beyond the occasional cassette demo made in the apartment at the Dakota. For five years the most famous songwriter of his generation baked bread, raised a child, and let the industry assume he was finished. Some of that was deliberate. The rest, by his own later account, came down to having nothing he wanted to say badly enough to go through the machinery of saying it.
Then two things broke the silence in 1980. First, Paul McCartney released a single called “Coming Up,” which Lennon heard and could not stop hearing.
Second, a storm caught him in the Atlantic.
Six Hours at the Helm
In June 1980, Lennon sailed from Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda on a 43-foot schooner. Partway across, the boat hit heavy weather. The crew went down — exhausted, seasick, useless — and Lennon, who was not a sailor, took the wheel and held it alone for roughly six hours.
He came off that boat changed, describing himself afterward as “tuned in to the cosmos” and saying the songs simply arrived.
Meanwhile, in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, he found a freesia carrying the name double fantasy. It struck him as a description of his marriage, so he took it.
By the time he flew home he had most of an album. So did Yoko Ono, who had been writing in parallel, and who had recently heard her husband point out that the B-52’s were doing in public what she had been doing for fifteen years. Instead of a solo return, they built one record out of both halves, alternating tracks — a conversation between two people.
Booked Under Someone Else’s Name
The sessions began on August 7, 1980, and ran until October 19.
Douglas booked them under the name Rich DePalma, Lennon’s accountant. No label had signed on; in fact no deal existed at all, which was precisely the point. Douglas has said the secrecy was Lennon’s condition: he did not want the press making a fool of him, and if word got out, the project would simply stop.
Read that again, because it is the part people skip. Double Fantasy at The Hit Factory came from a man who had arranged, in advance, a way to quietly abandon it.
He was not sure anyone still wanted him. At 39, after five years away — and five years in 1980 was a very long time — that doubt was not unreasonable.
The Hit Factory, which Ed Germano had bought from songwriter Jerry Ragovoy five years earlier and was steadily building into an institution, gave him the one thing money could not usually buy in Manhattan: nobody watching.
Making Double Fantasy at The Hit Factory
Douglas assembled the band without telling them whose record it was.
Hugh McCracken and Earl Slick on guitars. Tony Levin on bass. Andy Newmark on drums. George Small on keyboards. Arthur Jenkins Jr. on percussion. Members of Cheap Trick passed through early on, although studio players later re-cut those parts.
Slick turned up early one day and found Lennon alone in the room. Lennon greeted him as though they were old colleagues, insisting they had crossed paths on David Bowie sessions years before. Slick was fairly sure they hadn’t. It didn’t matter. That was the introduction.
Lee DeCarlo engineered. Lennon and Ono produced alongside Douglas, and mostly worked apart — Ono preferring that her husband stay out of the room while she shaped her side of the record.
What comes through on the tapes is a man enjoying himself. “(Just Like) Starting Over” is a rockabilly pastiche with a wink in it. “Watching the Wheels” is the closest thing he wrote to a defense of the five years off. “Woman” is an apology and a love song at once.
None of it sounds like a man auditioning.
The Deal, and the Reviews
Once the record was done, their publicist let the news slip, and the offers came fast.
They signed with Geffen Records on September 22, 1980. David Geffen had done one thing none of his competitors thought to do: he approached Yoko Ono first, and treated her half of the album as equal to Lennon’s. He signed them without hearing a finished track.
Double Fantasy came out on November 17, 1980.
The reviews were not kind. Critics found the domestic contentment cloying and said so. The general complaint: a happy marriage makes a poor record, and the two of them had overestimated how much strangers cared about theirs. Sales moved slowly, and “(Just Like) Starting Over” stalled at No. 8 in Britain. Robert Christgau was among the few who defended it, and even he was gentler about the music than about the words.
December
Three weeks after release, on the evening of December 8, 1980, a gunman shot and killed Lennon outside the Dakota.
One correction belongs here, because the error repeats constantly: his final session that day did not happen at The Hit Factory. He and Ono spent that evening at Record Plant, mixing her song “Walking on Thin Ice.” They left around half past ten and reached home minutes later.
Afterward, the album he had been unsure anyone wanted climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for eight weeks. In 1982 it won the Grammy for Album of the Year, an award Lennon, Ono and Douglas shared.
Those sessions had yielded far more than one record’s worth of material. Ono assembled the rest and released it in 1984 as Milk and Honey.
What the Room Was For
Writers usually describe studios in terms of consoles and microphones and the mystique of a live room. Sometimes, though, what a studio provides is much simpler.
The Hit Factory gave John Lennon ten weeks of not being John Lennon — a fake name on the booking sheet, a key-operated elevator, a block nobody had reason to walk down. He used them to find out whether he still wanted to make records.
He did. In the end, that is what Double Fantasy at The Hit Factory really was, underneath the reviews and everything that followed: the sound of somebody deciding to come back.
The Hit Factory left 48th Street in 1981, the year after these sessions, and moved to Broadway and 54th. The full history of the studio — and how the name ended up on a building in North Miami — is here.
