Lennon's Lost Weekend

As many of you know, the late lamented John Lennon (my favorite Beatle) hid out for weeks at a time at friend Harry Nilsson's Ojai home during his infamous "Lost Weekend," which lasted from late 1973 to 1975. That was after Yoko kicked him out of their New York house and set him loose with their personal assistant, May Pang. He took up with Nilsson's crowd, who dubbed themselves the "Hollywood Vampires," and terrorized the city for months.

My favorite story from that year is that Lennon was at a Los Angeles restaurant and was acting out-of-control like the pathological narcissistic hedonist that he could become, prancing about with a salad bowl on his head. A waitress gave him a disapproving glance, and he shot back with that timeless line of d-bags everywhere, "Do you know who I am?" She replied, on beat, "Yes, you're an asshole."

Not always. But he could be. He was a work in progress, one of the greatest talents of this century, or any other for that matter, part of a crew of cheeky lads from Liverpool who blended and blurred and stirred together music from wherever they could find it into one shining stream of sound that will echo throughout the centuries. The Beatles - we will never see their like again.

Imagine what he could have become had he not been felled outside the Dakota Hotel on that dark day in 1980, a victim of his fame. Well, I'll let John speak for himself about what might have been: