Mintz begins at a dark moment, when, soon after Lennon was killed, he is charged with inventorying the musician\u2019s countless possessions: roomfuls of guitars, the attach\u00e9 cases with which he was smitten, boxes of cassettes and their works in progress, granny glasses \u201cin a rainbow of tinted colors.\u201d He came into this responsibility circuitously. As a Los Angeles disc jockey, he listened to a promo of Ono\u2019s 1971 solo album Fly and invited her to be an on-air guest. She agreed. Interestingly, Mintz writes, although he was well aware of her marriage to Lennon, \u201cI was never a Beatles superfan.\u201d Instead, he adds, he was more of an Elvis freak, which didn\u2019t necessarily serve him well when, after Ono began to call him at all hours, Lennon did, too. \u201cIt was a never-ending loop,\u201d he writes, an eccentric conversation that often found him wondering why it was he on the other end. There\u2019s no brutal dish of the Albert Goldman trash-the-star variety, though Mintz doesn\u2019t shy from the dark side: Lennon, he writes, could be a monster when he was drinking, and he harbored odd views: \u201cEven though John had smoked, ingested, or snorted just about every illegal recreational drug he could get his hands on, he was weirdly suspicious of the ones that were properly prescribed and proven efficacious.\u201d As for Ono, she\u2019s alternately remote and generous, instinctively mistrustful\u2014and for good reason\u2014of anyone who wanted a piece of her husband, as so many did. All in all, he writes, \u201cthey were a magical couple,\u201d and it\u2019s clear that all these years later, he misses them.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mintz begins at a dark moment, when, soon after Lennon was killed, he is charged with inventorying the musician\u2019s countless possessions: roomfuls of guitars, the attach\u00e9 cases with which he was smitten, boxes of cassettes and their works in progress, granny glasses \u201cin a rainbow of tinted colors.\u201d He came into this responsibility circuitously. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}