The morning after John Lennon was assassinated outside of his New York City apartment, former Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney gave a surprisingly terse interview.
McCartney ended the minute-long interview about his lifelong friend and Beatles bandmate by saying, “Drag isn’t it? OK, cheers. Bye-bye.”
Nearly half a century later, the son of Lennon and Yoko Ono has responded to McCartney’s “robotic” reaction.
In a new documentary about the decade between the Beatles’ breakup and Lennon’s death, Sean Ono Lennon came to the rock star’s defense.
“I always notice the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice. Really felt like someone who was unable to process what was going on,” Sean, 50, says in Man on the Run.
“He just seemed almost robotic, which I think some people took possibly as coldness, but I never took it as that, ‘cause I understood even then what it was like when something that terrible happens,” he added.
Sean was just five years old when his father was murdered. He is now 10 years older than his father was at the time of his death.
McCartney’s terse reaction was heavily scrutinized as the ex-Beatles bandmates had been allegedly feuding for the decade following the band’s dissolution. In a later TV interview, McCartney explained his cold remarks.
“I had plenty of sort of personal grief, but I’m not very good at kind of public grief,” McCartney said. “All I could muster was like, ‘It’s a drag,’ and it was like I couldn’t say anything else, I just couldn’t.”
In the documentary, McCartney’s daughter, Stella, recalled the exact moment he got the phone call notifying him of Lennon’s death.
“I remember that moment. I remember the phone ringing. I remember some, the biggest reaction I’d ever seen, and him leaving the kitchen and going outside,” the fashion designer, 54, says. “That was heartbreaking, like truly heartbreaking.”
Sean continued to say that his father’s bond with McCartney remained strong up until his untimely death. In their home, Sean says, Lennon would often play McCartney’s self-titled 1970 album.
The documentary’s director, Morgan Neville, said that throughout the decade, Lennon and McCartney remained musical inspirations to one another.
“John had told people that he was looking forward to playing things with Paul, and had definitely thought about it,” Neville, 58, told the Daily Beast. “Part of why John went back in the studio to do Double Fantasy was having heard Paul’s McCartney II and ‘Coming Up’ and that song and being spurred on by it.”
Both Sean and Neville agreed that Lennon’s death was a turning point in McCartney’s life.
“When the Beatles broke up, he had to grow up, but in a way I feel like my dad passing was probably the real growing up moment,” Sean says in the film. “They had a once-in-a-millennium chemistry that I don’t think we’re likely to see again.”
On Obsessed: The Podcast, Neville said that Lennon’s death had a freeing effect on McCartney.
“If you look at what happens, Paul never records with Wings again. They break up. He starts recording as Paul McCartney for the rest of his entire career,” the Oscar-winning documentarian said. “Suddenly, he’s like, ‘Okay, I can be a Beatle, and I can be a Wing, and I can be Paul, and I can embrace all of my history. I don’t have to kind of cordon off part of it.’”
Man on the Run is in theaters on February 19 and February 22. The film features archival footage from the decade leading up to Lennon’s death, along with interviews with McCartney, Lennon, and others. It will stream on Amazon Prime starting February 27.
