(Note: The clip above is the first of six parts. Hear the remain­ing parts here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

John Lennon’s last days were filled with pro­fes­sion­al and domes­tic rou­tines char­ac­ter­is­tic of both a typ­i­cal wealthy New York­er and a leg­endary rock star and activist: mak­ing break­fast and watch­ing Sesame Street with his son Sean, going on epic shop­ping sprees, spend­ing late nights in the stu­dio, stag­ing demon­stra­tions, argu­ing with his ret­inue of ser­vants and hang­ers-on. After five years in semi-retire­ment, or “siege­like retreat,” spent rais­ing Sean, John Lennon seemed ready to emerge from seclu­sion and renew his career. On his final day, Decem­ber 8, 1980, he was feel­ing hope­ful about his cre­ative future. He had just learned that his album with Yoko, Dou­ble Fan­ta­sy, had gone gold, and he and Yoko were engaged in pro­mo­tion, and were look­ing for­ward to their next musi­cal endeav­or.

That morn­ing, Annie Lei­bovitz and her assis­tant came to the Lennon’s apart­ment build­ing, The Dako­ta, to shoot those now icon­ic pho­tographs for Rolling Stone of the Lennons in bed. Mean­while, a devot­ed fan named Paul Gore­sh, and Lennon’s mur­der­er Mark David Chap­man, start­ed to hang around out­side the build­ing. Less than two hours lat­er, a crew from San Francisco’s RKO radio arrived at The Dako­ta to inter­view John and Yoko. Inter­view­er Dave Sholin remem­bers meet­ing Lennon, who was get­ting dressed after the nude pho­to shoot: “the door opens and John jumps in with his arms extend­ed, like ‘here I am folks!’ We were meet­ing John Lennon and we were all maybe a lit­tle ner­vous but that just put us right at ease in prob­a­bly less than a minute.” “He was a reg­u­lar guy, very, very sharp and extreme­ly quick wit­ted,” Sholin con­tin­ued. “And he con­nect­ed with all of us. He had been out of the pub­lic eye for five years and he was open to speak­ing about any­thing. He did not hold back.”

You can hear that inter­view, in six parts, above, and read a tran­script here at Bea­t­les Archive. John and Yoko talk in great detail about Dou­ble Fan­ta­sy, about par­ent­ing, about meet­ing, falling in love, and work­ing togeth­er. Lennon also talks about his social vision and the need for “holis­tic” solu­tions to “stop this para­noia of 90-year old men play­ing macho games with the world and pos­si­bly the galaxy.” Notably, he offers his assess­ment of the cul­tur­al shifts from the six­ties through the sev­en­ties.

The bit about the six­ties we were all full of hope and then every­body got depressed and the sev­en­ties were ter­ri­ble – that atti­tude that every­body has; that the six­ties was there­fore negat­ed for being naïve and dumb. And the sev­en­ties is real­ly where it’s at, which means, you know, putting make­up on and danc­ing in the dis­co – which was fine for the sev­en­ties – but I don’t negate the six­ties. I don’t negate the sev­en­ties. The … the seeds that were plant­ed in the six­ties – and pos­si­bly they were plant­ed gen­er­a­tions before – but the seed… what­ev­er hap­pened in the six­ties the… the flow­er­ing of that is in the fem­i­nist, fem­i­niza­tion of soci­ety. The med­i­ta­tion, the pos­i­tive learn­ing that peo­ple are doing in all walks of life. That is a direct result of the open­ing up of the six­ties. Now, maybe in the six­ties we were naïve and like chil­dren every­body went back to their room and said, ‘Well, we didn’t get a won­der­ful world of just flow­ers and peace and hap­py choco­late and, and, and it wasn’t just pret­ty and beau­ti­ful all the time’ and that’s what every­body did, ‘we didn’t get every­thing we want­ed’ just like babies and every­body went back to their rooms and sulked. And we’re just gonna play rock and roll and not do any­thing else . We’re gonna stay in our rooms and the world is a nasty, hor­ri­ble place ’cause it didn’t give us every­thing we cried for’, right? Cryin’ for it wasn’t enough. The thing the six­ties did was show us the pos­si­bil­i­ty and the respon­si­bil­i­ty that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the pos­si­bil­i­ty, and the sev­en­ties every­body gone ‘Nya, nya, nya, nya’. And pos­si­bly in the eight­ies everybody’ll say, ‘Well, ok, let’s project the pos­i­tive side of life again’, you know? The world’s been goin’ on a long time, right? It’s prob­a­bly gonna go on a long time… ”

After the inter­view, Sholin board­ed a plane back to San Fran­cis­co, and John and Yoko went back to work, meet­ing with pro­duc­er Jack Dou­glas. When they returned home that night, they found Mark David Chap­man still wait­ing out­side The Dako­ta with his .38. At 11:15 that night, Lennon was pro­nounced dead at Roo­sevelt Hos­pi­tal. Sholin tells the sto­ry in a lengthy intro to the inter­view above. You can also lis­ten to a stream­lined ver­sion of the inter­view with­out the intro below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What We Heard 34 Years Ago on the Night John Lennon Was Shot: TV & Radio

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam Protests

Down­load the John Lennon/Yoko Ono “War is Over (If You Want It)” Poster in 100+ Lan­guages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, Jimi Hen­drix spent sev­er­al years as a jour­ney­man gui­tarist, play­ing the ear­ly rock ‘n’ roll cir­cuit with stars like Wil­son Pick­ett and Lit­tle Richard, before he final­ly came into his own. One point in his career, writes the Dai­ly Beast, found him “on the bad side of a hor­ri­ble record­ing con­tract” with “noto­ri­ous­ly shady label own­er and pro­duc­er” Ed Chalpin of RSVP Records. This was dur­ing his tenure with a group called Cur­tis Knight & The Squires, many of whose record­ings end­ed up “locked in lit­i­ga­tion for years, a peri­od that stretched to decades.”

Now that these tracks have been acquired by the Hen­drix-fam­i­ly run com­pa­ny Expe­ri­ence Hen­drix, they can final­ly be heard for the first time. Soon to be released as part of the com­pi­la­tion You Can’t Use My Name: Cur­tis Knight & The Squires (Fea­tur­ing Jimi Hen­drix), the instru­men­tal above, “Sta­tion Break”—unlike so many oth­er sup­pos­ed­ly “new” Hen­drix releases—has nev­er appeared before in any oth­er ver­sion. It’s not a Hen­drix com­po­si­tion, but it’s his gui­tar, restrained in some fair­ly stan­dard R&B licks.

“What makes [the record­ings] so spe­cial” on the new com­pi­la­tion album, says Hendrix’s sis­ter Janie, “is that they pro­vide an hon­est look at a great artist dur­ing a piv­otal time when he was on the cusp of his break­through.” Though Hen­drix may seem to have descend­ed from out­er space, he actu­al­ly honed his skills in groups like the Squires, before Ani­mals bassist Chas Chan­dler dis­cov­ered him and brought him to the UK. These ear­ly R&B releas­es “rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment in the time­line of Jimi’s musi­cal exis­tence.” They may not be as mind-blow­ing as, say, the psy­che­del­ic riffs in “Third Stone From the Sun,” but they show us an incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed gui­tarist at work, strain­ing to break free of a pop tem­plate and ven­ture into musi­cal realms unchart­ed.

via The Dai­ly Beast,

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hendrix’s Final Inter­view on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1970: Lis­ten to the Com­plete Audio

Jimi Hen­drix at Wood­stock: The Com­plete Per­for­mance in Video & Audio (1969)

Pre­vi­ous­ly Unre­leased Jimi Hen­drix Record­ing, “Some­where,” with Bud­dy Miles and Stephen Stills

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness