thFLASHBACK
ANNIVERSARY22 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com September, 2017O
n december 8th, 1980, annie leibovitz
arrived at the New York apartment building of
John Lennon and Yoko Ono to photograph the
couple for a cover of Rolling Stone. She urged
them both to take their clothes off , a fl ashback
to their fi rst Rolling Stone cover, in 1968,
when they appeared naked
to promote their Tw o V i r g i n s
album. Ono declined, but Len-
non was game, and stripped
down before getting on the
fl oor near their bed and curl-
ing up in a fetal position next
to the woman he called “Moth-
er”. “I remember peeling the Po-
laroid and him looking at it and
saying, ‘This is it. This is our re-
lationship’,” Leibovitz recalled.
Hours later, Lennon was shot
dead in front of the building.
The image (which in 2005 was
voted the best magazine cover
of the previous 40 years by the
American Society of Magazine
Editors) appeared on the cover
of Rolling Stone’s Januar y 22nd,
1981, issue. It was the heartbreak-
ing end of a 13-year relationship be-
tween Lennon and the magazine.
In his Rolling Stone interviews
over the years, Lennon was star-
tlingly open. He explained the Bea-
tles’ breakup to the world, fought
Richard Nixon’s attempts to deport
him, shared the stories behind his
songs, and talked about everything
from his macrobiotic diet to primal-
scream therapy. In Rolling Stone,
Lennon saw a magazine that shared
his passions and his worldview; in
turn, he shined a light on the young
magazine. “John, more purely than anybody else at the time,
symbolised rock & roll,” says Rolling Stone editor and pub-
lisher Jann S. Wenner. “He was the most natural heir to Elvis. Ev-
erything he and Yoko did to support Rolling Stone added a lit-
tle of their lustre. It gave us credibility and authority.”
The relationship started with Rolling Stone’s fi rst issue.
When Wenner needed an image for the cover of RS 1 (Novem-ber 9th, 1967), he saw a publicit y shot of Lennon as Private Grip-
weed in Richard Lester’s fi lm How I Won the War. “It was a day
before deadline,” says Wenner. “This was the best thing we had
on hand. It was incredibly fortuitous, symbolic and prophetic of
the future.”
A year later, Wenner heard record stores were selling Tw o V i r -
gins in a plain brown wrapper, since Lennon and Ono appeared
naked on the album’s cover. Rolling Stone editor emeritus
Ralph Gleason suggested the magazine contact Beatles publi-
cist Derek Taylor and ask to see
the images in full. “They said OK
and sent it over,” says Wenner. “It
was as simple as that.”
The cover – accompanied by
an interview by Jonathan Cott –
caused a national scandal. Featur-
ing Lennon and Ono naked from
behind (the full-frontal shots were
inside), it hit newsstands on No-
vember 23rd, 1968. A New Jersey
postmaster general stopped issues
from going to East Coast subscrib-
ers. One San Francisco newsstand
employee was arrested for selling
obscene material. (nude beat-
le perils s.f., declared a San
Francisco Chronicle headline
soon after.) Wenner was exu-
berant. “The point is this,” he
wrote in the next issue. “Print a
famous foreskin and the world
will beat a path to your door.”
Lennon realised Rolling
Stone was the perfect medium
for communicating with his
fans. He wrote an account of
the chaos that surrounded the
proposed 1970 Toronto Peace
Festival, and when Lennon and
Ono staged their “Bed-in for
Peace” in Montreal in 1969,
Rolling Stone writer Ritchie Yorke was by their side. “It was
the early days of John and Yoko together, and John was anxious
to make his own statement,” recalled Yorke, who died in Febru-
ary. “I was very impressed by what he was trying to say.”
A year after the Bed-in, Lennon and Ono went to Califor-
nia to study primal-scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov. They
decided to stop by the Rolling Stone offi ce, a tiny loft spaceJohn Lennon was the ‘North Star’ for ‘Rolling Stone’ since
the magazine’s earliest days, and his interviews in these
pages made news around the worldLennon Revealed
Four of Lennon s
covers; the image on
the January 22nd, 1981,
issue (right) was taken
the day he died.