http://www.rimonthly.com/Rhode-Island-Monthly/June-2010/There-039s-No-Place-Like-Nowhere/
Thirty years ago this month, John Lennon left Newport on a small boat
headed for Bermuda. He hoped the five-day voyage would unlock his
musical writer's block. It turned out to be the ride of his life.
By Brian R. San Souci
June 2010
As the Megan Jaye sailed into St. George's Harbour in Hamilton,
Bermuda, one of the passengers scrawled in the guest log, "Dear
Megan, There's no place like nowhere." The forty-three-foot Hinckley
centerboard sloop, lovingly named Megan Jaye after her owner's
daughter, had safely arrived after a seven-day journey from Newport,
Rhode Island, with precious cargo. The dedication continued with a
fond thank you to the yacht's captain, Hank Halsted, complete with
the writer's trademark caricature self-portrait and a sketch of the
Megan Jaye sailing into the sunset. It was signed "love, John Lennon."
Only days before, the small vessel had been clobbered by waves driven
by gale force winds, pitching it from side to side and up and down,
one moment surrounded by twenty-foot seas, the next by sky. Strapped
to the cockpit rails, Lennon, the novice helmsman, clung terrified to
the wheel for dear life. The waves pounded over the bow of the boat
and into the cockpit, knocking him to his knees and prompting him to
scream back, "Take me away, God. I don't give a shit."
Despite his fame and fortune, he was facing the perils of a life and
death situation, with no one to do it for him. Lennon found himself
vulnerable, and solely responsible not only for his own life, but
also the lives of his crewmates.
With his shoulder length hair tied back in a samurai bun, and the sea
and wind thrashing his face, his courage gradually rose along with
the menacing sea before him. Staying the course, he shouted back at
the sea, singing old sea chanteys and sailor songs he had heard as a
boy in Liverpool.
Surely, "There's no place like nowhere" was not his primary thought
when the former Beatle reluctantly took the helm in the midst of the
powerful mid-Atlantic storm. Nor was sailing the tension-relieving
experience he remembered while learning his way around his own
fourteen-foot sailboat, Isis, on Long Island Sound. Regardless of his
feelings at the time, though, John Lennon arrived in Bermuda a
different man from the one who left Murphy's Dock in Newport.
Lennon himself claimed that the experience at sea was one of the most
important events of his life, a catalyst that inspired him to rise
above his writer's block and compose what would become his last
material. And the one-of-a-kind signed guest log, a symbolic souvenir
of that experience, would find a place in rock 'n' roll history.
Nearly thirty years later, the Megan Jaye's captain, Hank Halsted, is
modest about his role in rock 'n' roll history. Halsted is a
principal of Northrop and Johnson's Newport office, one of the
largest yacht brokerages in the world. He was the president of the
Yacht Architects and Brokers Association, and founding member of the
International Yacht Council. He has also authored more than a hundred
articles on boat handling and seamanship and has captained or
navigated in dozens of Newport-to-Bermuda races and regattas, winning several.
Back in his twenties, he ran a drug clinic in Colorado and promoted
concerts for the Allman Brothers Band and Big Brother and the Holding
Company; just before he turned thirty he returned to his calling,
sailing the world visiting exotic places. Because of his love for
sailing, he would eventually cross paths with one of rock 'n' roll's
greatest legends.
While Halsted was sailing about the world, Lennon was burning out
from the pressures of recording and his immigration hassles with the
U.S. government. With all his troubles, the exhausted Lennon was in
desperate need of a break. After the birth of his son, Sean, in late
1975, and through the spring of 1980, he did just that. For many, it
seemed as if Lennon had fallen off the face of the earth. His
self-imposed hiatus had cast him into a reclusive lifestyle hidden
away in his Dakota apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, causing
many Beatles fans to wonder what had happened and if they'd ever hear
from him again.
He told an L.A. Times reporter, "Making music was no longer a joy.
For twenty years, I had been under this pressure to produce, produce,
produce. My head was cluttered. Every time I'd sit down to write,
there would be a cloud between me and the source, a cloud that hadn't
been there before. I was trapped and saw no way out."
Except for an occasional mention in the newspaper, there didn't
appear to be much happening with Lennon. In February 1978, he
purchased nearly one thousand acres of land in upstate New York,
intending to raise registered Holstein dairy cows. Later, one of his
Holsteins fetched a record-breaking $265,000 at the New York State
Fair. And in 1979, he reportedly donated $1,000 to the New York
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to outfit policemen with
bulletproof vests. Apart from that, Lennon spent the better part of
five years watching TV, baking bread, reading countless books and
newspapers, and writing song fragments that he was never inspired to
finish. But above all, and most importantly, he spent time raising
Sean while his wife, Yoko Ono, engineered all of the high-powered
business and investment deals.
In the spring of 1980, after having recently acquired a waterfront
home in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island's north shore, Lennon
confided to his assistant, Fred Seaman, that he wanted to fulfill a
lifelong dream. "All my life I've been dreaming of having my own
boat," he told Seaman. "I can't wait to learn how to sail!"
Lennon's fascination with the sea began during his childhood days in
Liverpool. Roaming the docks, he wondered whether his father, a
merchant seaman, was aboard one of the returning ships. Lennon
confessed to Seaman that he became distraught whenever his father was
absent. To ease his pain, he thought of the exotic places the ships
had been, or imagined himself a stowaway to escape whatever misery he
was facing at home or school. Sometimes he got an overpowering urge
to sneak aboard a ship, but in the end he was always afraid of the
unknown and never followed through on his impulses.
In late April 1980, Lennon dispatched Seaman to acquire "a one-sail
sailboat, i.e. the 'dumbest' and simplest." On Lennon's behalf,
Seaman bought a fourteen-foot, single-sail boat from Tyler Coneys of
Coneys Marine, a family-owned and operated marina in Huntington, New
York. Coneys spent a good part of May showing Lennon the ropes on
handling his new prize.
Lennon named the sailboat Isis after the Egyptian goddess of
fertility, and after his and Yoko's passion for Egyptian art. After
mastering the piloting of the Isis around Long Island Sound, he was
ready for a longer excursion. He quickly assigned Coneys the task of
making arrangements. However, as many of the Lennons' business and
personal decisions were reportedly guided by the stars and similar
methods of predicting the future, they consulted their
directionalist, Takashi Yoshikawa, the world's foremost authority on
the Ki. The Ki, an ancient Chinese divination system, holds that life
is determined by a combination of three hidden energies: earthly,
heavenly and human. Yoshikawa suggested that for Lennon to escape the
clouds that were casting a shadow over his life and his creativity,
the only direction that he could safely sail to undergo his psychic
healing was southeast. In his case, that meant Bermuda. Lennon
boarded a chartered twin engine Cessna airplane with his crew and
departed for Newport to meet Hank Halsted, the Megan Jaye, and his
appointment with destiny.
"I had just got back from an extended trip from the Caribbean, when
my charter agent, Paul McCaffrey, asked me to sail four New Yorkers
to Bermuda," Halsted recalls. "The last thing I felt like doing was
going right back out to sea."
Nevertheless, he agreed.
Halsted wasn't aware of his principal passenger's identity. "I went
the better part of the day as I readied the Megan Jaye for departure
before recognizing him. I said to McCaffrey, 'What would you say if I
told you that I think I have John Lennon on my boat?' McCaffrey
replied, 'You're full of shit.' "
On June 4, 1980, the Megan Jaye and its crew departed from Murphy's
dock, now the site of the Newport Yachting Center on the edge of
Newport harbor. "John and I hit it off immediately, striking up a
great rapport," Halsted says. "Our conversations were like a
ping-pong of the minds."
They talked about anything and everything, one topic fueling another.
Being closer in age, Halsted says they had more in common than with
the other crewmates. They'd both experimented with the same
psychedelics during the sixties, and they realized they were on the
same wavelength. Halsted asked Lennon about his self-imposed
retirement: "You affected millions of people all over the world. How
are you going to follow that up?" John replied, "I'm going to raise my son."
The voyage was to take five days and cover about 650 miles across the
Atlantic Ocean, past stormy Cape Hatteras and right into the
notorious Bermuda Triangle. Initially, the seas were calm, but by the
third day into the voyage a powerful mid-Atlantic storm befell them.
With twenty-foot waves and winds approaching sixty-five miles per
hour, the small vessel took a serious pounding. As the storm
continued, each of the experienced crew succumbed to seasickness,
leaving only Halsted at the wheel and Lennon in the galley. Halsted
remained at the helm for more than two days. "It was a serious storm,
a situation where you had to know what you were doing," Halsted says.
Sailboats have a protective covering called a dodger to shield the
helmsman from the elements when at sea. Typically, a dodger has
stainless steel support arms and zip out windows. "During the storm
the stainless steel dodger surrounding the hatch was flattened by a
wave," he says. "It was the only time I had ever seen it happen."
Exhaustion finally got the better of him. With no one left to pilot
the sailboat, Halsted was forced to recruit the inexperienced Lennon.
Why, in so severe a storm, would he put the lives of everyone at risk
by leaving the responsibility to such a novice sailor?
"I never intended for John to sail the boat alone," Halsted says. "He
would only sail with one of the experienced crew beside him, never
alone. His duties were in the galley, where he was responsible for
preparing all of the food. He came aboard knowing he would only be
learning, an observer. He never wrote anything down, just saying that
he would remember the experience."
"But I had been up for nearly three days. I had a situation where I
felt it was necessary that someone else take the helm. The others
couldn't do it; they were too ill. The Megan Jaye didn't have an
autopilot on board at that time. The captain's station and bunk below
are only a few feet away. I could have been at his side in seconds
had anything gone wrong. Being on the boat, you sleep lightly."
Halsted spent an hour keeping a watchful eye over his frightened
protege, then went below to sleep, leaving Lennon alone at the helm.
As Lennon told Playboy a few months later: "So, I was there driving
the boat for six hours, keeping it on course. I was buried under
water. I was smashed in the face by waves for six solid hours. It
won't go away. You can't change your mind. It's like being on stage;
once you're on there's no gettin' off. A couple of the waves had me
on my knees. I was just hanging on with my hands on the wheel it's
very powerful weather and I was having the time of my life. I was
screaming sea chanteys and shoutin' at the gods! I felt like the
Viking, you know, Jason and the Golden Fleece. I arrived in Bermuda.
Once I got there, I was so centered after the experience at sea that
I was tuned in, or whatever, to the cosmos. And all these songs came!
The time there was amazing. Fred [Seaman] and Sean and I were there
on the beach taping songs with this big machine and me just playing
guitar and singing. We were just in the sun and these songs were coming out."
When Halsted went back up on deck hours later he saw a changed man.
"To see John so filled with life was amazing. To see him so alive and
to have watched the change in him was truly a wonderful experience."
Lennon continued to accept new challenges for the remainder of the
voyage. He helped Halsted repair a torn sail while the Megan Jaye
coasted without sails for a day. "John was completely into this
primal experience, where I had him heat a marlinspike on the stove
until it was red-hot," Halsted recalls. "He would then pass it up to
me, where I would burn a hole in the sail causing it to wick so that
a rope could be passed through without the sail unraveling from the
tension of the rope. We did this for hours and he was completely into it."
Once in Bermuda, Lennon's assistant, Seaman, immediately noticed the
change in his boss. In his book, he recalls how Lennon talked
enthusiastically about his sailing trip and how he had survived due
to his own strength and courage. "You can't imagine what it's like
when you look around and all you see is water and sky. You feel both
isolated and in communication with the almighty whatever. It's an
overwhelming sensation of freedom."
Stephen Fuller, the current owner of the Megan Jaye (now named
Jubilee), understands what Lennon meant. "Sailing has this impact.
Having sailed almost 40,000 miles on the open ocean, I can attest to
the transformative effects that occur from the challenge of the sea,
the weather, the darkness, the isolation, the danger. John
experienced this challenge, as all sailors do, of being confronted by
man's insignificance in the cosmos, a little speck on the vast open
ocean, and then surviving and regaining land. It is a powerful
experience, and it influenced John's creative power to write and
capture these cosmic experiences in several of his last songs."
Fuller, a Beatles fan, had sailed to Bermuda a week after Lennon. He
spent two weeks in Bermuda not realizing that the rock legend was on
the island. Nearly twenty years later, without knowing its history,
Fuller purchased the very sailboat that Lennon sailed to Bermuda. A
plaque commemorating the memorable ocean passage now hangs next to
the berth where Lennon slept.
In the seven weeks that he spent in Bermuda following his voyage,
Lennon, filled with enthusiasm from his experience at sea, wrote
nearly all of the songs that turned out to be his last. Still beaming
with energy and passion, he returned to New York at the end of July.
With the assistance of producer Jack Douglas (of Aerosmith and Cheap
Trick fame), a band of some of the best studio musicians recorded the
songs that were the result of Lennon's newly found inspiration.
The fruits of his labor, planted from seeds sown in Newport five
months earlier, resulted in Lennon and Ono's final record together.
Double Fantasy was his first album in five years. It's named after a
freesia of the same name, a flower that Lennon had observed in his
daily visits with Sean to the Botanical Gardens in Bermuda.
Double Fantasy was released on November 17, 1980, just two-and-a-half
weeks before John Lennon was murdered. The album is a "heart play"
between John and Yoko, a collection of songs they sing to each other,
each tune responding to the one before it. It depicted their life
over the previous five years, and included the hits "Starting Over,"
"Woman," and "Watching the Wheels."
All these years later, Halsted thinks back to that memorable trip and
downplays his role in it and in music history. "My time spent with
John was a very special time in my life," he says. "I was incredibly
lucky to have met him and spent time with him.
"I don't think of what I did as being a part of rock 'n' roll
history," he adds. "Instead, I like to think that I just helped bring
creative genius back to the surface."
Double Fantasy won the 1981 album of the year at the Grammy Awards in
February 1982. The remaining material from those sessions was
released posthumously on the album Milk and Honey in 1984. It
included "Borrowed Time," which fans say was directly inspired by
Lennon's experience aboard the Megan Jaye, and his recognition that
life is fragile. That voyage from Newport to Bermuda unlocked John's
musical brilliance in ways that he'd never anticipated when he left
Rhode Island. It also underscored another reality that John knew
well; life is what happens while you're making other plans.
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