When John Lennon and Yoko Ono had something important on their minds or just wanted to vent about politics, religion, weight loss injections, or the Kennedy assassination, they didn’t phone up a family member, a former bandmate, or a high-priced shrink. Instead, they called Elliot Mintz, a diminutive, New York-raised, Los Angeles-educated radio and TV broadcaster who became their unlikely closest confidant for nearly a decade after a chance interview with Ono in 1971.
Following that conversation, Ono and Mintz began speaking daily by phone for months until she suggested Mintz hop on the line with her husband, who had just released Imagine but was still very much finding his footing in the wake of the Beatles’ demise. For the next nine years, the trio formed an improbable, unbreakable bond — traveling together to San Francisco or Japan for weeks at a time and spending hours lost in conversation in Lennon and Ono’s book-filled bedroom at the Dakota in New York City. All the while, Mintz did his best to juggle his professional obligations (the fruits of which are available via hundreds of fascinating archived interviews on his website) and whatever sliver of a personal life he could find time to nurture when Lennon and Ono weren’t in the mood to chat. Mintz’s devotion to the couple was so all-encompassing that he even installed a dedicated John and Yoko phone line, which was attached to a blinking red light in the ceiling of his bedroom to ensure he’d never miss a connection (unless his lifelong insomnia had decided to take a rare night off).
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That push and pull — Mintz as the secret keeper to two of the most famous people in the world vs. Mintz the independent human being with his own dreams and ambitions — is at the center of his first book, We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me, which was released today (Oct. 22) by Dutton. Although it’s packed with insider details about Lennon and Ono’s unique creative alchemy, Lennon’s fabled, debaucherous “Lost Weekend” apart from Ono in Los Angeles between 1973-1975 and the horrifying aftermath of Lennon’s 1980 murder, We All Shine On is, at last, Mintz’s story too. In it, he ponders what his life might have been like had he never picked up that phone in the first place (he never married or had children), and why, he, of all people, became the sympathetic ear of choice for Lennon, Ono and a wealth of other celebrities of the time.
Mintz, 79, eventually transitioned in the 1980s from broadcasting to the nascent world of media consultancy, through which he represented everyone from Bob Dylan and Diana Ross to Paris Hilton and Paris Jackson. Now enjoying what he’s called “early rehearsals for retirement,” he spoke with SPIN in his rich, ASMR-friendly voice by phone from his Los Angeles home about finally committing his memories to paper, the inevitable passage of time, and the enduring power of Lennon and Yoko’s art.
SPIN: Why was the time right to write your first book, at age 79?
Elliot Mintz: Two reasons. The first was I had received in recent years some encouragement from Sean Ono Lennon to tell my tale. He knew about my close proximity to his family and I’ve known him since he was three weeks old. He was the one who gave me the nudge and said, ‘It’s time.’ The other factor was that eight months ago, I turned 79, and I thought to myself, ‘If not now, when?’ If I didn’t tell my story at this moment, people would have to get a Ouija board to hear me speak. It was those two factors that motivated me to do this, and I did write it in about seven months.
You’ve been asked about some of these subjects for 50-some years, but I’m sure it wasn’t just a simple matter of recounting stories you’ve told before. What was your editing, or filtering, process for what felt right to include?
Well, for one thing, I included more of me in the story. In the past, when I talked about John and Yoko, I was just the character behind the curtain on the side of the stage that was putting them front and center. But, it was a relationship that we had. I tried to give people some insight into my life and what I was going through at the time, in the hope that some of them would identify with me and that my journey was their journey. I came of age in the ‘60s, like many of the people who are going to be reading the book. I posed some questions that I think might be relevant in their own lives. So, the most significant difference is, I’m there. You’re getting it from a singular, first-person perspective. I usually wrote from around 11 in the evening until four or five in the morning. Those were my optimum hours. The gate just opened and this endless flow of memories were evoked.
I can’t help but think that one of the reasons why this adventure began is because you were willing to give Yoko the chance to talk about her work at a time when very few people were interested.
Well, I certainly don’t want to take too much credit here, but the very first time that we spoke, yes, I wanted to probe her mind. I don’t think I asked any questions about her husband or the Beatles. She was to me a fascinating figure from the first time I put a piece of vinyl on my old turntable and listened to her, and read the book Grapefruit that she had written. I just found her to be a completely original person. Nobody had ever spoken to me the way she had, and some of the concepts that she advanced were unique to herself. I learned more about myself through Yoko than anyone I’ve ever met.
To the best of your knowledge, did either John or Yoko have anything remotely akin to the relationship and closeness with anyone else that they did with you?
Not to my knowledge. Of course, they did associate with other people. Occasionally, they went to the theater or to dinner. Even during the ‘silent years’ between 1975 and 1980, it’s not as if you couldn’t find pictures of them attending various events. They had friends like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, or Lorraine and Peter Boyle, with whom they would occasionally have dinners. But in terms of around-the-clock conversations, no, there wasn’t anyone. Sean can somewhat attest to the fact that the two of them would be on the phone with me frequently because I was available. There was only one person would be picking up that phone when they dialed it. I never say in my book or in any of my public pronouncements that they considered me to be their best friend. I’m not hanging that mantle upon me. I considered them to be my best friends. And towards the end of the game, it almost felt like they were my only friends.
Don’t forget — for the first year or so that I knew them, I never told anyone that I was friends with them. Yoko gave me that strict admonition that I should not say anything about their friendship. At the time, they were being surveilled by government agencies. Even on the telephone sometimes, they would be concerned about people listening in. If it was revealed that I was their confidant, that they were telling me secrets at night, then I might be surveilled too and their security might be compromised. So, I kept it all to myself for a very, very long period of time. The attachment and the association continues. Beyond these interviews that I’m doing for the book, when I meet somebody at any small social gathering. the first time they go to the restroom and Google my name before coming back to the table, the conversation is only about one subject. I’m still married to them.
Julian Lennon, Disney’s Bob Iger, Sean Lennon,and Elliot Mintz after a 2021 screening of ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ (photo: Charley Gallay / Getty Images for Disney).
As much as this book puts you in the room with John and Phil Spector during the insane Rock ‘N’ Roll sessions, or John drunkenly gambling away your money at a casino in Las Vegas, was it revelatory for you to think about yourself in those stories, and what you experienced? Maybe there were things about them that had never occurred to you before.
It’s a very, very cogent question. And you’re correct that the book induced a greater sense of self-reflection of not only the memories, good and bad, but what I was surrendering, in a very real sense, to be part of that family. Because that was my family, and I just felt that we would be together forever. But I know I lost myself somewhere in the relationship, and that I became less in touch with Elliot as I became more and more involved in their world.
They were very time-dominating people. Yoko was very officious and very stoic. She was the one who propelled the muse in John and looked after all the matters that John could never handle. She spoke to me in great clarity, most of the time devoid of emotion. John, on the other hand, his thoughts and my times with him would wander around a lot. He was not a linear thinker. He was more of the abstract painter through his sounds. I would get lost in some of the smoke rings in the sky. He sometimes talked to me in a very poetic manner. When I would be with him at the Dakota, and if John and I may have had a smoke or two, it was very hard to keep up. He never repressed anything. I never recalled him trying to keep a secret from me. He was a very bad secret keeper. He spoke from his heart, sometimes in a less than pleasant manner about other people. He liked to gossip. He frequently was engaged in all forms of self-doubt about himself, and was sometimes jealous of others.
One of the themes of the book is you asking the rhetorical question, ‘If only I’d learned to say no.’ How far have you let your mind travel down that road to really think about where you could have gone, or who you could have been, had John and Yoko never come into your life?
Some people feel it’s a waste of time to speculate about what could have been. Because as we make our own way, the universe unfolds as it will, or as John once so wisely put it, ‘Life is what’s happening to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ As I speak to you, I’m four months away, or thereabouts, from my 80th birthday. And of course, I have thoughts of mortality and of what might have been. It’s natural. I talk to some people who are in my age group and they feel it as well. How do you join a dating site when you’re in your late ’60s or ’70s? Especially in the wake of COVID, there’s so much isolation. It’s just not older people — the younger generation is reassessing their lives and their direction. I would hate to be somewhere between the ages of 18 and 30 today. I don’t see a lot of life preservers out there.
So, yes. It is a time of reflection. I did indicate some of the positive and negative options that I foresaw during my John and Yoko relationship. It was a marriage in some ways. I thought, maybe if I wasn’t totally devoted to them or if I didn’t think of them as my family, maybe I would have developed a relationship with somebody that I would be married to today and have children. Maybe I’d have lived, not a reclusive life, but certainly a non-public life, which I prefer. But then again, I thought that I could wind up in some small regional Los Angeles radio market, living in a small apartment and maybe drinking a little too much. Maybe I’d be in the Midwest and doing some oldies shows from midnight through four or five in the morning, where I would drive over to the station, open a microphone and say, ‘Good evening. From now until five in the morning, the best of the oldies for you, until the dawn. Here come the Platters.’ It could have gone that way. And who’s to say it won’t? I don’t have any long-range plans for the future. I don’t think much about long-range.
Your first real big break as a college radio student was interviewing a man who was in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, who just happened to be in your same program at Los Angeles City College. All these years later, have your thoughts evolved about Oswald’s guilt?
By nature, I am not a conspiratorially minded person, but to say that I debunk the concept of conspiracies in history would just be silly. Of course, I felt that on Nov. 22, 1963, there was a coup d’etat in America. It was the loss of innocence. I’m not convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald ever fired a shot that day. I’m convinced that there were multiple shooters in the Dealey Plaza area. I believe that there was a massive cover-up of that event. The majority of Americans still feel it was a conspiracy. I might add that according to law, all of the classified documents from the intelligence agencies were scheduled for release about three years ago. And the ex-president did in fact release a treasure trove of material, but held back a certain amount ‘in the interest of national security.’ For the generation who followed the work of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who read all the books, who listened to lectures by Mark Lane and Mort Sahl, this might be the last opportunity in their lifetimes to say, ‘Isn’t it time to turn over the last 200 or 300 pages?’ But nobody is asking. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to in years about this.
I once did a documentary called A Shot Rang Out on KPFK radio in the mid-‘60s. It was a detailed report where I interviewed a lot of the assassination conspiracy writers and played clips from Garrison. I played it to John and he became fascinated by it. We talked about it a few times, to the point where one day he called and said he’d figured it out. I propped myself up in bed at four o’clock in the morning and I said, ‘I’ve thought about that for years. What’s your conclusion?’ And John said, ‘It was the limousine driver who turned around and fired the fatal shot.’ I listened to him respectfully, and then I said, ‘John, that theory has been debunked. It’s been raised before, and research has been done about it having to do with the bullet trajectory and the rest. It was not the limousine driver.’ He got a little belligerent and said, ‘How do you know? The people who told you he couldn’t have done it are the same people who told you there was one guy in that building who did.’ A quote of his was, ‘Don’t give up on new information.’ I said, ‘OK, John, that’s your theory, but I don’t see it that way.’ He was kind of grumpy about it for a while.
He raised this again later when my dear friend, Sal Mineo, had been killed and I had gone to New York for his funeral. John insisted I come directly from Westchester to the Dakota to meet with them. They truly wanted to console me. I was tired as hell — I’d flown into JFK from LAX with Sal’s body in the airplane. But I got there, and we had a very intense conversation. John was curious as to whether or not Sal knew his assailant. He didn’t. It raised a question that I had been thinking about and I said to him, ‘You and Yoko never have any security guards around you. Why?’ He explained that all of his life, he had people around him, even when he was a teenager leaving the Cavern Club in Liverpool. When the Beatles became more well-known, then it became lots of guys around lots of other guys around the police. He said, ‘I’m sick of it. I’m tired of it. I don’t believe in it. If they want to get you, they’re going to get you. Look what happened to Kennedy with all those people around him.’ I pushed on this point. I got nowhere.
One of the reasons I spent so much time telling the Sal story in the book was that I wanted people to embrace the concept that John didn’t believe in protection. Secondly, John didn’t have any fear of death. He said that as far as he was concerned, death is getting out of one car and getting into another — very matter-of-factly. The only thing about death that really concerned him was that Yoko would go first, and he couldn’t stand the idea of living the rest of his life without her. So, it was always a hope of his that he would be the first to die. Yoko truly believed that destiny has a plan. You can do whatever you wish to do to try and circumvent that plan, but things will happen as they do.
You write about how John would sometimes stick up for the Beatles, or complain that other bands like the Rolling Stones were seen as more cutting edge. Even after the breakup, he still had a really strong association with the music that he made with them and how it was perceived by the wider world.
Yes, he did. And yes, he took great pride in most of the Beatles’ material. There were some songs that he disliked, upon reflection, completely. As he told me once in a broadcast interview, there was one song he absolutely detested and couldn’t believe that he wrote it. And I said, ‘What’s that song?’ He demurred and said, ‘One day I’ll tell you.’ I’ve speculated, but I don’t like to speculate when it comes to John. He was not pleased with the way the Beatles were perceived as ‘The Mop Tops’ and how they got lost in the cacophony of the screams, where nobody could hear what they were doing. I believe the Beatles did 1,300 concerts around the world in the relatively short period of time that they were together. That implies 1,300 hotel rooms, packing the luggage, unpacking the luggage, putting on the makeup, taking off the makeup, doing the press conferences. Eventually, he hated all of that. I marvel at Sir Paul McCartney’s ability to go from country to country and perform in these gigantic stadiums and appear to be loving it.
But, when somebody criticized their music, or pretended it was something greater than what the group had accomplished, John came out of his corner swinging. One night when he was asking me who I was going to be interviewing for upcoming shows, and I told him Mick Jagger, he went off again about the fact that he felt the Rolling Stones got the kind of adulation and respect that ‘The Mop Tops’ didn’t, and that the Stones were perceived as the revolutionaries because they came forward with ‘Street Fighting Man’ as opposed to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand.’ He loved Mick Jagger, and the two of them spent countless nights together in London. But when he would get really angry about it, he’d called them ‘the Rolling Pebbles.’
He had that same kind of envy of the way people perceived Bob Dylan. Bob released ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ six months before the Beatles came out with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ and the respect and wonder that surrounded him was something that challenged John. He insisted to me he was a far better writer than Dylan was. It was a love-hate thing. He loved Bob’s earlier work, but he liked the simpler, direct stuff. He said his favorite was, ‘don’t follow leaders / watch your parking meters.’ We would have these conversations where John would insist that ‘I Am the Walrus’ was superior to anything that Bob had ever penned.
Your time with John coincided with a period when Wings were massive, but John’s music in the ‘70s was very up and down. He seemed much more uneasy or unsure about his next destination, but it feels like albums such as Mind Games or Walls and Bridges have enjoyed a critical reappraisal. How has that music aged to you, especially knowing that you were so intimate with John and Yoko during the era it was made?
Sean Ono Lennon did this recent, enormous boxed set all devoted to Mind Games and I think he’ll win a Grammy for assembling that. I’ve never seen a collection of that kind in my life. I felt it was a brilliant album. Same with Walls and Bridges — he just elected to go in a different direction. He was with Yoko, and that was very different than his partnership with Sir Paul. Clearly, John leaned more in the direction of the avant-garde, or more in the direction of using albums to just express or vent his feelings. They wouldn’t sell as well as Sir Paul’s did. His union with Yoko was obviously very different than Paul’s assembly of Wings, and the receptions were quite different. John and Yoko together obviously didn’t sell a lot of albums. John as a solo artist didn’t sell a lot of albums compared to Paul McCartney. That bothered him. So did the adulation that Paul received when he’d go out on the road, which was all rightfully deserved, in my opinion. He believed he was a creative genius. He believed that throughout his entire life. When he was in art school, he thought he was brilliant. He was angry at his auntie Mimi for disposing of some of his early drawings or poetry. That’s a very confining place to find yourself, because you really believe that you’re sitting at a dining room table and you’re alone. You’re not being celebrated. Especially between ’75 and ’80, he felt like the pieces just didn’t seem to fit, and it caused him great personal anguish.
I remember coming to New York once and walking into the Dakota living room, and he was a kind of melancholic, sitting at the big white grand piano and just tinkering around. He mentioned something to me about the New York Times bestseller list, and how he was angry that his book wasn’t number one. I said, ‘John, you wrote yours many, many years ago. You don’t have a new book out.’ And he said that I missed the point. He just felt or innately knew that the book he could write would be superior to whatever book was number one, two, three, four or five at that time in the ‘70s. I listened patiently to the these thoughts of his, and I think one of the reasons that I assumed the role that I did is that I was non-judgmental about his conclusions. Nobody ever accused or said that Elliot Mintz was a creative genius, so I don’t miss that title. I never had it. Nobody ever said that I was tall, dark, and handsome or popular. So, I don’t know how I’d react to having once been referenced that way and then discarded.
You tell two particularly poignant anecdotes about John and Paul from around this time. One is that their meeting in L.A. in 1974 may have been a factor in John going back to Yoko. The other is when the McCartneys visited the Lennons around Christmas some years later in New York, and how you watched John and Paul grow somewhat uncomfortable talking as the day progressed. That’s maybe the beautiful dichotomy of their relationship — two people who provided so much joy for the world at large but are just normal human beings too, who simply ran out of things to say to each other after a certain point.
Again, this is all just Elliot’s point of view. None of this stuff is chiseled in stone, but I do recall that afternoon when Paul and Linda came to the Dakota. We all went out for a lunch and then came back. Yoko and Linda got along very, very well and gravitated to one side of the couch in the big living room. I observed Paul and John standing by the window looking toward lower Manhattan and speaking. I was, as usual, the fifth wheel on the couch, not talking to anybody, but I saw them. On occasion, I would pick up a phrase or two. What I discerned was a mutually respectful Christmas-ish visit, but it didn’t appear to be all that demonstrably warm. There wasn’t a lot of hugging going on.
I do distinctively recall that Paul asked John if he was making any music. John explained that he wasn’t, because he was looking after his son and the family. He said, ‘What about you?’ And Sir Paul said, ‘Oh, I’m always making music. I’m always writing. I just can’t help myself. That’s what I do.’ Later that evening, walking back to the Plaza Hotel, I imagined what would have happened if John said, ‘Well, look, I’ve got my guitars in the other room. Let me bring something in.’ That could have transformed the world of contemporary music, but nobody bit the bait, and it ended.
When John was separated from Yoko and going through his ‘Lost Weekend’ here in Los Angeles, he was a bachelor for the first time in his life and did all the things that people do. After he got that out of his system, he insisted that he was okay to return to Yoko and to continue their marriage. He ended every call we had with, ‘Please tell Mother that I’m okay and I want to come back.’ When I’d dutifully relay this in my nightly calls with Yoko, she just responded that she knew he’s not ready. That went on for quite a long time, until Sir Paul volunteered to have a word with John. Yoko didn’t encourage it. Yoko didn’t solicit it. Paul was just generous enough to offer it. And when he was in L.A., he did meet with John. He did say, ‘Look, if you really want to get back together, you’ve got to treat her the way you did when you first met her. You have to date her. You have to court her. You have to buy her gifts, bring her flowers, be responsive to her, and prove that you’re capable of changing some of your ways.’ I believe that John took that to heart. As things would unfold, I saw John doing just that until he called me and said, ‘If the press calls you, just let them know the separation didn’t work out.’
Obviously, Yoko is a polarizing figure, especially in the world of rock history. With time, some of those tropes have melted away. She deserves an enormous amount of credit for how’s she has preserved John’s memory through things like allowing you to broadcast The Lost Lennon Tapes and the creation of Strawberry Field in Central Park. As you mentioned, John did go first, and Yoko was left as the steward. She, and now Sean, have kept John in the public conversation all these years later.
From the first days after that unspeakable act, when she found herself alone. she’s dedicated herself to the preservation of John’s legacy. It has become her life’s work. A few years ago, she relinquished a lot of those decisions involving technical matters, or the Apple board and Beatles licensing, to Sean, who is now devoting his own life to his father’s work, as well as being the best darn son any mother could ever ask for. He’s 49 now. He’s an incredibly gifted musician unto himself, but that’s not as important to him as these reissues, which I think will continue for a very, very long time. John left behind some very prolific work. I’m not saying Sean will unearth something John composed and sang many years ago. I certainly never came across anything like that when I was doing the inventory of his possessions. But, these reissues are invaluable.
He’s involved in the preservation of his mother’s work as well, and Yoko’s art pieces appear in museums around the world. There are books that show her massive collection of material. Even people who don’t like the way she sings or enter this arena with negative feelings about Yoko have a completely different level of respect for her when they look at the body of artwork. She’s as important as Andy Warhol or Keith Haring or any of the people from that era, all of whom were close friends of hers. The experience remains a work in progress.
Yoko is now 91, and soon to be 92. Is there anything you would be comfortable saying about how she’s doing?
I get asked about that a lot. Obviously, there are limitations, with rare exceptions, of what people can do in their 90s. She’s very much alive. I’ve frequently said I believe that she’s going to outlive us all. It was great seeing her less than a year ago, in February of this year. I treasured that visit. But, I do really want to respect our privacy just the same way that Sean does. I know it’s frustrating to some people who genuinely care and are curious. In terms of the last time I saw her, what may have been exchanged and any kind of details, I choose to keep those to myself.
I had the pleasure of booking Yoko to perform with Sean and Mark Ronson on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show in 2009. Yoko was 76 at the time and it was pretty remarkable for someone of that age to be on national television doing something so out there. Seeing Sean and Yoko interact with each other in that setting, not only as musical collaborators, but just as two human beings, was special. It reflects what you’ve described in this conversation about the nature of their relationship. Maybe that’s the greatest gift John has left behind — that his wife and son are still putting that creativity and that spirit out into the world, even though he’s not here to do it with them.
I love that observation. I did see the show and I do remember that performance, and yes, it was extraordinary to me. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Sean and Yoko perform live together on at least half a dozen or more occasions, from concert venues to private party gatherings. I’m not a musician and I don’t play any instruments, but I’m told by other musicians that there is an unspoken language between musicians. I’ve seen Yoko and Sean engaging in that dialog without words, but they’re looking directly at each other. There is something inexplicable that exists in that space that’s being filled by those chords. Sean understands Yoko, and Yoko’s love for her son has never wavered her. Gosh, thinking about these moments is a lot like how I felt when I was writing the book. The more you think about this stuff, the more it crystallizes in your mind. Sometimes I just get lost in these memories.
This book ends in around 1981, and you obviously had a very distinguished career from that point onward. Would that phase of your life would ever be of interest to you to write about in a separate volume?
I don’t know if my life, independently of John and Yoko, would be of that great an interest to readers. I wound down a few years ago, because I’m no longer a broadcaster, I’m not on radio and TV, and I don’t interview anybody anymore. I really am looking for some sense, at this point of the journey, of a little peace and quiet. I could only imagine what it was like for John to have to constantly respond to that question of whether or not the Beatles will get back together again. I can understand how that would drive somebody right back into their bedroom. There will come a time when I’ve really expressed everything that I choose to express about my old pals and will be reading a collection of O. Henry short stories instead.
Yes, or maybe having a nice Chardonnay.
Oh, well, I never say no to a good glass of Chard, of course (laughs).
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