19 SEPTEMBER 21-27, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC Lost and Found MAY PANG DETAILS HER RELATIONSHIP WITH JOHN LENNON IN A SHOW AT BITFACTORY. BY EMILY FERGUSON The fi rst time May Pang came to Colorado was in 1974, when she went to Caribou Ranch in Nederland with Elton John (recording Caribou, of course) and her boyfriend, John Lennon. She helped to record their rendition of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” before she and Lennon returned to their home in New York to tackle other projects. It was the busiest time of Lennon’s solo career. Judging from many accounts by his friends and peers, it was also one of the happiest times in his life. But a quote from Lennon calling his relationship with Pang “the lost weekend,” as well as his wife Yoko Ono’s insistence that she orchestrated the entire event, gave many the impression that it was just a drunken fl ing. And that’s remained a thorn in Pang’s side. “Everybody was talking about it, and everybody was [putting] their two cents in about my relationship,” Pang remembers. “And I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well, aren’t you happy enough? That you know that you did this?’ I say, ‘No, it’s not enough.’ I don’t like the idea that somebody else is taking credit for me. I’m not trying to take away from other people. I’m just saying: ‘This is mine. Give me my dues.’” Not that Pang hasn’t told her story be- fore. She’s reiterated it time and again in interviews since her 1983 book, Loving John, but never as extensively as in her upcoming documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, which screened at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and will hit streaming plat- forms on October 13. But fi rst, Pang is coming to Denver on Friday, September 22, for the opening of her three-day exhibition at Bit- factory, The Lost Weekend: The Photography of May Pang, where visitors will see Lennon and Pang’s adventures through her own lens, with a collection of photos she took throughout their relationship. “What you see in these photos, it’s really through my eyes,” Pang says. “You see our life and how I saw him.” Pang grew up in East Harlem, where her parents had moved from China. Her father was very traditional and wanted a son; he ad- opted one, while acting “like a tyrant” to Pang, she says. She took comfort in her mother, who was very independent and owned a laundry, as well as in rock music. And like most girls in the ’60s, she loved the Beatles. “I always wanted to be in the music busi- ness, because music was really in my soul. It saved me from a lot of the strife,” Pang says. In 1969, she went to an employ- ment agency to fi nd work in any capacity; the agency sent her to a bicycle store for a re- ceptionist position. After the interview, “I met my girlfriend, who was waiting for me down- stairs,” Pang recalls. “And she said, ‘Do you know that Apple Records is here?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I looked in the directory, and sure enough, there was Allen Klein’s offi ce and Apple Records.” Pang told her friend that she was going to go to Apple and ask for a job. “She says, ‘You’re nuts!’ I said, ‘What are they going to say to me? If they say no, I’m still where I am.’ So I went up and got off on the 41st fl oor,” she says. “This woman looked at me and she goes, ‘Can I help you?’ I’m looking around, because I’m looking for anything about the Beatles. And I said I was looking for a job. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t think anything’s here.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And she’s looking at me again, saying, ‘Um, is there something that’s on your mind?’ I said, ‘I was wondering if the Beatles ever showed up here!’ She just chuckled.” Then the doors behind the woman’s desk opened, and record executives began fi ling out for their lunch. “She happened to yell out, ‘This woman’s looking for a job!’ And they told me to come back after lunch,” Pang says. She was eighteen and landed a job at Apple Records, where she took on any and every task. In December 1970, Lennon and Ono came to the offi ces and enlisted Pang to assist on Ono’s avant-garde fi lms, Up Your Legs Forever and Fly. Pang then accompa- nied Lennon and Ono to London, where she saw him play “Imagine” for the fi rst time. After the trip, Lennon and Ono asked her to become their full-time assistant, and Pang did everything from taking calls to running errands, working from an offi ce in their famed apartment at the Dakota in New York. As she became immersed in the couple’s lives, Pang also saw dysfunction. Julian, Len- non’s son with his fi rst wife, Cynthia, would call to speak with his father, whom he hadn’t seen in years. Ono would vet every call, Pang says, and would order Pang to tell Julian his father wasn’t available, and to not tell Lennon that Julian had called. After he phoned each week for three weeks, Ono fi nally allowed the call to go through, on the condition that Pang tell Lennon it was the fi rst time that Julian had reached out. Issues between the spouses were becom- ing more prevalent when, one day in 1973, Ono approached Pang and asked her if she would become Lennon’s girlfriend. Pang says she refused several times, noting that he was her employer, not to mention married to her other employer. But Ono was insistent. After she protested one last time, saying, “I won’t,” Pang remembers Ono replied, “Yes, you will,” and walked out of the room. Pang emphasizes that Ono was not the reason for the relationship, however; noth- ing would have happened if Lennon hadn’t started pursuing her, she says. She was help- ing him record Mind Games, and the two began fl irting in the studio until fi nally Len- non kissed her. The fi rst time they spent the night together, she woke up to him playing a song he wrote for her: “Surprise Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox).” After a time dating, the new couple left for Los Angeles to promote Mind Games and work on other projects, as well as to fi nd solace away from Ono. But even across the country, that could be hard. “She never stopped calling us. She says that John called her. It’s the other way around. She called us all the time. It was the fi rst phone call in the morning, and she called not once, not twice, but sometimes ten times a day, about nothing, for no reason,” Pang says. “I know that she told somebody she thought that our relationship was only going to be a two-week fl ing,” she adds. “And when she realized it wasn’t going to be a two-week fl ing, she was panic-struck.” At one point, “Yoko called John and asked for a divorce,” she recalls. “He agreed, and she didn’t expect that. … But she then said the stars weren’t right.” Meanwhile, Pang and Lennon were living the high life — and throughout, she snapped candid photos. Each picture in her collection has a particular whimsical mystique to it, an image of such a famous individual whose life was so microscopically documented, yet in a moment no one would otherwise know about. The couple traveled often, and on a road trip around Las Vegas, they stopped at a ghost-town roadside attraction. No one treated Lennon as anyone different, Pang recalls, and she took a photo of him posing in front of a motorcycle — which made her realize he was wearing her jeans. “I remember John looking at my stuff, and he goes, ‘Let me see some of these pho- tographs you’ve taken of me.’ Then he told me, ‘I don’t like photo shoots...because I look at myself and I don’t like the way I look,’” Pang recalls. “But then he goes, ‘I like the way you portray me.’” The Lennon in Pang’s photos is smiling and goofy, even coming across as a family man at times. Pang says she encouraged him to reach out to Julian as well as Cynthia, and helped to initiate a reconciliation between the three. The four would go on trips to- gether, and Pang and Cynthia remained life- long friends until the latter’s death in 2015. One particularly sweet photo shows John and Julian together, on one of their beach trips. Pang, Lennon and his son took a neigh- bor’s boat out with some other kids, and after a short and ineffective swim lesson from Lennon, Pang sat on the boat and began to take pictures. “That clip on the boat, I just thought of Julian just sitting next to his father, and I thought, ‘What a lovely photograph for Julian,’” Pang remembers. “My thought was always for Julian to have this of him with his father. I took a series of those, of the two of them. But the ones of Julian in the water with his father and the MUSIC continued on page 20 May Pang and John Lennon, in a photo captured by Harry Nilsson. COURTESY MAY PANG
