WE ALL SHINE ON

A radio personality recounts the peculiar friendship he enjoyed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Mintz begins at a dark moment, when, soon after Lennon was killed, he is charged with inventorying the musician’s countless possessions: roomfuls of guitars, the attaché cases with which he was smitten, boxes of cassettes and their works in progress, granny glasses “in a rainbow of tinted colors.” He came into this responsibility circuitously. As a Los Angeles disc jockey, he listened to a promo of Ono’s 1971 solo album Fly and invited her to be an on-air guest. She agreed. Interestingly, Mintz writes, although he was well aware of her marriage to Lennon, “I was never a Beatles superfan.” Instead, he adds, he was more of an Elvis freak, which didn’t necessarily serve him well when, after Ono began to call him at all hours, Lennon did, too. “It was a never-ending loop,” he writes, an eccentric conversation that often found him wondering why it was he on the other end. There’s no brutal dish of the Albert Goldman trash-the-star variety, though Mintz doesn’t shy from the dark side: Lennon, he writes, could be a monster when he was drinking, and he harbored odd views: “Even though John had smoked, ingested, or snorted just about every illegal recreational drug he could get his hands on, he was weirdly suspicious of the ones that were properly prescribed and proven efficacious.” As for Ono, she’s alternately remote and generous, instinctively mistrustful—and for good reason—of anyone who wanted a piece of her husband, as so many did. All in all, he writes, “they were a magical couple,” and it’s clear that all these years later, he misses them.

A charmingly modest tale of a long brush with stardom, with all its pleasures and frustrations.