Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper: My Life Leading Up to John Lennon’s Last Interview

December 8, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper: My Life Leading Up to John Lennon’s Last Interview is more than just a typical Beatle bio – it’s my memoir, the story of my early rock radio-related life and career wrapped around what tragically turned out to be John Lennon’s last day on the planet. On that day 43 years ago, December 8, 1980, I also co-conducted the interview with John and Yoko at the Dakota for RKO Radio mere hours before he was shot and killed, and it’s therefore still what I consider to be both the Best and Worst day of my life.

There are a number of reasons it took me nearly 40 years – almost four decades – since my afternoon spent with John and Yoko, to begin writing all about my entire life up to, during, and just beyond that point.

Not only was I feeling much too miserable and yes, extremely guilty, to sit down and put together my story on paper, but I was also far too busy contemplating and slowly but surely coordinating my upcoming career change. I was ready to head from radio to print, and eventually over to TV and video writing and production. My freelance and far beyond full-time gigs kept me wrapped up multiple hours of each and every day, so sadly I had no time to even think about concentrating on and coming up with a book.

This was despite the fact that as I say in my introductory first chapter, which I finally started writing in 2020 since thanks to the Pandemic, my work in TV production had pretty much completely come to a close – whenever anyone found out that I and our RKO team had conducted John Lennon’s final interview, jaws dropped, people gasped, and the inevitable question was asked: “When are you going to write your book, Laurie?”

The answer is NOW!

Thankfully, even before I finished it, I was contracted by a traditional, independent publisher – Fayetteville Mafia Press – and was encouraged to continue and wrap it up as soon as possible, which I was thrilled to be able to do.

My book of course features personal observations, details and quotes from the lengthy, incredible, unforgettable John Lennon interview, as well as many of my other amazing musician meetups – everyone from former Fab Four member George Harrison, whom I was thrilled to talk with back in late 1978, plus Paul McCartney along with his wife Linda and their latest line-up of Wings in London in 1979. Beatles producer George Martin was another terrific interview of mine, as well as a number of super cool favorite artists and bands like Little Richard Penniman, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and so many more.

And since it’s my memoir, my book features a fairly heartbreaking, but still funny, description of the dysfunctional family upbringing that led me to become a teen runaway and contributed to my fascination and enjoyment of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll.

Aside from not having enough extra, free time, another reason I decided to put off writing my book for so many years came thanks to my mother. This was even though there’s hardly any chance at all she would have read it herself, since she never, if ever, showed even the slightest bit of interest in anything I created either as a student and/or after I started my much anticipated radio career. Unbelievably, projects of mine that she ignored included the original 14 hour RKO Radio Network Beatles special which we later expanded to 17 hours.

I was so excited to write and co-produce this show back in 1977 when I first started working at KFRC AM in San Francisco, even though I could hardly wait for the title to be changed from RKO Presents the Beatles to the far more creative one that I’d come up with – The Beatles from Liverpool to Legend. My mother refused to listen to even a short piece of this special when it aired over a number of days on KHJ AM in L.A., saying she just wasn’t enough of a Beatles fan (or apparently, a daughter fan) to make it worth her while.

I felt that if I was going to take the time to write my book, I’d definitely need to tell the truth when describing how my mother treated me, her only child, while raising me when she was both a single woman and then later, married to the man who became my incredibly creepy and insulting stepfather. She would no doubt have sadly been offended and embarrassed to have readers find out about her behaviour, even if she didn’t actually regret the bulk of it. That’s why it made sense for me to wait until after she passed away, which she dismally did back in 2018, so that I could take the time to grieve before publicly detailing how she dealt with her daughter.

Once I finally had the time to put my story of being a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper down on paper, becoming the author of a book instantly became more of a challenge for me than anything else I’d ever written. Not only had I never been a daily diarist, so it wasn’t like I could look up my longtime personal history, but I was also having memory issues when it came to all of the music I’d been listening to ever since first discovering pop rock when I was a toddler, plus the tons of concerts I’d been lucky enough to see over the years since catching the Beatles at Dodger Stadium in 1966 while I was still in elementary school.

Somehow, the harder I worked, it almost all thankfully managed to come back to me, so I was able to not only mention my very first 45, Ragtime Cowboy Joe by Alvin and the Chipmunks, but also how awesome it was to finally receive the transistor radio I’d been craving as a little kid, and how cool it felt to be able to keep it in bed with me all night long with earplugs in my ears. So I was happily able to listen non-stop to my favorite Los Angeles Top 40 radio stations while falling asleep, and rock radio has of course played a major part in my life ever since.

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Laurie Kaye began her career in radio at KFRC-AM San Francisco, for years one of the nation’s greatest top 40 stations, where she started as an intern and worked her way up to on-air reporter and anchor. She wrote and coproduced numerous radio rock specials for RKO, including RKO Presents the Beatles (released in 1977, and later expanded and retitled as The Beatles from Liverpool to Legend), and The Top 100 of the 70’s before moving on to write Dick Clark’s weekly radio countdown show and syndicated newspaper column. Kaye then moved on to television and film as a writer, producer, and casting director, where she still works today, handling both creative content and line producing for docuseries pilots.

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Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper: My Life Leading Up to John Lennon’s Last Interview

On December 8, 1980, twenty-something rock journalist Laurie Kaye entered the legendary Dakota apartments in New York to interview her longtime idol John Lennon. It was the last interview Lennon would ever give— just hours later, outside that same building, Lennon was shot dead by a twenty-five-year-old man (Kaye refuses to name him) whom Kaye herself had encountered after finishing the interview and stepping outside. Kaye has beaten herself up ever since over her failure to recognize that the assassin posed a danger and should have been reported. Here Kaye recounts not just her unfortunate brush with history, but also her turbulent early years growing up in LA and her fascinating, star-packed journey from radio intern to acclaimed writer/producer. Plus interviews with such titans of the music industry as Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Talking Heads, the Ramones, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger.