The story of the Rock'n"roll album...

... from John Lennon (and Phil Spector):

https://faroutmagazine-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-rock-n-roll-covers-album-story/amp/

Quoting:

"Naturally, the sessions turned into pure riotous and ramshackle events, with one particular moment seeing Lennon tipped over the edge. It comes as Moon, notorious in his own way, was found to have peed all over the console Lennon was working on. To make matters worse, Spector was also taking the master tapes home with him every night, proving his eccentricities were beginning to show — he even discharged a weapon during a session, damaging Lennon’s ear. The Beatles man recalled how taking the master tapes nearly derailed the entire album: “One day when he didn’t want to work, one night he called me, he said the studio had been burnt down. Now, these… in the early days I didn’t know about it, you know, didn’t know how far away he was. So I said, ‘Oh the studio’s burnt down.’ So anyway a couple of hours passed… the studio’s burnt down… So I get somebody to call the studio, it hadn’t been burnt down. That was the Sunday, the following Sunday he calls and he says on the phone, ‘Hey Johnny’… I said, ‘Oh there you are, Phil, what happened? We’re supposed to be doing a session.’ — [he says] ‘I got the John Dean tapes.’ I say, ‘what?’ ‘I got the John Dean tapes…’ What he was telling me, in his own sweet way, was he had my tapes, not the John Dean Watergate tapes, he had my tapes locked in the cellar behind the barbed wire and the Afghan dogs and the machine guns.

“So there was no way you could get them. So that album was stopped in the middle for a year, and we had to sue through Capitol to get them back off him.” It put the singer over the edge and he abandoned his sessions with Spector in favour of working on his own on the East Coast.

Returning to New York alongside May Pang, Lennon became distracted by the covers album and instead wrote and recorded Walls and Bridges. It could have been some light relief for Lennon but soon enough, his adversary Morris Levy was back again with a brand new lawsuit, this time threatening to take Lennon to court unless he delivered the record he had seemingly reneged on. Lennon even used 11-year-old Julian Lennon to make a slight jibe at Levy in the final moment of Walls and Bridges."