It wasn’t long before Lennon issued his “What was I thinking?” mea culpa and patched things up with Wenner, but his relationship with Ono took longer to repair. “In a sense I’ve never lived that down,” he says today, chalking up this bumpy period to cocaine abuse and what he calls “Post-Ono Disorder Syndrome, or PODS for short. I was a pod person. I was lost in the 80s, wearing me sleeves rolled up like Don Johnson, trying to be an ’80s man,’ whatever that might be. Letting the times inform me rather than the other way ’round.”

Lennon says he was still in this “fragile ego state” when he succumbed to the inevitable and agreed to play Live Aid with the other three Beatles, closing the Wembley show with a sloppy if ecstatically received “All You Need Is Love.”

“Queen mopped the floor with us, but even so, if we’d left it at that, it wouldn’t have been so terrible,” he says. It was the ignominy of 1987’s Everest, the first album of new Beatles material since Let It Be, that made him realize at last how astray his sense of judgment had gone.

I happen to have a CD of Everest in my work bag, which I take out when we settle into his barn recording studio to talk further. Lennon cringes at the sight of it: “Oh, God, the outfits! We look like we’re wearing bloody screen savers!”

Indeed, it’s hard to get past *Everest’*s cover image of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in white puffy shirts and purplish, hideously patterned brocade vests, all of the Beatles save McCartney wearing their hair in that acutely late-80s style: long, slicked back, and cinched tightly into ponytails that trail down their backs.

As every Beatles fan knows, the group flew to the Himalayas in a symbolic show of unity. Everest had been the original title for what became Abbey Road, but the name was dropped when the four Beatles, exhausted and at each other’s throats in 1969, were willing to travel no farther than just outside the doors of EMI’s London studio for a photo shoot. *Everest’*s cover was meant to suggest that in 1987, things had changed: here are the grown-up Beatles, all friends again, standing in front of a majestic peak in puffy shirts!

But in truth, the same old arguments and resentments reared their heads, with Lennon and Harrison chafing under McCartney’s control-freak tendencies, and Starr tiring of playing the jolly mediator. From the distance of 2010, Everest is not as bad as the haters found it back then—the Harrison-written single “Handle with Care” holds up particularly well—but it remains a mystique-puncturing letdown marred by dated Jeff Lynne production (those compressed snare drums!), and its worst moment undoubtedly belongs to Lennon: the well-intentioned but abominable “A Day in the Life ’87,” the aids-themed re-write whose risible opening verse goes, “I read the news today, oh boy/ About a wave of boys who died too soon/ They wove a quilt out of their grief/ It’s someone’s life you rob/ When you don’t sheathe your knob.”

“Well, Elton likes it!” says Lennon, laughing. “I was trying to be relevant, y’know, but here I was, living in the sticks with a bunch of cows.” (In their divorce settlement, Ono kept the apartment at the Dakota in Manhattan, while Lennon kept the upstate farm they had purchased in 1978 to raise Holstein dairy cows. Since 1991, Lennon has also owned a loft on Warren Street in Tribeca.) “I mean, what did I know of what was happening in the streets?” he says. “Prince did the AIDS thing a million times better on Sign o’ the Times, which, I’ve said it before, was the best Beatles album of 1987.”