His One And Ono
Other performers crave recognition, but the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono just wanted to avoid it. “Fame is what I was born with, and it was a nightmare being a child,” says Sean Lennon, who was five years old when his father was gunned down in front of their Manhattan apartment building, the Dakota, in 1980. “I had bodyguards; I was followed home from school. I never wanted to be famous; I only wanted to be a musician. I was doing it as a way to connect with my father—trying to fill the void he left when he disappeared. The more I played music, the more I felt I had a piece of him inside me.”
Although Sean spent his childhood making music with his mother, his aversion to notoriety intensified when he released his own album at 22. “I was very young and naïve, and I was thrown to the sharks,” he says. “People treated it as if I was coming out as a pop star. They really misunderstood me, and I got cold feet, so I retreated and became a professional sideman instead of pursuing a solo career.”
He’s now ready to test the spotlight again. Autumn brings his 35th birthday—on October 9, a birth date he shares with his father, who would have been 70 this year—and the release ofAcoustic Sessions, the first album by the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Sean’s two-person band with Charlotte Kemp Muhl, a 23-year-old model with luminous porcelain skin and such pillowy lips she could be the offspring of Mick Jagger and Angelina Jolie. In a collaboration so enmeshed it recalls the epic mind meld of John and Yoko, Charlotte is Sean’s girlfriend, writing partner, and fellow musician, singing intricate harmonies and playing everything from accordion and glockenspiel to acoustic bass, banjo, piano, cello, vibraphone, recorder, melodica, and shakers on the album. Even the band’s name was Charlotte’s creation—the title of a play she wrote when she was seven. The couple met five years ago at California’s Coachella music festival. “I had a premonition,” Sean recalls. “I saw her and whispered to my friend, ‘I really think that girl is going to be my girlfriend.’ ”
But he didn’t anticipate that Charlotte would also become his McCartney. “I never realized how great it was for Dad to have Paul as a writing partner,” Sean says. “I used to write very simply and autobiographically; it was like slitting my wrists and letting it all pour out. With Charlotte, it feels more like an intellectual game in which we’re both having fun. It’s like intellectual tennis.”
“It’s like meta-lovemaking,” Charlotte adds. Both were surprised to find such a connection with someone from a radically different background. “I come from a Catholic Republican military family in Georgia—the antithesis of Sean’s hippie-artist-peacenik background,” says Charlotte, who moved to New York alone to become a model at age 14. “My father is a retired army colonel, and my family is into hunting. When Sean came to meet my parents, the first thing my dad did when he picked him up at the airport was to take him right to a shooting range. My dad was like, ‘I want to see how he shoots.’ ” Charlotte and Sean now live their own hippie-artist-peacenik lifestyle in downtown Manhattan, where they write, compose, play music, record, draw, and care for the albino python he gave her for her birthday, along with the white rabbit they named for Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD.
Although December 8 marks the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, Sean’s grief remains as potent as his memories, despite the passage of time. “There are moments when he’s just drawing a picture of his father and he starts to cry,” Charlotte says.
But the coming months will bring new achievements to celebrate; their CD is being released on their own label, Chimera Music, which will follow it next spring with an electric album tentatively titledVictorian Cyborg. “We don’t want to be huge pop stars,” Sean says. “We just want to be the artists we want to be, without too much limitation.” They know that increasing exposure invites scrutiny, along with the kind of public judgments that Charlotte refers to as “the elephants in the room. It couldn’t be a more eye-rolling cliché—the model and the son of a rock star,” she admits.
And yet the true nature of their partnership makes that image as misleading as any stereotype that casts Charlotte as a bimbo riding the coattails of the super-rich rock spawn. “People assume she’s with me for the wrong reasons,” Sean says. “They don’t realize she makes more money than I do.”
“I’m his sugar mama,” Charlotte says with a Cheshire-cat grin.