#9 Dream

The Zoo Crew has "#9 Dream" turning on the platter right now, John Lennon, off Walls and Bridges, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any stretch you already know this one sits in a strange, soft pocket of the catalog. It is not the clenched-fist protest side of the man and it is not the bare-bones rock and roll covers record that came after. It is a half-remembered haze with strings, a little slide of the voice, and a chorus that does not belong to any language on the map. Zoo Freaks tend to lean in when that chorus hits, because the story behind those syllables is better than most liner notes ever get.

Lennon told interviewers later that the thing started in an actual dream while he was living in New York with May Pang during the stretch he called the Lost Weekend. He woke up with a scrap of melody and a line of nonsense already in his head, wrote both down before they slipped, and had no idea what the words were supposed to mean. He just liked the sound of them. May Pang has said the same thing in her own accounts of those months: he thought the phrase was beautiful, he built the string chart so the record would feel like the dream, and it was the last song written for the album. Earlier working titles floated around "So Long" and even "Walls and Bridges" itself before he settled on the number that had been chasing him since Liverpool.

The chant you hear is usually written Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé. Count it out and you get nine syllables, which is exactly the sort of private joke he would keep. Nine was his birthday, October 9, and he treated it like a lucky coin he kept flipping. Revolution 9 on the White Album had already put the number on a loop. On Walls and Bridges he came back to it with a finished song, and when the single climbed the American chart it parked itself at number nine. He noticed that kind of thing. He always noticed that kind of thing.

He was also a little sheepish about the record once the years piled up. In the long Playboy conversations near the end of his life he called "#9 Dream" a piece of craftsmanship more than a bolt of inspiration. He said he sat down and churned it out from the dream fragment, no great thunderclap, just the job of finishing a song. That is easy to misread. The man who wrote "A Day in the Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" had a high bar for what counted as inspired, and a track he filed under craft still carries one of the prettiest arrangements of his solo years. The verses drift through heat and whispered trees. The middle lifts. The strings, which he arranged himself, do the work of fog on a morning road.

There is a small scandal tucked into the chant, and it is a good one for a room full of biker DJs. When he first sang the dream-line he was landing on a pronunciation that sounded a lot like a word Capitol did not want on a lyric sheet. He had just come off producing Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats, so the echo was sitting right there in the apartment. Lori Burton, who sang backup and was married to one of the engineers, told the label the phrase was foreign. Lennon shifted the vowel, poussé instead of the other reading, and the single went out clean. Nobody ever produced a translation, because there was never a language to translate.

Listen close after he sings about somebody calling out his name. That whisper of "John" is May Pang. She was on the session, she was in the apartment at 434 East 52nd where a lot of Walls and Bridges got sketched, and she is the voice in the mix. The album was cut at Record Plant East in the summer of 1974 with the Plastic Ono Nuclear Band, the Little Big Horns, and what the sleeve cheerfully calls the Philharmonic Orchestrange. Jesse Ed Davis's guitar and the horn charts keep the dream from floating off entirely. Lennon produced it himself. For a song he later shrugged at, he sure dressed it up.

The rest of Walls and Bridges is the Lost Weekend on vinyl: the Elton John duet that finally gave him a solo number one while he was alive, the sharp edges of "Steel and Glass," the bruised closer "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)," and a scrap of "Ya Ya" with Julian sitting in. "#9 Dream" is the soft room in that house. It went out as a single in late 1974, behind "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," and it still sounds like somebody trying to hold a picture that keeps dissolving at the edges. He ends it the only way a man who does not trust easy answers can end it. He believes. More he cannot say.

To get to a dream-song in a New York studio you have to go back to a porch in Liverpool and a boy who would not put the guitar down. John Winston Lennon was born in 1940 and raised mostly by his Aunt Mimi at Mendips on Menlove Avenue, after his mother Julia's life got too unsteady for a child to ride along. Julia is the one who put a banjo in his hands and showed him how to tune a guitar the same loose way, then handed him the chords to "Ain't That a Shame." Mimi was the one who finally gave in and bought the first real guitar, about seventeen pounds, once Elvis had turned the whole country upside down and the boy would not shut up about it. She hoped he would grow out of it. He did not.

Skiffle was the door. Lonnie Donegan had made washboard, tea-chest bass, and a cheap guitar into a national craze, and a Quarry Bank schoolboy did not need a drum kit or a manager to start a band. Late in 1956 Lennon and Eric Griffiths pulled a little group together, first under the name the Blackjacks, then the Quarrymen, lifted from a line in the school song. Pete Shotton played washboard. They learned "Rock Island Line," "Cumberland Gap," and whatever else Donegan had put on a record. The first gigs were church halls, school dances, the back of a truck. Julia came to cheer. Mimi worried. The repertoire got louder as rock and roll records arrived from the docks.

The turn that mattered came on July 6, 1957, at St. Peter's Church fete in Woolton. Ivan Vaughan brought a younger friend named Paul McCartney, partly because there might be girls, partly because the kid could play. After the Quarrymen set, McCartney picked up a guitar and ran through "Twenty Flight Rock," and he knew the words. Lennon, who had a habit of bluffing lyrics he had not learned, clocked that immediately. A few days later the invitation went out. George Harrison came in on a bus audition not long after, playing "Raunchy" well enough to get past the age problem. By the time the name changed to the Beatles and the nights moved to Hamburg, the shape of the thing was already there: two writers, a tight little gang, and a front man who had started on a banjo chord and a schoolyard dare.

That is the long road into "#9 Dream." The same ear that caught a nonsense line in a New York dream had once caught a skiffle song on the radio and decided a washboard band was a reasonable answer. The craft he talked down in 1980 was the craft he had been practicing since he was sixteen. Walls and Bridges keeps the evidence. The album page on his official site still lists "#9 Dream" right there in the track order, strings and all, with the old Dr. Winston O'Boogie line about possession being nine tenths of the problem sitting over the artwork.

If you want the catalog straight from the estate, the official home is John Lennon, and the Walls and Bridges page is the one that names this track. The estate keeps the conversation going on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X, all of them running under his name with the old quotes and the album notes. For the session story in the singer's own circle, May Pang's account of whispering his name on the record and of the dream-line he wrote down half awake lives on her site. Spin it again if you want. The chant still does not mean anything, and that is the whole charm of it.