The Troubadour door

The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.

So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.

“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.'”

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333

This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.

They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.

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