Why John Lennon Once Made ‘Quite a Scene’ by Pulling Out a Knife at a Party

John Lennon’s producer and friend Jack Douglas is opening up about the time the late musician used rather unconventional means to quiet down a party.

Douglas, 80, appeared on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast last week, and reflected on the time that he and Lennon attended a party in New York City in the early 1970s with Abbie Hoffman and other counterculture activists.

“They were talking in his apartment. ‘Off the pig.’ They were talking about violence, and he was getting drunker and drunker,” Douglas recalled. “He made quite a scene at that party. He grabbed a knife in the kitchen and he went at this woman who had been yelling to ‘off the pigs,’ and he was like, ‘You want violence? I’ll show you violence!’”

The music producer said Lennon’s scare tactic worked, as he “scared the s–t out of” the woman, and he and Douglas left the party.

“Off the pig” was a political slogan often used by the Black Panthers and other political parties, with pig meaning police.

Lennon, who was murdered in December 1980 at age 40, and his wife Yoko Ono became involved with Hoffman and Jerry Rubin upon moving to New York City. The pair even recruited Lennon and Ono to speak at a rally for John Sinclair, a writer arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for distributing marijuana.

Douglas said that Hoffman, Rubin and their crew were “using” Lennon to further their political activism, and recalled the ex-Beatle describing the group as “nutcases” when he first invited Douglas to the party where he brandished the knife.

Amid his anti-war activism with Ono, the “Imagine” singer was put under surveillance by the FBI in 1971 and was nearly deported.

Douglas opened up about working in the studio with Lennon on the day he died in a 2023 interview with PEOPLE, saying the star was “very positive” and looking forward to his 9 a.m. studio call time the next day.

“During that whole period, he was just so excited to be back and so happy to be with his family and how much he loved [his son] Sean and how things with Yoko were pretty good,” he said. “It was a very different John, and that whole period was just lovely.”

Douglas also said that the musician had “a lot of plans,” and was excited about his future.

“I once asked [John], ‘What’s your secret of writing a really great song?’ And he said, ‘Tell the truth, and make it rhyme.’ The reason why so many people felt close to him was because they always felt they knew him, because he sang about what he was going through,” he said. “There was just this great truth about his music.”