First published 25 September 2000 in The Guardian, G2 Media Supplement
[Please remember, this interview is from 1970 and The Beatles had just split with a lot of sore feelings. John's opinions here would have been tainted by that and changed as time went on.]
LENNON UNCUT
The surviving Beatles have laid out their own version of the band's history, but one voice is missing. Now the publication of a remarkably candid 1970 interview with John Lennon offers us a taste of what he might have said. And, reports Mark Lawson, it's not nice.
By Mark Lawson
On Harrison: He's not the kind of person I would buy the records of... I don't consider my talents fantastic but I consider George's less.
On The Beatles: I don't believe in The Beatles, whatever they were supposed to be in everybody's head. It was a dream. That's all.
On Epstein: He was a nice guy, but he knew what he was doing. He robbed us.
On drugs: I've always needed a drug to survive. The others too, but I always had more. I always took more pills and more of everything, cause I'm more crazy.
On McCartney: Paul had an impression, like a parent, that we should be thankful for what he did, for keeping the Beatles going. But he kept it going for his own sake.
Though terrible for loved ones, the early death notoriously solves certain late career problems. Escaping or surviving Oswald's bullet, President Kennedy would probably have been blamed for Vietnam and divorced by Jackie. Princess Diana in her 40's - remarried to a heart surgeon or playboy and obsessively consulting cosmetitions as the vital of her glamour dwindled - would have struggled to maintain the love of her middle England constituency.
John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940. Among the event to mark his ghostly landmark birthday [John's 60th] is the republication in book form - with the restoration of material previously deleted for reasons of legality, tact or (in the case of Yoko's intervention) tedium - of a marathon interview Lennon gave in 1970 to Rolling Stone magazine. Almost exactly a decade after speaking to Wenner, Lennon was freeze-framed at 40 by MDC's bullet, but the book and the birthday taunt us to look forward.
Lennon at 60? Imagine...
A Parkinson or South Bank Show Special? Possibly, although, provided he was clear of drugs, the pop star would surely realize how silly the bed-in's and bag-in's and primal scream therapy could be made to seem now. The 30th wedding anniversary with Yoko? Unlikely, given the failure rate of rock marriages. And the published interviews show him bickering with Yoko even deep in love. Perhaps John would now be having a fling with Patsy or Meg on the rebound from Noel and Liam [Gallagher, of Oasis. 'The New Beatles'].
A Beatles reunion concert? Perhaps, only if he had broken with Yoko because the strongest material these interviews is the hatred of his band mates for their treatment of his wife. Imagine... it really is very hard to do. Probably the only certain project would have been the Greatest Hits album, in which, you fear, Lennon would have played down the Beatles songs and played up the Plastic Ono collaborations. It also seems likely that - alive in the year 2000 - Lennon would have mobilized attorneys against the publication of this fuzzy, troubled, bitter conversation from the 70s.
This isn't because the book is bad but because the chats put Lennon's reputation in a context which it has been spared by the reverence inevitably given those slain young.
It's clear that Lennon had exceptional verbal talents. These are present most obviously in the song lyrics (although his 'poetry' collections consist mainly of facetious puns) but also in some magnificent ad-libs. Asked once if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, Lennon answered, "he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles" [I've heard this quote attributed to a few people, including Ringo himself], a response which reveals true comedic gifts. In the same way, his remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" - which was widely seen at the time as a deliberately shocking of the priests - contains a far more subtle acknowledgement of the power and passion of the crowd; a fear of what the Beatles were getting into. One of the best stretch's of the Rolling Stone interviews recalls that the sick and the crippled would be placed in the front row at Beatles concerts and then brought to their dressing rooms. Lennon recalls that the band had an uneasy running joke about how they were asked to heal them.
But little of what comes from Lennon's clever tongue in these interviews matches either the Ringo joke or the Jesus insight. This was probably because, at the time he grudgingly agreed to the grilling, Lennon was adjusting to the end of one significant relationship - with Paul, George and Ringo - and the beginning of two newish ones; with drugs and Yoko Ono.
When the 30 year old Lennon and Wenner, six years younger, sat down in Manhattan before Christmas of 1970, the Beatles' lawyers were gathering for the final splitting of the spoils - on December 31, McCartney would file suits against Starr, Harrison and Lennon - and John was increasingly going solo with Yoko.
Lennon several times tries to abandon the conversation - citing boredom - and seems to continue only because he wishes to settle scores. He word-playingly called one of his verse collections In His Own Write and, in the same spirit, these interviews may have been called Putting His Spokes in.
The most important restored passage for Beatles admirers and music historians is the one dealing with the reaction of the other three to Yoko. When Wenner asks, "How would you characterize George, Paul and Ringo's reactions to her?" Lennon replies: "It's the same. You can quote Paul, you can look it up in the papers. He's said it many times; at first he hated Yoko and then he got to like her. It's too late for me. And for Yoko. Why should she take that sort of shit from those people? They were writing about her looking miserable in Let It Be.
"You sit through 60 sessions with the most big-headed, up tight people on Earth and see what it's fuckin' like, and be insulted just because you love someone... I'll never forgive them. I don't care a fucking shit about Hare Krishna and God and Paul... I don't forgive 'em for that."
For the original publication Wenner apparently extended the quote with a soothing coda in which Lennon admits, "although I can't help still loving them either." The truthfulness of this version of matters because Anthology, written by the surviving three, suggests that the boys eventually got over the Yoko coldness. Perhaps there was a rapprochement in the final decade of Lennon's life but, in 1970, his hatred of McCartney in particular spatters from these transcripts. The others "got fed up with being side-men for Paul." Paul was impressed by Linda's dad because, "he's got Picasso's hanging on the wall and because he's some kind of East Coast suit. Form and not substance. And that's McCartney."
There has always been psychological interest in the extent to which the boy band was shattered by the inclusion of girls. This sexual subtext is further illuminated in these interviews. Angry with his colleagues for their suspicion of Yoko, Lennon seems most obsessed in the finally terminal business wrangling's with the fact Paul wants to bring Linda's family into the management of the band.
This lack of self-knowledge also applies to the stars discussion if gurus. He is witheringly funny about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who counseled the Beatles in the late 60s. He is with them in Bangor when the news of Brian Epstein's death comes through and advises them to "be happy". And yet, even as he sees through the Maharishi in this interview, Lennon is being psychologically blindfolded by the 'primal scream therapy' of Dr Arthur Janov. He tells Wenner, "It's a process going on - we primal almost daily... and, in a nutshell, primal therapy allowed us to feel feelings continually, and those feelings usually make you cry."
This book captures a moment on the cusp between the 60s and the 70s when the religion of celebrity - now our every day faith - was taking seed. Interviewers seriously expected pop stars to speak wisdom and the performers responded to this pressure by fleeing to gurus and pharmacists.
But there are many intriguing incidental details here. Lennon explains that the opaque lyrics of Norwegian Wood were not attributable to drugs - although the poetic streak in his writing elsewhere often did have a chemical provocation - but to the fact the song describes an affair and he couldn't let his then wife know that.
It's also fascinating to hear him insist that he knew he was a genius at age eight or nine and railed against the aunt who raised him for throwing away some early verse because, "It'll be worth millions when I'm famous." The problem with printed interviews, however, is that we cannot be sure of the tone of this. Lennon may be sending himself up - or Wenner.
Although the Lennon legend has undoubtedly been helped by the martyrdom, it was also crucial to his allure that, unlike former colleagues, he had done nothing as embarrassing as Mull of Kintyre or Thomas the Tank Engine voiceovers.
His death kept him cool. Though influenced by the music of the Beatles in general, Noel and Liam Gallagher copied Lennon in appearance and attitude. It was the writer of Imagine's fame that Chris Evan's tried to aggrandize in the mobile phone ad. [An advert that had celebrities talking about who they would like to have a 'one-to-one' with].
But only under the influential [sic] of acute nostalgia or strong narcotics could a reader get through these interviews with a straight face.
A lyricist who words on many occasions touched poetry here spews angry and amnesiac ramblings. The Rolling Stone conversations are his Mull, his Thomas. Yoko Ono, in her introductions, suggests John would have loved the internet because, "he liked to experiment with new media." Perhaps. But it is hard to weep too deeply for this website we missed and there's always the alternative possibility that Lennon would have been in court with today's living pop stars protecting his royalties from unauthorized downloading. The life of John Lennon had a tragic shape but - as so often with these cases - it can seem a kinder shape than the alternative.
The Rolling Stone interviews are in "Lennon Remembers" by Jan S Wenner.
