Some people have got nothing better to do than study Bibles and make myths about it and study rocks and make stories about how people used to live. They live vicariously. Is there a point at which you decided you and Yoko would give up your private life? We decided that if we were going to do anything, like get married or like this film we are going to make now, that we would dedicate it to peace and the concept of peace. During that period, because we are what we are, it evolved that somehow we ended up being responsible to produce peace.
Even in our own heads we would get that way. What do you think the effects were? Somebody else has to tell us what the reaction is. What happened in Denmark? During the Peace Festival scene? There was a doctor. He talked like crackers and then he said he would put us back into our past life. But he was such a nice guy in a way. But they were obviously all insane people, and then these other two came with him….
Actually, we went there to talk to Kyoko,. What do you think rock and roll will become? Whatever we make it. If we want to go bullshitting off into intellectualism with rock and roll then we are going to get bullshitting rock intellectualism. Rock and roll will be whatever we make it. Why do you think it means so much to people? Because the best stuff is primitive enough and has no bullshit. I read that Eldridge Cleaver said that Blacks gave the middle class whites back their bodies, and put their minds and bodies together.
Something like that. It gets through; it got through to me, the only thing to get through to me of all the things that were happening when I was Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal. You recognize something in it which is true, like all true art. Whatever art is, readers. Yoko: Classical music was basically and then it went into 4, 3, 2, which is just a waltz rhythm and all of that, but it just went further and further away from the heartbeat.
Heartbeat is Rhythm became very decorative, like Schoenberg, Webern. It is highly complicated and interesting — our minds are very much like that — but they lost the heartbeat.
You feel basically the same way about rock and roll at 30 as you did at The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music. It means a lot of things. How can they talk about it like that? What is Beatle music?
What was it in your music that turned everyone on at first? Why was it so infectious? The first gimmick was the harmonica. I would love to remix some of the early stuff, because it is better than it sounds. What do you think of those concerts like the Hollywood Bowl? It was awful, I hated it. Some of those big gigs were good, but not many of them. In what way was it new? I used to like guitars. I wonder where I fit in, what was my contribution?
I get hurt, you know, sick of it. We saw the movie Alice in Wonderland in L. What did you think of Abbey Road? That was my song. It was a competent album, like Rubber Soul. It was together in that way, but Abbey Road had no life in it.
It was the first thing you did together. It was great. I wrote it in the morning on the piano. I went to the office and sang it many times. I went in and he played it back and there it was. Does it sound all right? When did you first become aware of the idea of stereo, being able to work with stereo?
Oh, some time or other. There was a period when we started realizing that you could go and remix it yourself. We would ask what happened to the bass or something. It must have been a gradual thing.
Did you ever see Moratorium Day in Washington, D. That is what it is for, you know. You know, how can you beat Beethoven or Shakespeare or whatever? In what respect? On the other hand, it might just be ignored. We began talking again, alone with Yoko, about that.
Do you have a feeling for a Number One record? What will stay in your head the longest? What are the implications? The implications are all money — all of it is money, man.
To me, it sounds like there are 40 songs on there. How quick do you get to Number One? Be a good boy, now, John, you had a hard time, but me, me and my mother. Did you write most of the stuff in this album on guitar or on piano? The ones on which I play guitar, I wrote on guitar; the ones on which I play piano, I wrote on piano. What are the differences to you when you write them?
Because I can play the piano even worse than I play the guitar — a limited palette, as they call it — I surprise myself. What do you think are your best songs that you have written? The one best song? Have you ever thought of that? The lyric is as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes me feel secure to know that I was that aware of myself then. In fact, it could be the best. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody.
So what happened with Let It Be? It was another one like Magical Mystery Tour. In a nutshell, it was time for another Beatle movie or something; Paul wanted us to go on the road or do something. He sort of set it up, and there were discussions about where to go, and all of that. I had Yoko by them, and I would just tag along.
Nobody did. Year after year, that begins to wear you down. How long did those sessions last? Paul had this idea that he was going to rehearse us. We put down a few tracks, and nobody was in it at all. It just was a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studio, being filmed all the time, I just wanted them to go away. So how did it end? The tape ended up like the bootleg version.
None of us could be bothered going in. Nobody called anybody about it, and the tapes were left there. Glyn Johns did it. We were going to let it out in really shitty condition. There were 29 hours of tape, so much that it was like a movie. Twenty takes of everything, because we were rehearsing and taking everything.
Nobody could face looking at it. When Spector came around, we said, Well, if you want to work with us, go and do your audition. He worked like a pig on it. He always wanted to work with the Beatles, and he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit, with a lousy feeling toward it, ever. And he made something out of it. He did a great job. I had thought it would be good to let the shitty version out because it would break the Beatles, break the myth.
It would be just us, with no trousers on and no glossy paint over the cover, and no hype: This is what we are like with our trousers off, would you please end the game now? We ended up doing Abbey Road quickly, and putting out something slick to preserve the myth. Finally, when Let It Be was going to be released, Paul wanted to bring out his album.
There were so many clashes. I think he wanted to show he was the Beatles. Were you surprised when you heard it, at what he had done? I expected just a little more. What do you think Paul will think of your album? In me heart of hearts, I wish I was the only one in the world or whatever it is.
What was it like to go on tour? You had cripples coming up to you. That was our version of what was happening. People were sort of touching us as we walked past, that kind of thing. I walked out of that, swearing at all of them. What was the question?
The cripples. Wherever we went on tour, in Britain and everywhere we went, there were always a few seats laid aside for cripples and people in wheelchairs. Because we were famous, we were supposed to have epileptics and whatever they are in our dressing room all the time.
It just got to be like that and we were very sort of callous about it. It was just dreadful: you would open up every night, and instead of seeing kids there, you would just see a row full of cripples along the front. It seemed that we were just surrounded by cripples and blind people all the time, and when we would go through corridors, they would be all touching us and things like that.
It was horrifying. You must have been still fairly young and naive at that point. Yeah, well, as naive as In His Own Write. Surely that must have made you think for a second. Well, I mean we knew what the game was. There is only so much we could say, you know, with the pressure on us, to do and to perform. We had these people thrust on us. I was always drunk, insulting them. It would hurt me. I would go insane, swearing at them. I would do something. Being a Beatle?
If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. I read about Van Gogh, Beethoven, any of the fuckers. They live vicariously through me and other artists, and we are the ones. One of my big things is that I wish to be a fisherman.
What do you think the effect was of the Beatles on the history of Britain? It is exactly the same. It just makes you puke, and I woke up to that too. Why do you think the impact of the Beatles was so much bigger in America than it was in England? The same reason that American stars are so much bigger in England: the grass is greener.
We were really professional by the time we got to the States; we had learned the whole game. When we arrived here we knew how to handle the press; the British press were the toughest in the world and we could handle anything.
We were all right. We knew we would wipe you out if we could just get a grip on you. We were new. There was no conception of dress or any of that jazz. It was just the five of us, us and the Stones were really the hip ones; the rest of England were just the same as they ever were. You tend to get nationalistic, and we would really laugh at America, except for its music. It was that lonely, it was fantastic. When we came over here and it was the same — nobody was listening to rock and roll or to black music in America — we felt as though we were coming to the land of its origin but nobody wanted to know about it.
I think he was. Who do you think has done the best versions of your stuff? I never went much for the covers. I like people doing it, I get a kick out of it.
That I sort of enjoyed, somebody who reacted immediately to what I had said. Did you write that about anybody in particular? Probably about myself. I remember I was just going through this paranoia trying to write something and nothing would come out so I just lay down and tried to not write and then this came out, the whole thing came out in one gulp.
What songs really stick in your mind as being Lennon-McCartney songs? Those are the ones. In a rock band you have to make singles, you have to keep writing them. Plenty more. We both had our fingers in each others pies.
I remember that the simplicity on the new album was evident on the Beatles double album. I started simplifying my lyrics then, on the double album. What were the circumstances? Where were you? I was in Kenwood and I would just be songwriting. I was already a stylized songwriter on the first album. But to express myself I would write Spaniard in the Works or In His Own Write, the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions.
They were just a joke. Then I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively, but subjectively. I was trying to write about an affair without letting me wife know I was writing about an affair, so it was very gobbledegook. When did you decide to put a sitar on it? I think it was at the studio. I think we did it in sections.
I wrote that in Kenwood. I wrote it upstairs, that was one where I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it. Would you just record yourself and a guitar on a tape and then bring it in to the studio? I would double track the guitar or the voice or something on the tape. Why Christianity in that song? Because I was brought up in the church. I was pretty heavy on the church in both books, but it was never picked up although it was obviously there.
I was just talking about Christianity in that — a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven. Starting with the single. And we put out what? I had been thinking about it up in the hills in India. This is what I say. All the thing was made with loops, I had about thirty loops going, fed them onto one basic track.
I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I really wanted that released. You know, I really thought that love would save us all. I would never know until I went to China.
I just wondered what the kids who were actually Maoists were doing. I wondered what their motive was and what was really going on. It might happen now, or it might happen in a hundred years, but. Having a violent revolution now might just be the end of the world.
Not necessarily. What have you got to lose? You think by holding on it will be all right? I cherish life. Oh, I like that one of my best, I had forgotten about that. Oh, I love it.
I like all the different things that are happening in it. A warm gun means that you just shot something. Only after I read it or somebody told me, like you coming up. I listened to it as I made it. Everytime after that though I would look at the titles to see what it said, and usually they never said anything. Pepper is the one. Well, it was a peak. So we were doing it in his room with the piano.
I felt more at ease with that than the production. But Pepper was a peak all right. Do you think it is? Yeah, sure. How did you get in touch with Allen Klein? I got various messages through various people that Allen Klein would like to talk to you. Really, it was Mick who got us together. I mean I knew who he was. I had heard about him over the years; the first time I heard about him was that he said one day he would have the Beatles, and this was when Brian was with us.
He had offered Brian this good deal, which in retrospect was something Brian should have done. This was years ago. I had heard about all these dreadful rumors about him but I could never coordinate it with the fact that the Stones seemed to be going on and on with him and nobody ever said a word.
Yoko, what happened next? Did we call him or did we accept his call? Then finally did we accept the call or did I put a call through? But then we met and it was very traumatic. In what way? We are both very nervous. He was nervous as shit, and I was nervous as shit, and Yoko was nervous. We met at the Dorchester, we went up to his room, and we just went in you know. He was sitting there all nervous. But he was very nervous, you could see it in his face.
And one of the things that still surprises me is how monothematic American culture can be. In it was all about O. Everybody talked about O. He was everywhere on TV.
Just like Trump today, he consumed the entire bandwidth. Today we have so much more content than in because of the rise of the Internet and the ability of people to create content. But look at the percentage of all conversations and online communications that are consumed by Trump. Because one of the common criticisms of the current information glut is we have no shared cultural center.
Everybody has their own narrow interest and we have no shared cultural bond, no John Lennon. Is that a collective memory phenomena or is it because nowadays the guys in the middle of the culture are different guys?
Different people come into the center of culture because of the type of mediums that are available. There have been musicians for thousands of years, and for most of that history, musicians have not been wealthy. It was only when there was a medium that allowed them to sell their music—vinyl, magnetic tapes, and discs—that they were able to make money.
When that technology was replaced by simple forms of copying, like the ability to copy files on the Internet, all that went away. And I think a lot of young people now look up to entrepreneurs the way we used to look up to musicians. Did you come away from your study with insights into what may or may not cause something to stick in collective memory? He says you can equate quality and popularity in situations in which performance is clearly measurable. But in cases in which performance is not clearly measurable, you cannot equate popularity with quality.
If you look at tennis players, you find tennis players who win tournaments and difficult games are more popular. So quality and fame are closely correlated in a field in which performance is measured as tightly as professional tennis players. As you move to things that are less quantifiable in terms of performance, like modern art, your networks are going to be more important in determining popularity.
Well, I would say that collective memory decay is an important way to measure and think about quality. If you publish some clickbait that is popular in the beginning, that gets a lot of views in the first couple of days, but a year later, nobody looks at it, you have a good metric.
So the differences in longevity are important metrics for quality. That goes back to a paper I did when I was an undergrad about the decay functions of attendance of movies. There were some movies that had a lot of box office revenue in the first week but then decayed really fast.
And there were other movies that decayed more slowly. We created a model in which people would talk to each other and communicate information of the quality of the movie. And that model only had one parameter, which was how good was the movie was. So the quality of the movie would increase or decrease the probability that people would go watch it.
I was always bitterly ashamed of it because I could sing better than that. In , just a few years after getting his license at the ripe old age of 25, Lennon panicked while driving in Scotland with Julian, Ono, and her daughter Kyoko, crashing his Austin Maxi in spectacular fashion.
Lennon, Ono, and Kyoko all ended up needing stitches on their faces, with Ono suffering a back injury as well. Julian was treated for shock but was otherwise unscathed in the accident. The hospital there was just great. All jokes aside, the event affected Lennon deeply and moved him to surrender his license once and for all. Lennon was passionate about using his platform to bring awareness to issues he believed in, such as the need for America to end its war with Vietnam.
When Lennon and Ono moved to the U. Perhaps the last photograph of John Lennon was taken on December 8, , as he signed a copy of Double Fantasy for a fan. Last known pic of John alive with Mark, his assassin, to the right. He was always portrayed as this working-class hero but he was brought up in this rather nice house and surroundings.
And all those contradictions are what make him interesting to me, not the fact he was some cardboard character who never did anything wrong. In this case, it explored what might have happened when Lennon and the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein spent a weekend in Barcelona in , and presented the episode as a story of tender yet forbidden love between the two.
Was it grounded in any reality? In , Yoko Ono said in an interview that Lennon saw bisexuality as natural while Lennon himself said that his relationship with Epstein was " almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated". I was just a little kid when he died, but John was one of the only adult males I saw out there talking openly about feminism.
Not all portrayals of Lennon in fiction have aimed for a realistic examination of his life with or without the Beatles.
He can even be found in the Marvel comic book universe, via the character of John The Skrull a member of the shapeshifting alien race created by writer Paul Cornell, who routinely takes the appearance of Lennon. Both foreground different aspects of the multi-faceted Lennon persona. Lennon would be the most likely to do that. In the end, the character disposes of his book, not wanting his plot to be over-analysed. And as for the impact the Lennon myth has had on the surviving Beatles?
Sheffield says that the posthumous canonisation of Lennon after his death was to the detriment of Paul, Ringo, and George. Understandably, Lennon's bandmates — and the wider pop community — paid their own musical tributes to him in the decades after his death, largely with ruminations on the loss of a friend and great talent rather than any serious attempts to portray him as one thing or another.
0コメント