Lefty Wilbury
Active Member
- Nov 4, 2003
- 1,109
- 36
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/8898794
Long Night's Journey Into Day
A Conversation with John Lennon
"The time has come,"
The Walrus said,
"To talk of many things . . ."
-- Lewis Carroll
Here is John Lennon: thin bare arms, a rumpled T-shirt, bare feet, delicate fingers curled around a brown-papered cigarette, reaching for a cup of steaming coffee. A pale winter sun streams into the seventh-floor apartment in the Dakota, an expensive apartment house that stands like a pile of Nineteenth century memories on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Earlier, the Irish doorman had expressed surprise when I asked for John, because this is where Yoko Ono had lived alone for a year. The building, with its gargoyles and vaulted stone turrets, has seen a lot, and has housed everyone from Lauren Bacall and Rex Reed to Rosemary's baby. There is certainly room for Dr. Winston O'Boogie.
And now John Lennon is talking in a soft, becalmed voice, the old jagged angers gone for now, while the drilling jangle of the New York streets drifts into the room. He has been back with Yoko for three days, after a wild, painful year away, and there is a gray morning feel of hangover in the clean bright room. Against a wall, a white piano stands like an invitation to begin again; a tree is framed by one window, a plant by another, both in an attitude of Zen-like simplicity, full of spaces. I think of Harold Pinter's words: "When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness." There is, of course, always echo when you are with John Lennon, an echo of the loudest, grandest, gaudiest noise made in our time. But John Lennon is more than simply a Beatle, retired or in exile, more than just an echo. At thirty-four, he is moving into full maturity as a man and an artist and seems less afraid than ever before of nakedness.
On that first morning, and later, we talked only briefly about the Beatles. For the moment at least, talk of a reunion is only a perhaps. "What we did was what we did," he said in 1970, "but what we are is something different."
The twenty Beatles albums are there; the voices are forever young. John Lennon, the young man with the guitar who went to Hamburg and played the eight-hour gigs with the others, popping pills to stay up, drawing on some tough maniac energy. "You see," he explained later, "we wanted to be bigger than Elvis . . ."
Bigger than Elvis. Bigger than Sinatra. Bigger than God. John told everyone how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and for a couple of weeks that summer most of the Western world seemed to go into an uproar. Was the world really that innocent so short a time ago? No. It was just that John Lennon was explaining that the world had changed and the newspapers had to catch up; we were not going to have any more aw-shucks heroes. So we could all run in the endless emptiness of the rugby field in A Hard Day's Night, rising and falling, in slow motion or fast, but sooner or later we would have to grow up. The Beatles were custodians of childhood. They could not last.
And yet . . . and yet, it seemed when it was finally over, when they had all gone their separate ways, when Brian Epstein lay dead and Apple was some terrible mess and the lawyers and the agents and the money men had come in to paw the remains, it often seemed that John was the only one whose heart was truly broken. Cynthia Lennon said it best, when all of them were still together: "They seem to need you less than you need them." From some corner of his broken heart, John gave the most bitter interviews, full of hurt and resentment, covered over with the language of violence. In some way, he had been the engine of the group, the artistic armature driving the machine beyond its own limits, restless, easily bored, in love with speed the way Picasso was in love with speed, and possessed of a hoodlum's fanatic heart. Part of him was Pinkie from Brighton Rock; another was Christopher Marlowe dying in a barroom brawl at twenty-nine. John provided the Teddy Boy darkness behind the smiling face of the early Beatles; it is why they were not the Beach Boys. I remember going up to the Ad Lib in London with Al Aronowitz in '64, and the Beatles were there drinking hard with the Rolling Stones, the music deafening, the floor sagging under the weight of what seemed like half a thousand dancers. Paul McCartney was talking easily; Ringo was kidding and nice; George, as the stereotype told us, was quiet. But John Lennon was a son of a bitch. I felt an anger in him that was even fiercer than my own. We came close to violence, the words reduced to Irish immigrant code as anger bumped against anger, and Aronowitz had to move in and smother the anger with his easy kindness. Later I was ashamed of myself, and the memory of that night has stayed with me through all the years since as I watched John from a distance, engaged in his reckless dance with tragedy.
"One comes back again and again to the criminal," wrote Joyce Carol Oates, "who is the most important person because he alone of all people acts; he alone, by causing others to suffer and by passing through suffering himself, makes happiness possible."
She wrote about Dostoevsky, but the words have always reminded me of John Lennon. We only know a small part of what really has happened to him in the years since he met Yoko Ono in 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London. The details belong to John Lennon alone. But we know how the other Beatles stood in judgment ("like a jury") on Yoko. We know how viciously the press in England sneered at them and attacked them. Yoko saw the artist in him: "John is like a frail wind . . ." But reviewers were already saying that Yoko had ruined his art.
Christ! You know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going,
They're going to crucify me.
There was no literal crucifixion, but John moved through everything else: Bed-Ins, peace posters, a phony drug arrest, the acorns planted in the plastic pots in the Coventry Cathedral. He followed Yoko into the rare air of the avante-garde, banging up against Cage and Bartok, undergoing a re-barbarization of his music as if running to some older, purer vision he had of himself, created in the loneliness of the Liverpool art school when he was convinced he was a genius. Bagism, Shagism, Rubin and Hoffman, acid and anger; the marriage in Gibraltar, seventeen stitches in a car crash in Scotland, the MBE handed back to the Queen, the Plastic Ono Band, his hair long, his hair short, the neat, precise features wearing a series of masks, his life with Yoko a series of public events. Working Class Hero. Some Time in New York City. Power to the People. And ever deeper into America: into its crazed, filthy Nixonian heart and the immigration case, and that form of the Higher Paranoia that comes because you are a victim in a time when all the other victims have proof and you have none.
"All we are saying . . ."
It was a long way from Chuck Berry.
Until finally people started to write him off. His records were selling but it wasn't like the Beatles, it wasn't even like the other ex-Beatles. John wasn't the one Who Had Gone Too Far.
A year ago, he and Yoko split up and some people cheered. We live in strange times.
And then, as if from nowhere, came Walls and Bridges. John had a big hit single with "Whatever Gets You thru the Night." And the music was wonderful: full of invention, tenderness, remorse, more personal than anything he had written before; the music clearly showing the effects of his time with Yoko. More than anything else, though, the songs were essays in autobiography, the words and music of a man trying to understand a huge part of his life. "I've been across to the other side/I've shown you everything, I've got nothing to hide . . ."
What follows is a result of two long talks with John Lennon at the end of a difficult year. As an interview, it is far from definitive, but nothing will ever be definitive in John Lennon's life: He is the sort of artist, like the aforementioned Picasso, who is always in the process of becoming. I think of this as kind of interim report from one of the bravest human beings I know. Oh yes: He looked happy.
What's your life like right now?
Well . . . Life: It's '75 now, isn't it? Well, I've just settled the Beatles settlement. It must've happened in the last month. Took three years. (pause) And on this day that you've come here, I seem to have moved back in here. In the last three days. By the time this goes out, I don't know . . . That's a big change. Maybe that's why I'm sleeping funny. As a friend says, I went out for coffee and some papers and I didn't come back. (chuckles) Or vice versa: It's always written that way, y'know. All of us. You know, the guy walked. It's never that simple.
What did happen with you and Yoko? Who broke it up and how did you end up back together again?
Well, it's not a matter of who broke it up. It broke up. And why did we end up back together? (pompous voice) We ended up together again because it was diplomatically viable . . . Come on. We got back together because we love each other.
I loved your line: "The separation didn't work out."
That's it. It didn't work out. And the reaction to the breakup was all that madness. I was like a chicken without a head.
What was the final Beatles settlement?
In a nutshell, what was arranged was that everybody gets their own individual monies. Even up till this year -- till the settlement was signed -- all the monies were going into one pot. All individual records, mine, Ringo's, Paul's -- all into one big pot. It had to go through this big machinery and then come out to us, eventually. So now, even the old Beatle royalties, everything goes into four separate accounts instead of one big pot all the time. That's that. The rest of it was ground rules. Everybody said the Beatles've signed this paper, that means they're no longer tied in any way. That's bullshit. We still own this thing called Apple. Which, you can explain, is a bank. A bank the money goes into. But there's still the entity itself known as the Beatles. The product, the name, the likeness, the Apple thing itself, which still exists, and we still have to communicate on it and make decisions on it and decide who's to run Apple and who's to do what. It's not as cut and dried as the papers said.
Do the old Beatles records still go in a pot?
No one of us can say to EMI, "Here's a new package of Beatle material." We still have to okay everything together, you know, 'cause that's the way we want it anyway.
There's still a good feeling among the guys?
Yeah, yeah. I talked to Ringo and George yesterday. I didn't talk to Paul 'cause he was asleep. George and Paul are talkin' to each other in L.A. now. There's nothin' going down between us. It's all in people's heads.
You went to one of George's concerts; what are your thoughts on his tour?
It wasn't the greatest thing in history. The guy went through some kind of mill. It was probably his turn to get smacked. When we were all together there was periods when the Beatles were in, the Beatles were out, no matter what we were doing. Now it's always the Beatles were great or the Beatles weren't great, whatever opinion people hold. There's a sort of illusion about it. But the actual fact was the Beatles were in for eight months, the Beatles were out for eight months. The public, including the media, are sometimes a bit sheeplike and if the ball starts rolling, well, it's just that somebody's in, somebody's out. George is out for the moment. And I think it didn't matter what he did on tour.
George told Rolling Stone that if you wanted the Beatles, go listen to Wings. It seemed a bit of a putdown.
I didn't see what George said, so I really don't have any comment. (pause) Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It's conceptual. I mean, they're backup men for Paul. It doesn't matter who's playing. You can call them Wings, but it's Paul McCartney music. And it's good stuff. It's good Paul music and I don't really see the connection.
What do you think of Richard Perry's work with Ringo?
I think it's great. Perry's great, Ringo's great, I think the combination was great and look how well they did together. There's no complaints if you're Number One.
George said at his press conference that he could play with you again but not with Paul. How do you feel?
I could play with all of them. George is entitled to say that, and he'll probably change his mind by Friday. You know, we're all human. We can all change our minds. So I don't take any of my statements or any of their statements as the last word on whether we will. And if we do, the newspapers will learn about it after the fact. If we're gonna play, we're just gonna play.
In retrospect, what do you think of the whole Lennon Remembers episode?
Well, the other guys, their reaction was public. Ringo made some sort of comment that was funny, which I can't remember, something like, "You've gone too far this time, Johnnie." Paul said (stuffy voice), "Well, that's his problem." I can't remember what George said. I mean, they don't care, they've been with me for fifteen or twenty years, they know damn well what I'm like. It just so happens it was in the press. I mean, they know what I'm like. I'm not ashamed of it at all. I don't really like hurting people, but Jann Wenner questioned me when I was almost still in therapy and you can't play games. You're opened up. It was like he got me on an acid trip. Things come out. I got both reactions from that article. A lot of people thought it was right on. My only upset was Jann insisted on making a book out of it.
Walls and Bridges has an undertone of regret to it. Did you sit down consciously to make an album like that?
No, well . . . Let's say this last year has been an extraordinary year for me personally. And I'm almost amazed that I could get anything out. But I enjoyed doing Walls and Bridges and it wasn't hard when I had the whole thing to go into the studio and do it. I'm surprised it wasn't just all bluuuugggghhhh. (pause) I had the most peculiar year. And . . . I'm just glad that something came out. It's describing the year, in a way, but it's not as sort of schizophrenic as the year really was. I think I got such a shock during that year that the impact hasn't come through. It isn't all on Walls and Bridges though. There's a hint of it there. It has to do with age and God knows what else. But only the surface has been touched on Walls and Bridges, you know?
What was it about the year? Do you want to try talking about it?
Well, you can't put your finger on it. It started, somehow, at the end of '73, goin' to do this Rock 'n' Roll album [with Phil Spector]. It had quite a lot to do with Yoko and I, whether I knew it or not, and then, suddenly, I was out on me own. Next thing I'd be waking up, drunk, in strange places or reading about meself in the paper, doin' extraordinary things, half of which I'd done and half of which I hadn't done. But you know the game anyway. And find meself sort of in a mad dream for a year. I'd been in many mad dreams, but this . . . It was pretty wild. And then I tried to recover from that. And (long pause) meanwhile life was going on, the Beatles settlement was going on, other things, life was still going on and it wouldn't let you sit with your hangover, in whatever form that took. It was like something -- probably me-self -- kept hitting me while I was trying to do something. I was still trying to do something. I was still trying to carry on a normal life and the whip never let up -- for eight months. So . . . that's what was going on. Incidents: You can put it down to which night with which bottle or which night in which town. It was just sort of a mad year like that . . . And it was just probably fear, and being out on me own, and gettin' old, and are ye gonna make it in the charts? Are ye not gonna make it? All that crap, y'know. All the garbage that y'really know is not the be-all and end-all of your life, but if other things are goin' funny, that's gonna hit you. If you're gonna feel sorry for yourself, you're gonna feel sorry for everything. What it's really to do with is probably the same thing that it's always been to do with all your life: whatever your own personal problems really are, you know? So it was a year that manifested itself (switches to deep actor's voice) in most peculiar fashion. But I'm through it and it's '75 now and I feel better and I'm sittin' here and not lyin' in some weird place with a hangover.
Why do you feel better?
Because I feel like I've been on Sinbad's voyage, you know, and I've battled all those monsters and I've got back. (long pause) Weird.
Tell me about the Rock 'n' Roll album.
It started in '73 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad, drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can't begin to say, it's just barmy, there's a jinx on that album. And I've just started writing a new one. Got maybe half of it written . . .
What about the stories that Spector's working habits are a little odd? For example, that he either showed off or shot off guns in the studios?
I don't like to tell tales out of school, y'know. But I do know there was an awful loud noise in the toilet of the Record Plant West.
What actually did happen those nights at the Troubadour when you heckled the Smothers Brothers and went walking around with a Kotex on your head asking the waitress, "Do you know who I am?"
Ah, y'want the juice . . . If I'd said, "Do you know who I am?" I'd have said it in a joke. Because I know who I am, and I know she knew, because I musta been wearing a Kotex on me head, right? I picked up a Kotex in a restaurant, in the toilet, and it was clean and just for a gag I came back to the table with it on me head. And 'cause it stuck there with sweat, just stayed there, I didn't have to keep it on. It just stayed there till it fell off. And the waitress said, "Yeah, you're an asshole with a Kotex on," and I think it's a good remark and so what? Tommy Smothers was a completely different night and has been covered a million times. It was my first night on Brandy Alexanders and my last. (laughs) And I was with Harry Nilsson, who was no help at all. (laughs)
Long Night's Journey Into Day
A Conversation with John Lennon
"The time has come,"
The Walrus said,
"To talk of many things . . ."
-- Lewis Carroll
Here is John Lennon: thin bare arms, a rumpled T-shirt, bare feet, delicate fingers curled around a brown-papered cigarette, reaching for a cup of steaming coffee. A pale winter sun streams into the seventh-floor apartment in the Dakota, an expensive apartment house that stands like a pile of Nineteenth century memories on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Earlier, the Irish doorman had expressed surprise when I asked for John, because this is where Yoko Ono had lived alone for a year. The building, with its gargoyles and vaulted stone turrets, has seen a lot, and has housed everyone from Lauren Bacall and Rex Reed to Rosemary's baby. There is certainly room for Dr. Winston O'Boogie.
And now John Lennon is talking in a soft, becalmed voice, the old jagged angers gone for now, while the drilling jangle of the New York streets drifts into the room. He has been back with Yoko for three days, after a wild, painful year away, and there is a gray morning feel of hangover in the clean bright room. Against a wall, a white piano stands like an invitation to begin again; a tree is framed by one window, a plant by another, both in an attitude of Zen-like simplicity, full of spaces. I think of Harold Pinter's words: "When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness." There is, of course, always echo when you are with John Lennon, an echo of the loudest, grandest, gaudiest noise made in our time. But John Lennon is more than simply a Beatle, retired or in exile, more than just an echo. At thirty-four, he is moving into full maturity as a man and an artist and seems less afraid than ever before of nakedness.
On that first morning, and later, we talked only briefly about the Beatles. For the moment at least, talk of a reunion is only a perhaps. "What we did was what we did," he said in 1970, "but what we are is something different."
The twenty Beatles albums are there; the voices are forever young. John Lennon, the young man with the guitar who went to Hamburg and played the eight-hour gigs with the others, popping pills to stay up, drawing on some tough maniac energy. "You see," he explained later, "we wanted to be bigger than Elvis . . ."
Bigger than Elvis. Bigger than Sinatra. Bigger than God. John told everyone how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and for a couple of weeks that summer most of the Western world seemed to go into an uproar. Was the world really that innocent so short a time ago? No. It was just that John Lennon was explaining that the world had changed and the newspapers had to catch up; we were not going to have any more aw-shucks heroes. So we could all run in the endless emptiness of the rugby field in A Hard Day's Night, rising and falling, in slow motion or fast, but sooner or later we would have to grow up. The Beatles were custodians of childhood. They could not last.
And yet . . . and yet, it seemed when it was finally over, when they had all gone their separate ways, when Brian Epstein lay dead and Apple was some terrible mess and the lawyers and the agents and the money men had come in to paw the remains, it often seemed that John was the only one whose heart was truly broken. Cynthia Lennon said it best, when all of them were still together: "They seem to need you less than you need them." From some corner of his broken heart, John gave the most bitter interviews, full of hurt and resentment, covered over with the language of violence. In some way, he had been the engine of the group, the artistic armature driving the machine beyond its own limits, restless, easily bored, in love with speed the way Picasso was in love with speed, and possessed of a hoodlum's fanatic heart. Part of him was Pinkie from Brighton Rock; another was Christopher Marlowe dying in a barroom brawl at twenty-nine. John provided the Teddy Boy darkness behind the smiling face of the early Beatles; it is why they were not the Beach Boys. I remember going up to the Ad Lib in London with Al Aronowitz in '64, and the Beatles were there drinking hard with the Rolling Stones, the music deafening, the floor sagging under the weight of what seemed like half a thousand dancers. Paul McCartney was talking easily; Ringo was kidding and nice; George, as the stereotype told us, was quiet. But John Lennon was a son of a bitch. I felt an anger in him that was even fiercer than my own. We came close to violence, the words reduced to Irish immigrant code as anger bumped against anger, and Aronowitz had to move in and smother the anger with his easy kindness. Later I was ashamed of myself, and the memory of that night has stayed with me through all the years since as I watched John from a distance, engaged in his reckless dance with tragedy.
"One comes back again and again to the criminal," wrote Joyce Carol Oates, "who is the most important person because he alone of all people acts; he alone, by causing others to suffer and by passing through suffering himself, makes happiness possible."
She wrote about Dostoevsky, but the words have always reminded me of John Lennon. We only know a small part of what really has happened to him in the years since he met Yoko Ono in 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London. The details belong to John Lennon alone. But we know how the other Beatles stood in judgment ("like a jury") on Yoko. We know how viciously the press in England sneered at them and attacked them. Yoko saw the artist in him: "John is like a frail wind . . ." But reviewers were already saying that Yoko had ruined his art.
Christ! You know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going,
They're going to crucify me.
There was no literal crucifixion, but John moved through everything else: Bed-Ins, peace posters, a phony drug arrest, the acorns planted in the plastic pots in the Coventry Cathedral. He followed Yoko into the rare air of the avante-garde, banging up against Cage and Bartok, undergoing a re-barbarization of his music as if running to some older, purer vision he had of himself, created in the loneliness of the Liverpool art school when he was convinced he was a genius. Bagism, Shagism, Rubin and Hoffman, acid and anger; the marriage in Gibraltar, seventeen stitches in a car crash in Scotland, the MBE handed back to the Queen, the Plastic Ono Band, his hair long, his hair short, the neat, precise features wearing a series of masks, his life with Yoko a series of public events. Working Class Hero. Some Time in New York City. Power to the People. And ever deeper into America: into its crazed, filthy Nixonian heart and the immigration case, and that form of the Higher Paranoia that comes because you are a victim in a time when all the other victims have proof and you have none.
"All we are saying . . ."
It was a long way from Chuck Berry.
Until finally people started to write him off. His records were selling but it wasn't like the Beatles, it wasn't even like the other ex-Beatles. John wasn't the one Who Had Gone Too Far.
A year ago, he and Yoko split up and some people cheered. We live in strange times.
And then, as if from nowhere, came Walls and Bridges. John had a big hit single with "Whatever Gets You thru the Night." And the music was wonderful: full of invention, tenderness, remorse, more personal than anything he had written before; the music clearly showing the effects of his time with Yoko. More than anything else, though, the songs were essays in autobiography, the words and music of a man trying to understand a huge part of his life. "I've been across to the other side/I've shown you everything, I've got nothing to hide . . ."
What follows is a result of two long talks with John Lennon at the end of a difficult year. As an interview, it is far from definitive, but nothing will ever be definitive in John Lennon's life: He is the sort of artist, like the aforementioned Picasso, who is always in the process of becoming. I think of this as kind of interim report from one of the bravest human beings I know. Oh yes: He looked happy.
What's your life like right now?
Well . . . Life: It's '75 now, isn't it? Well, I've just settled the Beatles settlement. It must've happened in the last month. Took three years. (pause) And on this day that you've come here, I seem to have moved back in here. In the last three days. By the time this goes out, I don't know . . . That's a big change. Maybe that's why I'm sleeping funny. As a friend says, I went out for coffee and some papers and I didn't come back. (chuckles) Or vice versa: It's always written that way, y'know. All of us. You know, the guy walked. It's never that simple.
What did happen with you and Yoko? Who broke it up and how did you end up back together again?
Well, it's not a matter of who broke it up. It broke up. And why did we end up back together? (pompous voice) We ended up together again because it was diplomatically viable . . . Come on. We got back together because we love each other.
I loved your line: "The separation didn't work out."
That's it. It didn't work out. And the reaction to the breakup was all that madness. I was like a chicken without a head.
What was the final Beatles settlement?
In a nutshell, what was arranged was that everybody gets their own individual monies. Even up till this year -- till the settlement was signed -- all the monies were going into one pot. All individual records, mine, Ringo's, Paul's -- all into one big pot. It had to go through this big machinery and then come out to us, eventually. So now, even the old Beatle royalties, everything goes into four separate accounts instead of one big pot all the time. That's that. The rest of it was ground rules. Everybody said the Beatles've signed this paper, that means they're no longer tied in any way. That's bullshit. We still own this thing called Apple. Which, you can explain, is a bank. A bank the money goes into. But there's still the entity itself known as the Beatles. The product, the name, the likeness, the Apple thing itself, which still exists, and we still have to communicate on it and make decisions on it and decide who's to run Apple and who's to do what. It's not as cut and dried as the papers said.
Do the old Beatles records still go in a pot?
No one of us can say to EMI, "Here's a new package of Beatle material." We still have to okay everything together, you know, 'cause that's the way we want it anyway.
There's still a good feeling among the guys?
Yeah, yeah. I talked to Ringo and George yesterday. I didn't talk to Paul 'cause he was asleep. George and Paul are talkin' to each other in L.A. now. There's nothin' going down between us. It's all in people's heads.
You went to one of George's concerts; what are your thoughts on his tour?
It wasn't the greatest thing in history. The guy went through some kind of mill. It was probably his turn to get smacked. When we were all together there was periods when the Beatles were in, the Beatles were out, no matter what we were doing. Now it's always the Beatles were great or the Beatles weren't great, whatever opinion people hold. There's a sort of illusion about it. But the actual fact was the Beatles were in for eight months, the Beatles were out for eight months. The public, including the media, are sometimes a bit sheeplike and if the ball starts rolling, well, it's just that somebody's in, somebody's out. George is out for the moment. And I think it didn't matter what he did on tour.
George told Rolling Stone that if you wanted the Beatles, go listen to Wings. It seemed a bit of a putdown.
I didn't see what George said, so I really don't have any comment. (pause) Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It's conceptual. I mean, they're backup men for Paul. It doesn't matter who's playing. You can call them Wings, but it's Paul McCartney music. And it's good stuff. It's good Paul music and I don't really see the connection.
What do you think of Richard Perry's work with Ringo?
I think it's great. Perry's great, Ringo's great, I think the combination was great and look how well they did together. There's no complaints if you're Number One.
George said at his press conference that he could play with you again but not with Paul. How do you feel?
I could play with all of them. George is entitled to say that, and he'll probably change his mind by Friday. You know, we're all human. We can all change our minds. So I don't take any of my statements or any of their statements as the last word on whether we will. And if we do, the newspapers will learn about it after the fact. If we're gonna play, we're just gonna play.
In retrospect, what do you think of the whole Lennon Remembers episode?
Well, the other guys, their reaction was public. Ringo made some sort of comment that was funny, which I can't remember, something like, "You've gone too far this time, Johnnie." Paul said (stuffy voice), "Well, that's his problem." I can't remember what George said. I mean, they don't care, they've been with me for fifteen or twenty years, they know damn well what I'm like. It just so happens it was in the press. I mean, they know what I'm like. I'm not ashamed of it at all. I don't really like hurting people, but Jann Wenner questioned me when I was almost still in therapy and you can't play games. You're opened up. It was like he got me on an acid trip. Things come out. I got both reactions from that article. A lot of people thought it was right on. My only upset was Jann insisted on making a book out of it.
Walls and Bridges has an undertone of regret to it. Did you sit down consciously to make an album like that?
No, well . . . Let's say this last year has been an extraordinary year for me personally. And I'm almost amazed that I could get anything out. But I enjoyed doing Walls and Bridges and it wasn't hard when I had the whole thing to go into the studio and do it. I'm surprised it wasn't just all bluuuugggghhhh. (pause) I had the most peculiar year. And . . . I'm just glad that something came out. It's describing the year, in a way, but it's not as sort of schizophrenic as the year really was. I think I got such a shock during that year that the impact hasn't come through. It isn't all on Walls and Bridges though. There's a hint of it there. It has to do with age and God knows what else. But only the surface has been touched on Walls and Bridges, you know?
What was it about the year? Do you want to try talking about it?
Well, you can't put your finger on it. It started, somehow, at the end of '73, goin' to do this Rock 'n' Roll album [with Phil Spector]. It had quite a lot to do with Yoko and I, whether I knew it or not, and then, suddenly, I was out on me own. Next thing I'd be waking up, drunk, in strange places or reading about meself in the paper, doin' extraordinary things, half of which I'd done and half of which I hadn't done. But you know the game anyway. And find meself sort of in a mad dream for a year. I'd been in many mad dreams, but this . . . It was pretty wild. And then I tried to recover from that. And (long pause) meanwhile life was going on, the Beatles settlement was going on, other things, life was still going on and it wouldn't let you sit with your hangover, in whatever form that took. It was like something -- probably me-self -- kept hitting me while I was trying to do something. I was still trying to do something. I was still trying to carry on a normal life and the whip never let up -- for eight months. So . . . that's what was going on. Incidents: You can put it down to which night with which bottle or which night in which town. It was just sort of a mad year like that . . . And it was just probably fear, and being out on me own, and gettin' old, and are ye gonna make it in the charts? Are ye not gonna make it? All that crap, y'know. All the garbage that y'really know is not the be-all and end-all of your life, but if other things are goin' funny, that's gonna hit you. If you're gonna feel sorry for yourself, you're gonna feel sorry for everything. What it's really to do with is probably the same thing that it's always been to do with all your life: whatever your own personal problems really are, you know? So it was a year that manifested itself (switches to deep actor's voice) in most peculiar fashion. But I'm through it and it's '75 now and I feel better and I'm sittin' here and not lyin' in some weird place with a hangover.
Why do you feel better?
Because I feel like I've been on Sinbad's voyage, you know, and I've battled all those monsters and I've got back. (long pause) Weird.
Tell me about the Rock 'n' Roll album.
It started in '73 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad, drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can't begin to say, it's just barmy, there's a jinx on that album. And I've just started writing a new one. Got maybe half of it written . . .
What about the stories that Spector's working habits are a little odd? For example, that he either showed off or shot off guns in the studios?
I don't like to tell tales out of school, y'know. But I do know there was an awful loud noise in the toilet of the Record Plant West.
What actually did happen those nights at the Troubadour when you heckled the Smothers Brothers and went walking around with a Kotex on your head asking the waitress, "Do you know who I am?"
Ah, y'want the juice . . . If I'd said, "Do you know who I am?" I'd have said it in a joke. Because I know who I am, and I know she knew, because I musta been wearing a Kotex on me head, right? I picked up a Kotex in a restaurant, in the toilet, and it was clean and just for a gag I came back to the table with it on me head. And 'cause it stuck there with sweat, just stayed there, I didn't have to keep it on. It just stayed there till it fell off. And the waitress said, "Yeah, you're an asshole with a Kotex on," and I think it's a good remark and so what? Tommy Smothers was a completely different night and has been covered a million times. It was my first night on Brandy Alexanders and my last. (laughs) And I was with Harry Nilsson, who was no help at all. (laughs)