John Lennon Interview ( Published in 1981)

 

John Lennon

By Vic Garbarini / Interview by Barbara Graustark

Musician Magazines

March 1981

    We've got to come up with a better word than "tragedy" to describe the death of John Lennon. It's not just that it doesn't begin to convey the scope of our loss, sorrow, and pain. There's so much that needs to be said that it ignores or even misrepresents it.  In the classic Shakespearean sense, tragedy implied that the victim had a hand in his or her own demise by means of some fatal flaw or action. I failed to see that here.  The word also suggests a sense of incompletion of promises unkept, of potential unfulfilled. Elvis Presley's death was tragic. So was John Bonham's, I guess, and maybe even Tim Hardin's. But as anyone who reads this interview with a clear head and heart must see, there was just so much damn joy, hope, and triumph crammed into John Lennon's 40 years on this planet. For us to speak of him in terms of an unfulfilled life, the kind of triumph I'm talking about had nothing to do with his fame, his music, or what he accomplished, but how he handled them, what he did with the fruits of his labors. It's not just that he freed himself from the oppression of government, the music industry, and other institutions of  ilk; his was a much greater victory.By the end, through struggle, perseverance and determination (and a little help from his friends) John Lennon, had begun to free himself from the biggest obstacle any of us ever encounters: himself. 

    The Beatles were our means of self-discovery. They were true catalysts, the agents of our generation awakening, helping to reveal to us our potential as individuals and as a community. Like modern-day shamans, they became vehicles through which we contacted our own deeper nature, our collective unconsciousness, or whatever you choose to call it, but as John stated in his last interview, the Beatles weren't apart from society. They were society. It was a self-liberation, and they became the instruments through which we discovered our birthright. It's important that we begin to understand this whole process, as John had finally done. Certainly we owe him that much. 

    Unlike most people who become mediums for that kind of cultural transformation, John resisted the temptation to let his ego take credit for what was happening, to spoil it by clogging that creative opening with his own greed and egoism. He struggled to transform his anger, pain, and frustration into a force of his own and others' liberation, striving to maintain contact with the source of his inspiration. In the process, he came to the inner realization that it was indeed true, as all the sacred texts had told him, that creativity was a gift. That he didn't really own his songs any more than he owned the wind. Reaching that kind of freedom is uneasy. It requires a painful process of stripping away illusion, of letting go of Elvis Beatle to find John Lennon, the real John Lennon.

     It also requires commitment, the courage to take risks and, yes, even a willingness to make a fool of oneself on occasion. And it was a true liberation, not total by any means. The man was riddled with faults, like all of us, but true in the sense that occurred on an essential level. The action the Beatles initiated in us had such force because it too touched us in our depths and the place where we all touch each other, where there's a true oneness, where there's not a sentimental cliche to say, "I am he as you are me, as we are, all together." We'd forgotten about that place, lost touch with it, until it became crusted over, and the connections atrophied, until that network of intuitive unity was only an embarrassing memory. Maybe we really never understood the process in the first place. We're not a civilization that's learned to understand the laws and forces that determine our creative potential, our art, and our lives. Maybe we didn't know, but somehow we instinctively understood on December 8 that common space, that long forgotten sanctuary, was jolted awake again in many of us. We found we were still part of the same nervous system. We continued all that week, culminating in Sunday's vigil, described so simply and clearly by Yoko, "I saw we were one mind", and we were in such moments we move closer to being truly human, to a place in all of us that outside of time and space and from which flows all that we value in our inner world, creativity, joy, music itself. 

"When the real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding that has nothing to do with me because I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me and to describe, transcribe it like a medium. Those moments are what I live for." -- John Lennon

     What touched us at such times is not just emotion, but something far greater and far more satisfying, our own potential for the future, urging us forward, and we have to learn to respond to it, cooperate with that higher part of ourselves if our lives are to be anything more than just mechanical exercises and the worship of quantity over quality. We have to be active in this process of transformation, and through his example, John Lennon showed us how to begin to empty ourselves of all the crap that blocks our contact and that inner strength to prepare ourselves to let that part of ourselves awaken and flourish, and to establish and maintain contact with that inner strength that surpasseth understanding. 

    We need all the help we can get with this kind of endeavor. And certainly the most important factor in John's growth was Yoko Ono. Some thought of her as the Dragon Lady, an unhealthy, domineering influence on their hero. Recently, she's emerged as a kind of Lady Madonna, his main source of strength and sustenance. Which is the real Yoko? Well, it depends on what level we're looking at. On the surface, John's mother fixation seemed an unhealthy regression, and Yoko somewhat cool and uncompromising personality made her an easy target for those who disliked her. That may be partly true, but it misses the essential point in a deep and profound way. Yoko became a mother to him in the true sense of the word. She constantly nurtured his inner being, and far from protecting him from the world, she forced him to face both it and himself, to drop the masks, illusions, and ego trips,  and find out who he really was, his true nature.

     I sometimes feel that as Americans, we've missed some of the point about women's liberation. How can we liberate what we don't understand? We have much to thank John and Yoko for, and much to learn from the depth understanding and commitment evidence in their Heart Play.

     At the end, there was a sense of wonder and hope amidst the pain and grief as he passed from us, not as a flame snuffed out, but more like a comet, illuminating our lonely night, showing us once again, parts of ourselves that we weren't sure we still believed. He had been part of the instrument of our original awakening in the 60s, and his death was a final ironic gift that enabled us to reaffirm our unity. Some spoke of losing a part of themselves, but it wasn't like that. We'd rediscovered something we no longer dared believed in:  the power and grandeur of our own spirits. We glimpsed that space before us on The Ed Sullivan Show in '64, at Woodstock, at the Fillmore, and felt ashamed of our naivety, and we dared to embrace the vision our naivety was not in believing in the reality of these events, but in thinking that these glimpses into another reality could sustain themselves indefinitely. 

    We're still a long way from becoming citizens of that world, and it's going to take a lot of struggle and work to get there if we do this. It is no longer just a question of utopian daydreaming, as our lack of contact with the inner reality of things has resulted in a hollow civilization that's crumbling before our eyes, and it's going to get worse before it gets better, much worse. 

You say you want a revolution, why don't you free your mind instead?

     By the end, John Lennon knew that any society or system could be as strong and conscious as the individuals comprising it, and like most of us, he had the guts to put it into practice. What he began to realize in his own inner searching, to strive to maintain contact with the inner source of transcendence and reality that had touched him, to learn what was required of him in order to play his role as an active agent in his own transformation and to pursue that path, wherever it led him, and in spite of whatever obstacles inner or outer stood in his way. The following excerpts were taken from an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, originally done for Newsweek magazine by Barbara Graustark in September 1980

John Lennon Interview Starts here

    I've been under contract since I was 22, and I was always "supposed to, supposed to." I was supposed to write 100 songs by Friday, supposed to have a single out by Saturday, supposed to do this and do that. It dawned on me that the reason I became an artist was freedom, because I couldn't fit into the classroom, the college, or the society. I was the outsider, and that freedom was what I cherished. That was the plus for all the minuses of being an oddball, that I was free and everybody else had to go to the office. But suddenly it was exactly the opposite of what I had set out to be. I was obliged to a record company, obliged to the media, obliged to the public, obliged to American immigration, obliged to go to court every time some asshole bumped into me on the street. So I said, "What the hell is this? I'm not free at all."

    I know freedom is in the mind, but I couldn't clear my mind. So it was time to regroup. The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not in the gossip columns or on the charts or at Exxon with Mick Jagger or Andy Warhol. I just wanted to remember that I existed at all. At first, it was very hard not to be doing something musical because I felt I ought to be, but musically, my mind was just a big clutter. It wasn't a question of not having anything to say.

     If you listen to my early records -- there's a dumb song on Sgt. Pepper called "Good Morning". There's absolutely nothing to say, just descriptions of paintings of what is. I never have illusions about having something to say, "But it's okay. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning"-- as the dumb song goes: quack, quack, quack. It wasn't a matter of nothing to say. It was a matter of no clarity and no desire to do it, because I was supposed to. 

    There is a hard withdrawal period that people must go through at 65, and then I started being a house husband and swung my attention onto Sean. Then I realized I'm not supposed to be doing something. I am doing something. And then I was free. I was a working-class macho guy who didn't know any better.

     Yoko taught me about women. I was used to being served like Elvis, and a lot of the stars were, and Yoko didn't buy that. She didn't give a shit about Beatles. "What the fuck are the Beatles? I'm Yoko Ono. Treat me as me." That was the battle. She came out with "Woman is the Nigger of the World" in 1968 as the title of an article she wrote for Nova magazine. Because things were like they were, I took the time and wrote the song, but it was her statement, and what she was saying to the world, she was saying to Lennon in spades. I had never considered it before. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights. I didn't know what she was talking about. I said, "What do you want? A contract? You can have whatever you want, but don't expect anything from me or for me to change in any way. Don't pinch in my space."

     Well, she said, the answer to that is "I can't be here because there is no space where you are. Everything revolves around you, and I can't breathe in that atmosphere. I'm an artist. I'm not some female you picked up backstage." Well, I found out. I'm thankful to her for the education. I was used to a situation where the newspaper was there for me to read, and after I read it, somebody else could have it. It didn't occur to me that somebody else might want to look at it first. I think that's what kills people like Presley and others of that ilk, so-called stars who die in public, and lots of people who die privately.

     The king is always killed by his courtiers, not by his enemies. The king is overfed, overdrugged, overindulged, anything to keep the king tied to his throne. Most people in that position never wake up. They either die mentally or physically, or both. What Yoko did for me, apart from liberating me to be a feminist, was to liberate me from that situation, and that's how the Beatles ended-- not because Yoko split the Beatles, but because she showed me what it was to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by psycho fans and slaves who are only interested in keeping the situation as it was, and that's a kind of death.

     She said to me, "You've got no clothes on." Nobody had dared to tell me that before. Nobody dared to tell Elvis Presley that, and I doubt if anybody ever dared to tell Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan that they had no clothes on. I didn't accept it at first, but I am clothed. Everything is perfect. You're crazy. Nobody tells me I'm God, I'm King John of England. Nobody tells me nothing, because nobody had. she told me, "Uou absolutely have no clothes on. And that man whispering in your ear is Machiavelli." "But he's been with me for 20 years." "And he's been screwing you for 20 years." Really, I couldn't face any of that. She still tells me the truth. It's still painful. 

    I was always waiting for a reason to get out of the Beatles from the day I made How I Won the War in 1966. I just didn't have the guts to do it, you see, because I didn't know where to go. I remember why I made the movie. I did it because the Beatles had stopped touring, and I didn't know what to do. So instead of going home and being with the family, I immediately went to Spain with Dick Lester because I couldn't deal with not being continually on stage. That was the first time I thought, "My God, what do you do if it isn't going on? What is there? There's no life without it."  And that's when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of this without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening.

     I used to go through hell thinking I don't own any of my songs, and then it dawned on me that I never owned them in the first place. I don't own the copyright to anything I wrote up until Walls and Bridges, so I didn't own any of the old so-called Beatles songs. I get writer royalties from them, but I don't own the copyright. I have to ask permission to do things to it or whatever, and that used to make me suffer and think I'd been robbed. I might have read that somewhere that people don't own music, and I read it 100 times, but it didn't make sense to me until it dawned on me that I have known it myself. You know what I mean? Because you can't own-- how can you own it? It's insane. I can't believe that I would think that I owned it before. That's what's so strange. It's an illusion. Ownership is an illusion like possession. Ownership is the same as possession. It's impossible. 

    Being with Yoko makes me free. You know, being with Yoko makes me whole. I'm a half without her. Male is half without a female. We're like spiritual advisors to each other. You can do it correctly, but there's something missing; only somebody close to each other, like this, can tell each other what it is, but the spirit is the way it's being performed. That Judeo-Christian story that we've been living by for 2,000 years is that God and everything is some other thing outside of ourselves, that continual us and them relationship with God, with children, with animals, with nature, the environment where we've conquered nature. Worship God. We deal with children. It's the separation business that I don't believe exist. It's just an idea. So I cannot separate Sean from the environment or from me, or from the other end of the universe, whatever that may or may not be, that it is one living organism. So, therefore, how I deal with you, I deal with Sean, and vice versa, but he's not separate from me. I don't deal with my left leg any different from my right ear. I deal with the reality of the shape and where it's placed and how I look after or wash different parts of the body, but I don't consider them separate. 

    The first thing I noticed about Sean in the hospital was that when the black nurses came to feed him, they would put the radio on. They're not supposed to, but they do. The radio would be on all the time, usually off the station, blaring into these intensive care kids who were dying. Little shriveled rabbits. Anyway, black nurses had on station, WBLS, and when she fed the baby, she would hold him and give him the bottle. Like the whites would come in, switch it to the country in western Sit down, sit there, like this, smoking. So the first thing I did was get the rhythm. Whenever I fed him, I put the music on Bum Bum. Dee, Dum. Now he moves like this, so in that way, he was trained in music, and he has my jukebox in his playroom.

    

    I've withdrawn many times. Once to the Himalayas with Maharishi, and all the press wrote about was, look at those idiots going to the Maharishi. But I was sitting still, as they call it in the I Ching for three months in the Him.... Once we got back from Hamburg, when we got deported, and George had gotten deported, I didn't contact the other four for a month. That's a long time at 18 or 19, because I withdrew to think whether this is worth going on with. Now, when George and Paul found out, they were mad at me because they thought we could have been working, but I just withdrew. 

    So part of me is a monk and part of me is a performing flea. Knowing when to stop is survival. For me, it's like breathing in and out. For me, it happened in many forms. Maharishi John, of the sneering and the sniggering about Maharishi from the public and the press, was incredible, but now they're all doing it, and now I'm old enough not to need to go somewhere with somebody to withdraw. Okay, so now I withdraw on my own. 

    To be creative is to receive a gift. Now I'm a craftsman whose creative spirit no who can fake it like a lot of artists do, and I can reap from what I've sowed already for the rest of my life by just being a craftsman, by keeping my mouth shut and being a good boy, and I might get honored by every show biz group and be in the Guinness Book of Records and get knighted. It wouldn't interest me to get it for being anything other than for something real. I created for the creative spirit, the way I like it, where it's given to me, not where it's something I've made, cannot come through. If the air is cluttered, the mind is cluttered, you can fake it and be a craftsman and put out paintings like Picasso or records, if you're a pop singer, you might get away with it, and the business will let you get away with it, you know, inside.

     So in order to get that clear channel open again, I had to stop picking up every radio station in the world, in the universe. So my turning away from it is how I began to heal it again. I couldn't see the wood for the trees, or I couldn't hear the music for the noise in my own head. You know, Einstein or Newton -- anything that was discovered was discovered by accident, by creative spirit, or they were turned into whatever came down at that moment, right?   That's what Einstein do. He spilled the theory of relativity when he was working on something else. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove something else, which you can never do. So what he did was really live off that record for the rest of his life, not taking away from his brilliance or his natural native ability, but the real creation came when he sat there, and something came to him, or when the apple fell on his head. Newton would never have had the apple fall on his head and can seem of what it meant, had he not been sitting under the tree daydreaming.

     So for me, it's the same with music. The real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, music that surpasses understanding, that has not to do with me, that I'm just a channel. So for that to come through, which is the only joy for me. Out of the music for it was to be given to me, and I didn't transcribe it like a medium, but I have nothing to do with it other than I'm sitting under the tree, and this whole damn thing comes down, and I've just put it down. That is the only joy for me, getting into the involvement, the pretending I'm this genius who creates things or owns the rights to them. That's when it's garbage, when I'm in that illusion of thinking that somebody owes me something because I was gifted, occasionally gifted, not permanently gifted. Nobody is occasionally gifted. Of this music or the words, and pretending that they own it and that they should get a gold record for doing it. Not that I don't appreciate adulation and awards and everything else, but to believe it is another matter, to believe that's why I'm doing it, because, as we proved in the last five years, there's many other ways of making money. I don't have any doubt of our ability to always make money, so it's nothing to do with money, but for the joy of having the apple fall on my head every 10 years or so, that's what I'm living for, besides trying to keep the little family going happy and progressing together, and the rest can be fun or not, like this is okay, we're having fun, we're having coffee, we're talking we're bringing up stuff that I remember. You're enjoying it, I'm enjoying it, and we call it work, but believing in it, that I own it, I created it, my record label and my company and my picture, someone stealing my song, or they're singing my song-- garbage, when I start believing that, that's when I'm in trouble, and that's when the gift just goes to somebody else, and one becomes a craftsman. 

    I have nothing against craftsmen, but I have no interest in being a craftsman. The friction is in living and waking up every day and getting through another day. That's where the friction is. And to express it in art is the job of the artist, and that's what I can do, to express it on behalf of people who can't express it or have the time or ability, or whatever it is, that's my job, my function in society. There's a reason for everything living, the gods that work in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. And there's a job for flies, I'm not sure, but there's a reason for it. There's a reason for artists and musicians, and it's to just do what we do to better or lesser degrees, depending on whose opinion you follow. It's no more important or less important than anything else going on. See, but it's for the people who receive it later on, but it's for me, basically, and then the so-called audience second. 

    And it's just why I'm here, just my game, everybody else thinks in such short time spans, the same as when the record company used to think each Beatle record was the last one, only the Beatles knew it wasn't, and only the Beatles knew that they would be as big as they were. The record company never caught on. They still treated them as if we better fuck them over now, in case they don't produce anything else, but I don't think like that. I knew that if I was going to do it, I would do it in my own good time. Life is long. It doesn't last in terms of three months on the charts or just having a movie out or not having a movie out. So that insecurity wasn't my problem. The problem was only with wanting to have the ability to express it in my terms, the way I wanted to. So that's all five years. It could have been 20 years.

 Some guys write only one book every 20 years. Other guys produce 15 a month, and I don't think one's better than the other. I'm just a different kind of guy. I don't produce them every week. I love commercial music. I like commercials on the TV. I don't sit and watch them. But as a form, if I had to do anything on TV, it would be the style of the commercial. I like pop records. I like Olivia Newton-John singing " Magic ", and Donna Summer singing whatever the hell it is she'll be singing. I like the ELO singing "All Over the World." I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business and put it down or praise it, or see it from a sociological point of view, or an anthropological point of view, or any fucking point of view, whatever. But without any thought, I enjoy it. I just enjoy it. That's the kind of music I like to hear. It's folk music. I always said it, and it's true, it's folk music. That's what I'm doing. Folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it. I'm not arranging it into a symphony and making it into a phony art form and calling it a pop opera. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. And now I'm enjoying it, and it comes in the form of pop music. 

    To me, it came in the form of painting. I'd be painting. Walls and Bridges was the last record I made. I've already compared it. It's light-years away because Walls and Bridges... it's the same as cooking. Anybody can cook rice, but few can cook it well. And cooking and is a manifestation of your state of mind. So is music. There's craftsmanship in Walls and Bridges. There's some good, and there's the semi-sick craftsman who put together the thing. But there's no inspiration. And there's misery. It's miserable. It gives off an aura of misery because I was miserable, so now I'm not miserable. So this new album will get off an aura of not being miserable. 

    You never wanted to talk about it. You know, none of us did, really. So we would just say something glib or something just to shut people up. We couldn't say never, because then it would be like what Ringo said,  "Once you're the bad guy, you're the one that says 'never', and God knows what would happen." God knows what would have happened anyway, right?  Nobody knows what's never. It's a long time, but then it goes, "Ringo says never!" big headlines, or John says never, or Paul says never.  So nobody wanted to be the one to say "maybe", because then every time you said, "maybe" somebody took an ad out in the paper saying, I'm the one who's bringing them back together.

     So there was nothing to be said about the Beatles. It came to a point where you couldn't say a damn thing. Whatever you said was something wrong. It's like being in a divorce situation. You know, you can't say anything about your ex-wife because you're in court, and anything you say can be held one way or another, against you or for you. So that was the situation. And the point about the Bangladesh concert, or any of those events, is that if the Beatles wanted to get together, they would be the first to know, not the last to know, and they would be the ones that ran it, promoted it, and owned it, and it would not come from some third party outside of the four guys themselves.

     Whatever it was that made the Beatles also made the 60s. The 60s, the Beatles were, whatever the Beatles were, and I certainly don't need it to do what I'm doing now. It could never be. Anybody who thinks that if John and Paul got together with George and Ringo, the Beatles would exist is out of their skull!  The Beatles gave everything they've got to give and more, and it exists on record. There's no need for The Beatles, for what people think are the Beatles, the four guys that used to be that group can never, ever be that group again, even if they wanted to be. You mean, if Paul McCartney and John Lennon got together, would they produce some good songs? Maybe, maybe not. But whether George and Ringo joined in again is irrelevant, because Paul and I created the music.

     Okay, whether it's relevant, whether  Lennon and McCartney, like Rogers and Hammerstein, instead of Rogers and Hart, or instead of Rogers and dingbat or whoever else they worked with, should be limited to having worked together once, to always having to refer back to that is someone else's problem, not mine. I never think about it. What if Paul and I get together? What the hell would it do? It would be boring! 

    I never know what I'm talking about until a year later, when I see what I'm writing. Some of it, even the Beatles stuff, when I hear it now, I think, "Oh, that's what, what?" And I think Dylan said it about his work. He was really talking about himself. A lot of it in his early days was him, you, and they doing things. But really, when I look back on it, it's me that I'm talking about. And so yes, you could say it was overwhelming and that I actually fell out of the universe, you know, disconnected. And so I converted it into that.

     But it also could be a short story about when we were physically separated in the early 70s. You can apply it to that too, although I wasn't thinking that at the time. It described that situation too, of being kicked out of the nest and being dead or being not connected is like being dead. There's that difference. Being alone and being lonely is two different things. 

    Something I've learned in the past 10 years was rediscover that I was John Lennon before the Beatles and after the Beatles. And so be it, one moment, the actual moment, when I remembered who I was, completely not a glimpse. I never really lost complete touch with myself, but a lot of the time, I did for long periods of time. I was in a room in Hong Kong because Yoko had sent me on a trip around the world by myself, and I hadn't done anything since I was 20. I didn't know how to call for room service or check into a hotel. This sounds-- if somebody reads this and they think, "well, these fucking artists, or these bloody pop stars, or these actors,..." you know, and they don't understand the pain of being a freak. Yoko said, "Why don't you do this?" And I said, "Really, by myself? Hong Kong? Singapore?" I said, "But what if people bother me with?" And well, I had a big excuse for it. You see, I had to isolate. Being famous as an immense excuse, an incredible excuse I used for never facing anything because I was famous, therefore I can't go to the movies. I can't go to the theater. I can't do anything. 

    So sitting in this room taking baths, which I've noticed Yoko do and women do. Every time I get nervous, I take a bath. It's a great female trick. It's a great one. I must have had about 40 baths, and I'm looking out over the Hong Kong Bay, and there's something that's like ringing a bell. It's like, what is it? What is it? And then I just got very relaxed, and it was like a recognition. God, it's me. This relaxed person is me. I remember this guy from way back-- when this feeling is from way, way back when I knew what the fuck I'm doing. I know who I am. It doesn't rely on any outside agency, or adulation or non-adulation, or achievement, or non-achievement, or hit record or no hit record, or anything. It's absolutely irrelevant whether the teacher loves me or hates me; I'm still me. He knows how to do things, he knows how to get around, and he knows how to form a group. He knows how to do everything he wants to do. Wow! So I called, I said, "Guess who? It's me. It's me here."

     I walked out of that hotel. I just followed the workers onto the ferry, and no one noticed me. This is an aside thing. Somebody asked a very famous actress, and I've got forgotten who it was, somebody like Carol Lombard, somebody really big from way back. And maybe the story came from Johnny Carson, but they asked her how one actress couldn't get down the street without being recognized, while the other could, even though they were both equally famous. And she said, "This is how I do it."And she demonstrated. She walked down the street as Carol Lombard, and everybody turned their heads. Then she walked down the street as nobody. And that works! I can get around. If I'm super nervous, I send out a vibe. Here's a nervous person coming. So they're going to look around because of the vibration that's walked past, and then afterwards, say "that's somebody famous," because some people are like that. Anyway, so I got out, and I got on the ferry, looking around. It's like a thrill. I'm walking around all by myself, and I'm in the middle of the Far East, and these people are going to work, you know, there's Europeans and Chinese and everybody, they're all just going to work. And we get along over to Khao Long, and I just follow the crowd, because I didn't know where the hell I was, having never seen anything. I've just been in a hotel in Hong Kong. I just wandered around, and when I saw them dispersing into offices or different things, I just went into these little cafes and ate. This and that, give me two and all that bit. Then I went to the store and bought things. I did that for a few days because I didn't try to adjust to their time. I was always up at five o'clock watching the sun come up and walking out and wandering around Hong Kong at dawn, and it was just fantastic. I loved it. I loved it. That's what I rediscovered, the feeling that I used to have as a youngster.

     I remember another incident in my life when I was walking in the mountains of Scotland, up in the north. I was with an auntie who had a house up there, and I felt this coming over me. You know, I thought, "This is what they call poetic or whatever they call it." When I looked back, I realized it was kind of loose and fascinating. You know, when you're walking along, and the ground starts going beneath you and the heather, and I could see this mountain in the distance, and this kind of feeling came over me. I thought, "This is something. What is it? Ah, this is that one they're always talking about, the one that makes you paint or write because it's so overwhelming that you want to tell somebody, you can't describe it." You can't say there's this feeling that I'm having, and the world looks like, and it's sort of glowing, and it's there, so you have to try and paint it right, or put it into poetry or something like that. 

    Well, it was the same kind of thing, but it was recognition that the thing had been with me all my life, and that's why maybe I got a little like that. When you said about putting the boys back together again, it's irrelevant, you know, because the feeling was with me before the Beatles and with me after. That's what I'm saying. What "Watching the Wheels" is saying. All these teachers, which you can call critics, media, friends in the business, other singers, they have all been commenting about me for eight years. They've all had something to say about me. I'm thrilled that they're so concerned. But there isn't one of them that hasn't made some remark about one way or the other. So they're all talking now to me, it sounds like the teachers, if I look through my report cards, it's the same thing, "too content to get a cheap laugh," "hiding behind this," or "daydreaming his life away."  Am I getting this from those rock and rollers and these rock and roll critics and the do-gooders and the rest of them? 

    Well, it's a ringing a bell in my head. I'm sitting there picking this up because I ain't doing nothing. I'm watching the wheels, everyone's talking about me. I ain't doing nothing. Lennon sit up. Lennon sit down. Lennon, do your homework. Lennon, you're a bad boy. Lennon, you're a good boy. What the hell is this? I heard this before somewhere. I heard it at school. So this period was that to re establish me as me for myself. 

    That is why I'm free of The Beatles, because I took time to free myself mentally from it and look at what it is. And now I know. So here I am, right? That's it. It's beautiful. You know? It's just like walking those hills.

 "Some people are saying that this is the end of an era, but what we said before still stands. The 80s will be a beautiful decade. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please tell people to pray the same for him. Please remember that he had deep faith and love for life, and that though he has now joined the greater force, he is still with us." -- Yoko, Ono, December, 1980