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

George was having a Good Year at the races

 

In the studio with Paul

 

Ringo and Nel

 

Grauman's Chinese Theater

 

The "new" photo of George signing an autograph seems to be for the guy from the "old" photo.  

Pay no attentino to the Beatles below you

 

Greeting Paul and Linda

 

McCartney: :Lifting the Veil on the Beatles (1980)

 Paul McCartney:  Lifting the Veil on the Beatles

By Vic Garbarini

Musician Magazine

August 1980

    I'm sitting in a large, sparsely furnished apartment somewhere in North London. Paul McCartney is seated across from me, patiently sipping a cup of tea as he waits for me to set up my tape recorder. Finally, I'm ready to go. I'm just launching into my first question when McCartney suddenly turns towards the door and smiles. I watch in amazement as both John Lennon and George Harrison enter the room. "Ringo couldn't make it," said McCartney, still smiling. I opened my mouth to answer him, but instead of words, only a ringing bell-like noise came out. 

     Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head... and shit! It's 820 already. I wearily grope for the clock, making a mental note to ask my dad to fix the alarm. As I stagger into the bathroom, I remember about the geometry test. The geometry test! I'd forgotten all about it. Two minutes of pure panic ensue as I feverishly search my memory. Relief -- I sit behind Mraz in geometry, the math freak, the guy I loaned last month's copy of Playboy to. Good old Mzra! Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus in seconds flat, found my way upstairs and had a smoke. Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

     "Sugar?" "Huh?" "Sugar," repeats Paul McCartney, "Do you want sugar in your tea?" "Oh, right, sorry. Drifted out there for a minute."

     Be cool. I think. I engaged the critical faculties. He's just another bloke. Wrote a lot of good songs, transformed my generation hasn't done much interesting lately. Sure, he's talented, and his music changed my life, but he's only human. So why do I feel like I'm having a conversation with my own childhood? Hold on now. Let's get some perspective here. Carl Jung actually had conversations with his archetypes, yeah, responds a tiny voice. But did one of them ever put sugar in his tea? Point taken.

 When I get older, losing my hair many years from now... natural, unpretentious. Those are the words that best describe James Paul McCartney at 38, ten years after the breakup of the most influential pop group the world has ever known. The boyish good looks are still remarkably intact, no hair loss, (though most of the baby fat is gone,) but what impresses most is his relaxed, open manner.

     He seemed totally at ease during our two-hour conversation at his London office. He was charming, frank, and surprisingly willing to talk at great length about the Beatles experience. Willing isn't the right word. He seemed positively eager to discuss it for reasons he explains fully in the interview. Paul claims he wants to be just an ordinary guy, and I believe him. He's anchored himself in normalcy, reasonably secure in the nest he's created with his family and farm.

     As a result, his work with Wings has sometimes lacked creative tension, a problem which many critics, myself included, find irksome. Great art often requires friction, something to struggle against, an inner or outer obstacle to overcome in order to get the creative juices flowing and provide energy externally. There's little for McCartney to rub up against these days, and he doesn't seem to harbor the kind of inner demons that can drive John Lennon to tantrums and transcendence. But when he's offered a challenge, as in the case of the nearly disastrous Band on the Run sessions, or in a concert situation, as captured in the excellent Wings Over America live set, McCartney has proven that he can still turn out material that rivals his work with the Beatles.

     His creative potential may be somewhat underutilized at times, but his powers seem relatively undiminished. In fact, his new solo album, McCartney II, contains some of the best material since Abbey Road. True, there's relatively little tension here, but in this case, it hardly seems to matter. This is a pure, distilled essence of McCartney, gorgeous dream-like melodies floating through no Eno-esque electronic textures, ranging from the Bach-like elegance and soothing ethereality of "Summer Day Song" to the poignant romanticism of "Waterfalls."

     His work may occasionally be disappointing, but I'm heartened that a man who's been through what McCartney has can remain so open, unspoiled, and still capable of creative work of this caliber. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile. So may I introduce to you the act you known for all these years? 

Musician: Let's just skip over the whole Japan thing. I'm sure you're sick of answering questions about it by now. Needless to say, you won't have a Live At Budokan album coming out this year.

 McCartney: (deadpan) Good joke. 

Musician: Thanks. I've been saving that one for weeks. Moving right along-- why another solo album now?

 McCartney: Well, actually, I was trying not to do an album. It was just after Back to the Egg, and I wanted to do something totally different, so I just plugged a single microphone into the back of a Studer 16-track tape machine. Didn't use a recording console at all. The idea was that at the end of it, I would just have a zany little cassette that I'd play in my car and never release. 

    In the end, I had a few tracks, played them for a couple of people, and they said, "See, that's your next album." And I thought, "Right, it probably is." So then I got a bit serious about it and tried to make it into an album. That was the worst part of it. I was having fun until that.

 Musician: It's interesting the way you describe your approach. It reminds me of the way Eno goes about making an album -- creative play. The other person who came to mind when I first heard it was Stevie Wonder.

 McCartney:  I like Stevie a lot. It's probably because he's the only other person who's done this kind of recording -- doing it all yourself.

 Musician: You're also the only two people who've combined avant-garde electronic textures with an unerring sense of melody. 

McCartney: Well, I can't help that. I'm glad I can't help that. When I was doing this album, I thought I'd make something that didn't sound anything like me. The first three tracks I made were the two instrumentals on the album and a third one, which I later put lyrics on. I wanted something that sounded nothing like me, but inevitably, you start to creep through even that your sense of tune, or whatever it is.

Musician: Have you ever consciously tried to do a melody that was non-diatonic, not based on a major or minor motif, or something? 

McCartney: Well, I don't understand that. I'm not a technical musician.

Musician:  Something discordant, something that isn't normal, tonal melody. 

McCartney: Yes, on some of the tracks, I had enough for a double album, and most of the tracks that came off to make a single album were a bit more like that. One was kind of a sequence of wobbly noises, a crazy track, probably not worth releasing. It's just for the cassette in my car. There are people who like it, but it's just experimental. I like it, but zoning in on which ones we were going to release, I asked a lot of people which were their favorites, and the ones that got dropped off are probably the least ones. I've got one 10-minute instrumental that just goes on forever and ever.

Musician: And you left off the ones that were less melodic?  Could you ever conceive of putting out the experimental stuff?

 McCartney:  I wouldn't mind it. The thing is, I go through record companies, and record companies want to have a say in it. If I bring them an album they think is totally uncommercial, and I say, "Look, artistically, I've got to do this." You have to agree with them in the end when they say, "Look, it's very nice, but we would rather have this, please, because we're the company that's going to release it."

     I'm not going in an avant-garde direction, particularly. It's just for my own interests, that sort of stuff. But still, I get certain decisions creeping in that wouldn't necessarily be my decision. 

Musician: You're forgiven. Were you very disappointed or surprised by the negative critical reaction to Back to the Egg?

McCartney:  I'm used to it all now. Nearly everything I've ever done or been involved in has received some negative critical reaction. You'd think the response to something like " She Loves You " with the Beatles would have been pretty positive. It wasn't the very first week that came out. It was supposed to be the worst song The Beatles had ever thought of doing. Then Ram was supposed to be the worst thing I'd ever done. And so the criticism continues.

Musician: But was the harder rocking approach on Back to the Egg a reaction to criticism of your work as too poppish? Were you influenced by the emergence of New Wave?

McCartney: It was just what I was into at the time. The New Wave thing was happening, and I realized that a lot of New Wave was just taking things at a faster tempo than we did. We, being what I like to call the Permanent Wave (a little joke there), so you get something like "Spin It On", out of that. 

     I'm always getting influenced. Most of the songs I've written can be traced to some kind of influence, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, to name a few-- even some of the 30s type tunes, like " When I'm 64 or " Honey Pie " that's influenced by Fred Astaire and people like that.

Musician:  Can you look at your own work with any degree of objectivity or impartiality? I mean, can you listen to an album you've just made and trust yourself to be able to see what its strong and weak points are?

McCartney: When they first come out, I'm totally confused. It takes a few months for me to warm up to them. Sometimes I'll be at a party, and I'll hear music coming from the next room. Immediately, I'll get jealous and think, "Who's that?" So I go into the other room, and it's us, and I think, "Hey, I like this group. We're all right after all", because everyone's a bit paranoid.

Musician: Band on the Run was probably the most successful Wings album from both a commercial and a critical standpoint. Was it the most satisfying one for you?

McCartney:  I like Band on the Run that was going to be a normal Wings album originally, but then our guitarist at the time, Henry McCullough and Denny Sewell, failed to turn up. It was one of those numbers where they said, "We don't want to go to Lagos to record this album. Sorry." I was left in the lurch at the last minute, literally an hour before the flight. So there was just Denny Laine, Linda, and me in Nigeria. I played drums, bass, and a lot of guitar myself. I took a lot of control on that album. It was almost a solo album. 

Musician: Why Lagos? 

McCartney:  I just fancied going to Africa. I'm into African rhythms. When we were there, I saw the best band I'd ever seen live, Fela Ramsomecoutie. I think he's in jail now. He's too political for the local authorities. We saw him one night at his own club, and I was crying.  A lot of it was just relief. There was a lot of crazy circumstances and weird things happening. At one point, we got held up at knifepoint. It was a real fight to make that album. 

Musician:  Do you find in your experiences that friction like that can actually help the creative process?

 McCartney: Unfortunately, yes, it does help. It's unfortunate, because who wants to go around having stress all the time just to aid creativity? But when it happens, it does actually seem to help. It's a drag, because the logic then follows is that we should all walk around even more stressed to make better albums. Who needs it? I'd rather not make albums than do that. But it did help on Band on the Run. It gave us something to fight against. 

    At first, I was worried, but then I thought, "Wait a minute, I love playing drums." So the positive side started to creep in.

     Musician:  I heard that with the Beatles, you sometimes gave Ringo directions regarding what he should play.

     McCartney: We always gave Ringo direction on every single number. It was usually very controlled. Whoever had written the song, John, for instance, would say, "I want this." Obviously, a lot of stuff came out of what Ringo was playing, but we would always control it.

 Musician:  Did musical disagreements or conflicts have anything to do with the breakup?

 McCartney:  They were some of the minor reasons, yeah. I remember on "Hey Jude" telling George not to play a guitar. He wanted to echo riffs after the vocal phrases, which I didn't think was appropriate. He didn't see it like that, and it was a bit of a number for me to have to dare tell George Harrison-- who was one of the greats, I think-- not to play. It was like an insult, but that was how we did a lot of our stuff.

 Musician:  We were talking about creative tension, and how even if it's a pain in the ass, it can be useful. Are there any particular Beatles albums that.....

McCartney: The White Album was the tension album. We were all in the midst of the psychedelic thing or just coming out of it. In any case, it was weird. Never before had we recorded with beds in the studio and people visiting for hours on end, business meetings, and all that. There was a lot of friction during that album.

 Musician: That was the one that sounded the most fragmented to me, whereas Abbey Road sounded the smoothest. Yet, I imagine there was a lot of tension at that point, too. 

McCartney:  No, not really. There was no --- come to think of it, there was actually --- yes, there were one or two tense moments, but it didn't feel like a tense album to me. I was busy getting into a lot of new musical ideas, like the medley on the second side. I think the White Album was the weirdest experience, because we were about to break up, and that was just tense in itself. 

Musician:  I wanted to ask you about your bass playing. To me, you've always played bass like a frustrated guitar player; those melodic lines that start to show up on Sgt. Pepper, there was no precedent for that in rock music. How did that style of playing come about? 

McCartney:  I always liked those little lines that worked as support and yet had their own identity, instead of just staying in the background. Also, bass was beginning to come to the front in mixes at that point. If you listen to early Beatles mixes, the bass and bassdrum aren't there. We were starting to take over mixing ourselves and to bring those things out. So I had to do something with it. I was listening to a lot of Motown and Stax at the time, Marvin Gaye, and people like that.

 Musician:  How did Sgt. Pepper come about? 

McCartney:  I think the big influence was Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. That album just flipped me. Still is one of my favorite albums. The musical invention on that is just amazing. I play it for our kids now, and they love it. When I heard it, I thought, "Oh, dear, this is the album of all time. What the hell are we going to do?" My idea took off from that standard.

Musician: Wasn't the initial concept some kind of fantasy thing?

 McCartney: Yeah, I had this idea that it was going to be an album of another band that wasn't us. We'd just imagine all the time that it wasn't us playing. It was just a nice little device to give us some distance from the album.

Musician:  I remember listening to it and thinking it was the perfect fantasy album. You could put yourself into a whole other world. That's really the way you went about creating it, then?

McCartney:  Right, that was the whole idea. The cover was going to be us dressed as the other band in crazy gear, but it was all stuff that we'd always wanted to wear. And we were going to have photos on the wall of all our heroes, Marlon Brando in his leather jacket, Einstein -- it could be anybody who we'd ever thought was good--- cult heroes, and we kind of put this other identity on them to do it. It changed a lot in the process, but that was a basic idea behind it.

 Musician: Thinking back on that period, which album would you say caught the feeling of expansion and creativity that was going on at its height? 

McCartney:  Pepper, probably. 

Musician: What about Rubber Soul? That was a real departure. 

McCartney: All I can remember is that it was kind of a straightforward album.

 Musician: It was so acoustic, though, compared to the previous stuff.

 McCartney: Those were the sounds we were into at the time. "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", was basically John doing Dylan. Dylan had just come out, and we were big fans of his. Rubber Soul was just a catchy title. That's the bit I remember most about it. A lot of people like that as an album.

Musician:  Among connoisseurs, considered one of the early high points, Revolver, too. 

McCartney: Just to show you how wrong one can be, I was in Germany on tour just before Revolver came out. I started listening to the album, and I got really down because I thought the whole thing was out of tune. Everyone had to reassure me that it was okay. 

Musician:  Robert Fripp wrote a piece for us recently, in which he talked about an artist's image and how it can have a life of its own, in the sense that you're Paul McCartney, a human being with taste, talents, faults and all that, and yet you also have a public image, as Johnny Lydon would say, that has a life of its own that's almost independent of you. Sometimes people relate that image instead of to you as a person. How did you deal with this when you first encountered it with the Beatles? Did it bother you? Was it enjoyable? How did it feel from the inside?

 McCartney: At first, you're just an ordinary Joe rocking around trying to make a living. Then you get famous. You get your first hit, and you love it. There's nothing you'd like to do more than sign autographs. "You got them? I'll do them!"  That wears off after three or four years, you start to think, "Wait a minute, what am I bloody signing for you?"  At this point, I've come to another phase where I think it's okay again. So I've been in and out of all that.

Musician:  Have you ever wished you could just chuck it all in, fade into obscurity? 

McCartney: I remember thinking at one point that I've come to a point of no return, that even if I say now that I don't want to be famous anymore, I'd be like Bridget Bardot or Charlie Chaplin, a recluse, but still very famous, and that's no use. They'll be after me even more. 

Musician: Do you think that was John's reaction?

 McCartney:  I really don't like to speak for John, but seeing how you've asked me -- my theory is that he's done all the things he wants to do, except one-- being himself. Now he's just turned on to actually living his own life, sod everyone else. But it's not an aggressive thing, from what I can see.

 Musician: Basically, you're the most active of the former Beatles. You maintain a band and still tour pretty consistently, which the others don't. I don't want to get into a comparison trip, but after being with The Beatles, where do you go? 

McCartney: It's rather difficult to top Yeah.

 Musician: All of you must have felt some trepidation at the thought of going out on your own, but you didn't seem to worry.

 McCartney: I didn't seem to, but that's one of my features. I may seem to not do a lot of things when, in fact, I can be just as bad as the next guy. The first gigs we did with Wings were frightening. It was so scary coming out with a new band, knowing the Beatles was what was expected. 

    That was just a question of knowing I had to run that gauntlet, go through that thing, and that once I came out of it, I'd feel better and be glad I'd gone through it.

 Musician: Did you ever experience that kind of fear with The Beatles?

 McCartney:  Sure. I remember many times just sitting outside concert halls waiting for the police to escort us inside, thinking, "Jesus Christ. I really don't want to go through with this. We've done enough. Let's take the money and run. Let's go down to Brighton or something."

     Linda and I felt like that when she was having our last baby. We were driving to the hospital, and there was this terrible urge to say, "Let's go to Brighton instead." If we could have gotten away with it, we would have.

Musician: Those early tours with Wings are pretty innovative for the time, showing up unannounced at colleges in a van and charging only $1 admission, exactly the kind of impromptu "Small is Beautiful" philosophy that a lot of the New Wavers are beginning to exponge. Only you were doing it eight years ago. What led you to take that approach?

 McCartney: Instead of doing what was expected, I asked myself, "What do I really want to do? What have I missed being with the Beatles? What is it time to do?"  It was silly, little things like with the Beatles, you used to get paid massively, but you never saw it, because it always went straight into the company. You had to draw on it. So for me, one of the buzzes on that first tour was actually getting a bag of coins at the end of the gig. It wasn't just a materialistic thing. It was the feeling of getting physically paid again. It was like going back to square one. I wanted to take it back to where the Beatles started, which was in the halls; we charged 50 pence to get in. Obviously, we could have charged more and gave the Student Union a bit for having us there.

     We played poker with the money afterwards, and I'd actually pay the band physically, you know, 50 pence for you and 50 pence for you. About the thrill of actually working for a living.

 Musician: Can you empathize with this New Wave thing? Did you feel the same explosive force with the early Beatles in Hamburg and elsewhere? 

McCartney: Yes, I think it's the same thing and will always be the same. It's just a question of age. When we were 18, we were doing it and getting exactly the same reaction, only 20 years earlier. It's the energy. I don't care where they got it from. If it sounds like a great piece of music, the Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant, for instance, then I'm all for it.

 Musician: Some of the early Beatles material was obviously coming out of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, but most of it seems strikingly original. How did that  Merseybeat sound come about?

 McCartney: When we started the Beatles, John and I sat down and wrote about 50 songs, out of which I think "Love Me Do" is the only one that got published. Those songs weren't very good because we were trying to find the next beat, the next new sound. New Musical Express, which was a much gentler paper at the time, was talking about Calypso and how Latin rock was going to be the next big thing. Minutes later, we stopped trying to find the new beat. The newspaper started saying it was us, and we found it, we discovered the new sound without even trying. 

    That's what made me suspicious of categories like heavy metal or pop. My musical taste range from Fred Astaire to the Sex Pistols and everything in between. Pink Floyd ,Stevie Wonder, the Stones...

Musician: A great deal of the criticism you come in for seems to be because you use pop as a medium. What is it about pop you're attracted to?

 McCartney: I just like it. I, like a lot of people, when I get in my car and turn on the radio, I want to hear some good sounds. So whatever I write, I write for that. What are the alternatives?  Writing a serious piece of music or modern classical music? No thanks. I'd bore myself stiff after a couple of hours.

Musician:  The first major cultural experience of my generation was in February 1964 when we saw you on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was like something just swept over the whole country, a new, open energy.

 McCartney: It was strange, wasn't it?

 Musician: What the hell was it all about?

 McCartney:  I don't know. I personally think that in America, there was a standard way of doing things. The only freaky people were Hollywood writers, jazz musicians, and pop stars. But even they were tied to a framework. Meanwhile, we had cooked up this whole new British thing. We had a long time to work it out and make our mistakes in Hamburg, and almost no one was watching. 

    We were very different, having taken all the American influences and stewed them up in a British way; a lot of things had been happening with our own chemistry, because John and I were strong writers. George was like a third writer, Ringo, had a good head on his shoulders and was by no means thick. 

    We put in a lot of work in Hamburg. We would work eight hours a day, which most bands never worked that hard. We literally worked eight hours a day. It was a full factory day. So we had developed our act by the time we came to America. We had worked all that out, all the success we had in Britain. The British newspapers were saying, "Well, what's left to do? You've conquered everything". And we'd say "America!" 

    We got the number one, did Ed Sullivan. By then, we distilled our stuff down to an essence. So we weren't just coming on as any old band. We had our own total new identities. 

Musician: Did you feel that among yourselves? 

McCartney:  Yes, we knew it. People were saying, "What's this with the haircut?" If I go back on the haircut thing, I know it was actually because we saw some guy in Hamburg whose hair we liked. John and I were hitchhiking in Paris, and we asked him to cut our hair like he did his. He didn't do it quite the same, and it fell down in a Beatles cut. He was a very sort of artsy guy. This guy, great guy called Jergen. He cut our hair. We came back to England and all the people in England thought we were German, because the newspaper said, "Direct from Hamburg." All the kids were surprised when they saw us. We had leather jackets and blue jeans. We thought "We won't have corny suits. "We'll have new things guitars and jackets.

     So by the time we got to the States, for instance, the hair, which was really a bit of an accident, it was really what a lot of artsy people were doing anyway, we were the first with it in the States. So it looked like we invented it. Actually, the story was a lot more ordinary, like life is.  By the time we got to be presented on The Ed Sullivan Show, the biggest show in the States, and there we were with these funny haircuts. It was us. Everyone said, "You started the Beatle haircut." So it was like distilling the essence of what we were going through and laying it all out on America in one big move. That's why it was such a big shock and had such a big effect on them.

 Musician: Was it apparent to you that something was going on that was more than just another very big group, that this was a cultural phenomenon? 

McCartney: You don't get into that. I don't think that when Muhammad Ali was shouting, he was the greatest; he actually knew he was. It was a bluff --- showbiz. He suspected he was. We suspected we were, but a lot of what you did was just bluff, because if you wanted to be number one, you tell everyone you're number one.

Musician: But when did you realize, my God, it worked? This is more than just a musical event. This is a whole generation?

 McCartney: Very early on. When we started off in Hamburg, we had no audience, so we had to work our asses off to get people in. People would appear at the door of the club while we were on stage, and there would be nobody at the tables. We used to try to get them to sell beer. The minute we saw someone, we would kick into "Dancing in the Streets," which was one of our big numbers at the time, and just rock out pretending we hadn't seen them, and we'd find we've got three or four of them in. We were like fairground barkers, see four people, have to get them in. 

    We eventually sold the club out, which is when we realized it was going to get really big. Then we went back to England and played the Cavern. The same thing happened there. First, nobody came; then they started coming in. Finally, they came in droves. There was this incredible excitement. So we knew something we were doing must have been right.

     By the time we started playing tours, it really didn't surprise us anymore, though we were still thrilled by it when we were. On the Chris Montez tour, he was at the top of the bill. Halfway through, they switched it and put us on top. Was embarrassing as hell for him. I mean, what could you say to him? "Sorry, Chris." He took it well and stuff, but we expected it by then. Everywhere we'd gone, it seemed to work.

 Musician: At that point, no European group had ever really conquered America, no pop group. How did you determine when you were ready to take the plunge and come to the US?

 McCartney: The thing we did, which I always think new groups should take as a bit of advice, was that we were cheeky enough to say that we wouldn't go to the States until we had a number one record there. We were offered tours, but we knew we'd be second to someone, and we didn't want that. There was a lot of careful thought behind it. There were a lot of artists from here who'd go over and vanish, Cliff Richard, still trying to make it in the States. We've always looked at it logically and thought, ' Well, that's the mistake. You've got to go in as number one.' So there was a lot of careful thought there. 

    We were cooking up this act, the Beatles. It was very European, very British, as opposed to the standard American way of doing things. Ed, a couple of jugglers, Sinatra, Sinatra Jr, even Elvis from the waist up, the American Dream.

 Musician: Can you remember what it was like when you find when it finally happened?

 McCartney: When we heard that our first record went number one in the States? Yeah. We were playing Paris at the time the telegram came, and we all jumped on each other's backs and ran around everywhere. Big Mal, the roadie, gave everyone piggyback rides. We were just so excited. 

    So we went to America, and it was all like we planned might happen, but we were lucky. It went much further than we ever imagined. 

Musician: What was it that made the group able to weather the incredible pressure of all that? And stayed together as long as it did? 

McCartney: It didn't feel like pressure. It wasn't pressure for a long time. At American press conferences, they used to ask us, "What will you do when the bubble bursts?" There used to be a guy like yourself who we would take around with us, because he was so funny. We used to ask him to ask that question every time; it was the only question he ever asked on the whole tour. He got to be like the court jester.

 Musician:  So how did you answer him? 

McCartney:  I don't know. We'll blow up, or we'll fall out of the sky or whatever, but it was never a serious question to us.

Musician: When and why did the bubble burst?

 McCartney:  I don't know, really. Just about a year before the Beatles broke up, you could say the seed was sown from very early on. I don't know. It just did. Friction came in business, things, relationships between us. We were all looking for people in our lives. John had found Yoko. It made things very difficult. He wanted a very intense, intimate life with her. At the same time, we'd always reserve that kind of intimacy for the group.

     You could understand that he had to have time with her, but does he have to have that much time with her?  That was some of the feelings in the group. So these things just started to create immovable objects and pressures that were just too big.

     After that, after the breakup, then the idea of, when will the bubble burst came home. So I thought, "Oh, that was what that guy was talking about at every bloody press conference." We weren't aware of that much pressure while the Beatles were happening, because we were a very organized group, a well-rehearsed unit. But eventually I started to realize what they were talking about. You start to grow up, you realize, "Wait a minute, I really am holding down a job here, and if my paid gig goes down..."

 Musician:  I'm impressed by how easily you can go back to that period and pull out all these amazing things. I was afraid you might not be willing to talk about the Beatles. It seemed like a forbidden topic for so long. 

McCartney: Well, I recently did this video clip in which I play all the instruments like I do on the album. We had to think of someone to make the bass player like, so I told the director, I could do Beatle Paul, you said, "Yeah, you got to do it!"  I almost chickened out at the end, but I did it, put on my old uniform, and got out the old Hofner violin bass, which still has a Beatles song list taped to it. And I didn't realize until a few days later that I'd gone and broken the whole voodoo of talking about the Beatles because I'd been him again. And it didn't feel bad. I mean, if someone else is going to impersonate me, I might as well do it myself. And it was such a ball among the studio technicians, they really got off on it. 

Musician:  Did it feel like you were stepping back into that old image for a minute?

 McCartney: Yes, I felt great. It felt like I was on a TV show 20 years ago, exactly the same. The bass was the same weight. The whole thing about the Hoffner bass is that it's like balsa wood. It's so comfortable after a Fender or a Rickenbacker. I now play a Rickenbacker or a Yamaha, which are quite heavy.

Musician: Why did you switch?

 McCartney: It was given to me back in the mid-60s. Mr. Rickenbacker gave me a special left-handed bass. It was the first left-handed bass I ever had, because the Hofner was a converted right-handed. It was a freebie, and I loved it. I started getting into it on Sgt. Pepper, and now I'm playing a Yamaha.

Musician: How come?

 McCartney:  Because they gave me one. I'm anybody's for a free guitar! Sometimes I think I should research what instrument I like to play best, but generally, I seem to play stuff that's been given to me. Naturally. I only played the stuff that I like. I've been given stuff that I don't care for, but I like it. Things that I don't like are too thought-out and logical. 

    If someone asked me what strings I use, I honestly couldn't tell you. They come out in a little bag. To me, these things are just vehicles. They're beautiful, and I love them, but I don't want to find out too much about them. It's just the way my mind is. I prefer to be non-technical. 

Musician:  Back to your composing and writing. Do you have to have a set way of going about putting together a song, or is it all pretty free-flowing? 

McCartney: I'm suspicious of formulas. The minute I've got a formula, I try and change it. People used to ask us, "What comes first, the music or the words, or Lennon and McCartney, who does what?" We all did a bit of everything. Sometimes I wrote the words, and sometimes John did. Sometimes I write a tune, and sometimes he would

 Musician: ...were you the walrus? 

McCartney: Yeah, I'm still the walrus. That was a nothing thing, really; it didn't mean anything. What happened was that during Magical Mystery Tour, we did a scene where we all put on masks. It just happens to be me in the walrus mask. We just picked up a head each, no thought behind it. Then there was all that stuff about me being dead!

 Musician:  I think it's amazing that your bass playing continues to improve after you died. Very impressive.

 McCartney: Yes. Then there was that whole thing about me wearing a black carnation. I had a black carnation because they'd run out of red ones. So there was this hugely significant thing in me wearing a black carnation or turning my back on the Sgt. Pepper cover. It was actually just a goof. When we were doing the photos, I turned my back, and it was just like a joke or whatever. 

Musician:  Are your good feelings about New Wave because you recognize the same kind of creative elements you cultivated with The Beatles?

 McCartney: I think the nice thing about New Wave is that it's gotten back to real music rather than pop. I don't like a lot of it, but a lot of it I do like. I can see where it all comes from. A great deal of it. You could trace it back to the Doors, Lou Reed, Bowie, and Brian Ferry, but that's great. 

    I was influenced by Elvis. I still do an Elvis impersonation at a party --"Love me Tender." I recognize that we're all very frail no matter who puts on the great show out front. Basically, we are all imitators. We used to nick songs,  titles John and I have you, been inspired by things in the press. "Helter Skelter" came about because I read in Melody Maker that the Who had made some track or other that was the loudest, most raucious, just rock and roll, the dirtiest thing they've ever done. I didn't know what track they were talking about, but it made me think, "Right, got to do it."

     And I totally got off on that one little sentence in the paper, and I said, "We've got to do the loudest, most raucous." And that ended up as "Helter Skelter", but that's great. We were the greatest criminals going.

 Musician: Getting back to your own writing, I've noticed that with Wings, your writing often centers on themes having to do with the home, domesticity, and the family. Is that a reaction to the craziness of the Beatles or in the 60s in general? 

McCartney: It came out of getting married. Everything changes in the way you look at things. I started realizing that I liked the warmth of the family, the no-hassle thing of having a family you can relate to intimately without really trying. 

    When you're 18, you sneer at all that kind of stuff. But when you're 30, you start to reconsider, "What do I really think about all that?" When my dad used to hit me as a kid, he'd say, "When you've got kids of your own, you'll understand," and I thought, "You're a lunatic, you're hitting me, and I'll never understand that." Then you get a few kids, and your lot realizes what he was talking about. Only time can do that. 

    The word "home" changed its meaning after I gotten married. I never really had a home for a long time, I started to realize that it's important to investigate your feelings instead of hiding them. 

Musician: Looking back over your career, do you feel satisfied? Do you feel content when you consider your musical legacy?

 McCartney: I'd say I've done some songs that I think are really good, some that I think didn't quite come off, some I hate, but I've done enough to satisfy myself that I'm okay. That's basically I'm looking for-- like most people.

Musician: As long as you stay in touch with your own creativity, as you said, and keep going through this reviving, refreshing process. 

McCartney: Yes, as long as there's still some good music coming out, there'll be a wave of bad music out there, and then something will come along and kick it. They may be swearing and picking their noses and cutting themselves, but if they bring out good, if the energy is there, regardless of the form, if it's Merseybeat or Potatobeat, it makes no difference to me. As long as there's something there. 

    There's a great trick about records. It has to leap off the plastic, and if it does, it's magic. How is it that some leap off the plastic and some don't? I don't care who does it or how. It can be Segovia or Johnny Rotten, as long as they're communicating.

 Musician: To me, the deepest song you've done since the Beatles is "One of These Days" on the new album. What's going to happen one of these days?

McCartney: But doesn't everyone have this kind of thing in them since they're a kid? That one of these days I'll get around to it?  I've always wanted to be a friendly person. Well, one of these days, I'm going to be a friendly person. But in the meantime, life gets in the way. You don't always find yourself being friendly. It's just groping in the dark, really. But a lot of what I do is like that. I don't see any alternative to it, but I think of that as a positive thing.

     I don't know what I was before I was born. I was the sperm that won out of those 300 million. I can't remember that far back, but there was something working for me, some incredible thing that did it. So for me, the wonder of that, of knowing that something got on with it before my conscious memory existed, leads me to believe that when you die, maybe something gets on with it too, which gives me this vague faith that I can't pinpoint. I don't say it's so and so doing it, but it just is, and whatever it is, I have an optimistic view about it based on the record that it got me this far. It can't be that bad, right? 

Epilogue

McCartney is at his best when he excuses security, and 1. takes a risk, as on Wildlife recorded in a few days, a la Dylan. 2. is challenged-- the stressful Band on the Run. 3. is caught off guard. McCartney II -- an informal home studio project not originally intended for distribution. 

    Just how much he values a secure environment can be gleaned from the following example. McCartney had planned to use Abbey Road (where the album of the same name, and the other Beatles albums were recorded) last year, to record Back to the Egg with Wings, but found it to be already booked during the dates he needed. 

    Since Abbey Road was his favorite studio, he decided to take drastic measures in the basement of his offices in London, Soho Square, and he actually built an exact replica of his favorite room at Abbey Road Studios. It was precise in every detail. There's even a large security door against a wall that leads nowhere, simply to duplicate one in the original studio. A massively enlarged photograph depicting a larger room full of recording equipment, musical instruments, and other electronic gear covers one entire wall. This is precisely the view you'd have in the real Abbey Road Studio. 

    Inspecting it, I noticed a large clock on the studio wall in the photograph. The clock in the photo shows the time to be 1:35pm, which was an interesting coincidence, as my own watch read 1:35 also. We completed our tour of the building, and we're passing through the same room again when I happened to glance at the clock in the photo, the hands had moved!  The time now read 10 minutes to two, the correct time. A representative of Paul McCartney's office explained, "After finishing the replica studio, we invited Paul down for a look. He was delighted by everything, but stared a long time at the photo. He turned and said, 'The clock doesn't work'. We laughed, but he said, 'No, I'm serious. I want the clock in the photo to work.' So we had them hollow out the wall, install real hands on the photo clock and watchworks behind the wall. It tells excellent time, actually."  I bet. Talk about controlling your environment. 

Out to see Little Malcolm

 

February 4, 1966 -

Newlyweds Pattie and George along with Brian Epstein go to see Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, which is a movie George will produce later in his life. 

No ice cream for Beatle Paul

Photo taken by Dezo Hoffman