An Interview with John (and Yoko?)
From the National Observer, reprinted in the I.F.A.
June 3, 1972 -- April 1973
Q: Did the collective Beatles image hide your real personalities?
John: The guy who wrote A Hard Day's Night, tried to write what he thought we were like after being with us for three days, and that rather set our image, you know, like boom, boom, boom: Ringo,sharp John, sweet Paul, serious George. These were caricatures of what we were. Although Epstein had cleaned us up a little, he took the cigarettes out of our mouths on stage, wouldn't let us eat on stage, and told us to stop swearing. We were still doing all right, just being ourselves. We were very popular, not being goody-goody on stage. If you're not yourself, you're paid, you'll pay for it, and we paid. That was the suffering I felt being a Beatle.
Yoko: The Beatles had a neutral or bisexual image. It was not really a masculine image. It was an image that wouldn't go over in an age when people are aware of women's identities and Blacks and other races.
Q: In their heyday, did the Beatles use drugs?
John: They never used hard drugs. But when we were kids in Liverpool, pep pills were already rampant. It was a pill age. Then marijuana didn't come until we got to America. The only way to keep going on the road was to take something to keep you awake, whether you got it from a doctor or a PG man, and we drank quite a lot. The Beatles were famous for whiskey and Coke.
Q: What caused the breakup of the Beatles?
John: It started when Epstein died. When we came back from India, we made a double album, sort of looking back to the R&R, very simple and basic. George was writing a lot. Then that's when the tension really started showing we were less and less interested in each other's songs. Paul was going more and more into "Mary Had a Little Lamb", and I was going more and more into "Uncle Punkly Jingle, Gaggle" with sounds and things and that. So it was a musical division, more than an emotional division. Everybody was uncomfortable, but nobody could put his finger on the reason. Even making an album became such a production. It was like we had all outgrown the Beatles.
Q: Did Yoko have anything to do with the breakup?
John: She may have been the last straw for some of them. Meeting Yoko was in a way, like meeting Paul in the early days, meeting somebody with the same interest, with a brilliant mind, who had the same kind of vision I had. But after 10 years, it became nothing. When Yoko came into my life. Nothing else seemed important, but she didn't say, 'Why don't you leave those lunatics?'
She would have been content to join in. She'd have come to a session and, as she had with other musicians, performed with us, but nobody performed with the Beatles. Nobody. Paul always wanted to keep the Beatles pure, whereas George and I wanted to expand the Beatles. McCartney wanted to be the Beatles forever. George and I had been trying to break that down for quite a bit. So it finally became evident that the only way to break it, was to break it. Paul rang up a year later and said, 'I understand what the rest of us put you two through now. I'm going through it with Linda myself. I understand that what you two were trying to do was just be yourselves, individuals. I'm trying to do the same thing now.' That was the only clue I had to the announcement he was going to make that night that he had left the Beatles.
Q: Did all that climax by the McCartney suit end your long friendship with Paul?
John: He and Linda were at our New York apartment just a few weeks ago. We all want to get this thing settled, the Apple thing. We were disagreeing, then the lawyers came in and turned it into a pitched battle. But as soon as it died down, we started getting in contact again. We both basically want the same thing: everything that we own, coming directly to each of us as individuals, and not into one big pot. And one quarter of everything that we did together coming directly to us instead of into a pot. Now my album, Imagine, goes into the pot. It's divided amongst the four people.
Q: Why was George always the most inconspicuous?
John: When we met George, he was musically good on the guitar, and he had sung a little, but he had never written a song in his life, and it was years before any of his songs made any sense. It wasn't that we were holding him back. It was just that they were such trash, they were rubbish, and we weren't about to put his bit of rubbish on when we could turn out better rubbish. He was the lead singer in his own group. He left that to become our guitarist, because we had presence on stage, which is something he never really got. You can see it in the Bangladesh concert. You've seen comedians on stage together. It's a fight for the camera, right? Well, it's the same with musicians on stage. It's every man for himself. So he had all the chances, stage and film, therefore, extroverted people, or introverts who show themselves to be extroverted. George is still introverted.
Q: How do you explain Beatlemania of the 60s?
John: We were just reflecting the culture. Our style was instinctive, intuitive. We pulled things up from the streets. The Paris kids were wearing bell-bottom trousers and Beatle haircuts before we popularized them in London. We went to a shop that had a Pierre Cardin corduroy coat with no collar. We picked it up, wore it, made it famous. The decision to put our hair forward was a big one, because the kids in Liverpool are tough kids. It took us a long time to convince them we hadn't gone fag just because we had changed our hair. Before that, it was just like everyone else, you know, with Vaseline and Burl Cream. We were descendants of rock and roll with the original pop musical revolution. As far as I'm concerned, the Beatles just carried it a step farther. Rock and roll was basically black music, except for a few people like Elvis and Bill Haley. We sort of intellectualized it for white people. We made white kids in America aware of their own black music.
