Do you think you’re a genius?
Yes, if there is such a thing as one, I am one.
When did you first realize that?
When I was about twelve. I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody’s noticed. I used to wonder whether I’m a genius or I’m not, which is it? I used to think, well, I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away; therefore, I’m a genius. A genius is a form of madness, and we’re all that way, you know, and I used to be a bit coy about it, like my guitar playing.
If there is such a thing as genius—which is what . . . what the fuck is it?—I am one, and if there isn’t, I don’t care. I used to think it when I was a kid, writing me poetry and doing me paintings. I didn’t become something when the Beatles made it, or when you heard about me, I’ve been like this all me life. Genius is pain, too.
You say that the dream is over. Part of the dream was that the Beatles were God or that the Beatles were the messengers of God, and, of course, yourself as God . . .
Yeah. Well, if there is a God, we’re all it.
When did you first start getting the reactions from people who listened to the records, sort of the spiritual reaction?
There is a guy in England, William Mann, who was the first intellectual who reviewed the Beatles in the Times and got people talking about us in that intellectual way. He wrote about aeolian cadences and all sorts of musical terms, and he is a bullshitter. But he made us credible with intellectuals. He wrote about Paul’s last album as if it were written by Beethoven or something. He’s still writing the same shit. But it did us a lot of good in that way, because people in all the middle classes and intellectuals were all going, “Oooh.”
When did somebody first come up to you about this thing about John Lennon as God?
About what to do and all of that? Like “You tell us, Guru”? Probably after acid. Maybe after Rubber Soul. I can’t remember it exactly happening. We just took that position. I mean, we started putting out messages. Like “The Word Is Love” and things like that. I write messages, you know. See, when you start putting out messages, people start asking you, “What’s the message?”
How did you first get involved in LSD?
A dentist in London laid it on George, me and wives, without telling us, at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George’s and our dentist at the time, and he just put it in our coffee or something. He didn’t know what it was; it’s all the same thing with that sort of middle-class London swinger, or whatever. They had all heard about it, and they didn’t know it was different from pot or pills, and they gave us it. He said, “I advise you not to leave,” and we all thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house, and we didn’t want to know, and we went to the Ad Lib and these discotheques, and there were these incredible things going on.
It was insane, going around London. When we went to the club we thought it was on fire, and then we thought it was a premiere and it was just an ordinary light outside. We thought, “Shit, what’s going on here?” We were cackling in the streets, and people were shouting, “Let’s break a window,” you know; it was just insane. We were just out of our heads. When we finally got on the lift [elevator], we all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light. We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical, and when we all arrived on the floor, because this was a discotheque that was up a building, the lift stopped and the door opened and we were all [John demonstrates by screaming] . . .
I had read somebody describing the effects of opium in the old days, and I thought, “Fuck! It’s happening,” and then we went to the Ad Lib and all of that, and then some singer came up to me and said, “Can I sit next to you?” And I said, “Only if you don’t talk,” because I just couldn’t think.
This seemed to go on all night. I can’t remember the details. George somehow or another managed to drive us home in his Mini. We were going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand, and Patti was saying, let’s jump out and play football. I was getting all these sort of hysterical jokes coming out like speed, because I was always on that, too.
God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. I did some drawings at the time, I’ve got them somewhere, of four faces saying, “We all agree with you!” I gave them to Ringo, the originals. I did a lot of drawing that night. And then George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine. I was driving it, they all went to bed, I was carrying on in it; it seemed to float above his wall which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it.
When you came down, what did you think?
I was pretty stoned for a month or two. The second time we had it was in L.A. We were on tour in one of those houses, Doris Day’s house or wherever it was we used to stay, and the three of us took it, Ringo, George and I. Maybe Neil and a couple of the Byrds—what’s his name, the one in the Stills and Nash thing, Crosby and the other guy, who used to do the lead. McGuinn. I think they came, I’m not sure, on a few trips. But there was a reporter, Don Short. We were in the garden; it was only our second one, and we still didn’t know anything about doing it in a nice place and cool it. Then they saw the reporter and thought, “How do we act?” We were terrified waiting for him to go, and he wondered why we couldn’t come over. Neil, who never had acid either, had taken it, and he would have to play road manager, and we said go get rid of Don Short, and he didn’t know what to do.
Peter Fonda came, and that was another thing. He kept saying [in a whisper], “I know what it’s like to be dead,” and we said, “What?” and he kept saying it. We were saying, “For Christ’s sake, shut up, we don’t care, we don’t want to know,” and he kept going on about it. That’s how I wrote “She Said, She Said”—“I know what’s it’s like to be dead.” It was a sad song, an acidy song, I suppose. “When I was a little boy” . . . you see, a lot of early childhood was coming out, anyway.
So LSD started for you in 1964: How long did it go on?
It went on for years, I must have had a thousand trips.
Literally a thousand, or a couple of hundred?
A thousand. I used to just eat it all the time. I never took it in the studio. Once I thought I was taking some uppers, and I was not in the state of handling it. I can’t remember what album it was, but I took it and I just noticed . . . I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I thought I felt ill, and I thought I was going to crack. I said, I must get some air. They all took me upstairs on the roof and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me I must have taken acid. I said, “Well, I can’t go on, you’ll have to do it and I’ll just stay and watch.” You know, I got very nervous just watching them all. I was saying, “Is it all right?” And they were saying, “Yeah.” They had all been very kind, and they carried on making the record.
The other Beatles didn’t get into LSD as much as you did?
George did. In L.A., the second time we took it, Paul felt very out of it because we are all a bit slightly cruel, sort of, “We’re taking it, and you’re not.” But we kept seeing him, you know. We couldn’t eat our food. I just couldn’t manage it, just picking it up with our hands. There were all these people serving us in the house, and we were knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it. Then there was the big announcement.
Right.
So, I think George was pretty heavy on it; we are probably the most cracked. Paul is a bit more stable than George and I.
And straight?
I don’t know about straight. Stable. I think LSD profoundly shocked him, and Ringo. I think maybe they regret it.
Did you have many bad trips?
I had many. Jesus Christ, I stopped taking it because of that. I just couldn’t stand it.
You got too afraid to take it?
It got like that, but then I stopped it for I don’t know how long, and then I started taking it again just before I met Yoko. Derek came over and . . . you see, I got the message that I should destroy my ego, and I did, you know.
I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.
I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said, “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this,” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”
The next week I went to Derek’s with Yoko and we tripped again, and she filled me completely to realize that I was me and that it’s all right. That was it; I started fighting again, being a loudmouth again and saying, “I can do this, fuck it, this is what I want, you know. I want it and don’t put me down.” I did this, so that’s where I am now.
At some point, right between ‘Help’ and ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ you got into drugs and got into doing drug songs?
A Hard Day’s Night I was on pills; that’s drugs, that’s bigger drugs than pot. Started on pills when I was fifteen, no, since I was seventeen, since I became a musician. The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them—the pills and drink. I was a fucking dropped-down drunk in art school. Help was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy, probably.
There’s a lot of obvious LSD things you did in the music.
Yes.
How do you think that affected your conception of the music? In general.
It was only another mirror. It wasn’t a miracle. It was more of a visual thing and a therapy, looking at yourself a bit. It did all that. You know, I don’t quite remember. But it didn’t write the music; neither did Janov or Maharishi in the same terms. I write the music in the circumstances in which I’m in, whether it’s on acid or in the water.
The Hunter Davies book, the “authorized biography,” says . . .
It was written in [London] Sunday Times sort of fab form. And no home truths were written. My auntie knocked out all the truth bits from my childhood, and my mother and I allowed it, which was my cop-out, et cetera. There was nothing about orgies and the shit that happened on tour. I wanted a real book to come out, but we all had wives and didn’t want to hurt their feelings. End of that one. Because they still have wives.
The Beatles tours were like the Fellini film Satyricon. We had that image. Man, our tours were like something else; if you could get on our tours, you were in. They were Satyricon, all right.
Would you go to a town . . . hotel . . .
Wherever we went, there was always a whole scene going; we had our four separate bedrooms. We tried to keep them out of our room. Derek’s and Neil’s rooms were always full of junk and whores and who-the-fuck-knows-what, and policemen with it. Satyricon! We had to do something. What do you do when the pill doesn’t wear off and it’s time to go? I used to be up all night with Derek, whether there was anybody there or not, I could never sleep, such a heavy scene it was. They didn’t call them groupies then, they called it something else, and if we couldn’t get groupies, we would have whores and everything, whatever was going.
Who would arrange all that stuff?
Derek and Neil, that was their job, and Mal, but I’m not going into all that.
Like businessmen at a convention.
When we hit town, we hit it. There was no pissing about. There’s photographs of me crawling about in Amsterdam on my knees coming out of whorehouses and things like that. The police escorted me to the places because they never wanted a big scandal, you see. I don’t really want to talk about it because it will hurt Yoko. And it’s not fair. Suffice to say that they were Satyricon on tour and that’s it, because I don’t want to hurt their feelings, or the other people’s girls either. It’s just not fair.
What else was left out of the Hunter Davies book?
That I don’t know because I can’t remember it. There is a better book on the Beatles by Michael Brown, Love Me Do. That was a true book. He wrote how we were, which was bastards. You can’t be anything else in such a pressurized situation, and we took it out on people like Neil, Derek and Mal. That’s why underneath their facade, they resent us, but they can never show it, and they won’t believe it when they read it. They took a lot of shit from us because we were in such a shitty position. It was hard work, and somebody had to take it. Those things are left out by Davies, about what bastards we were. Fuckin’ big bastards, that’s what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, that’s a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.
Yoko: How did you manage to keep that clean image? It’s amazing.
John: Everybody wants the image to carry on. You want to carry on. The press around, too, because they want the free drinks and the free whores and the fun; everybody wants to keep on the bandwagon. We were the Caesars; who was going to knock us, when there were a million pounds to be made? All the handouts, the bribery, the police, all the fucking hype. Everybody wanted in, that’s why some of them are still trying to cling on to this: Don’t take Rome from us, not a portable Rome where we can all have our houses and our cars and our lovers and our wives and office girls and parties and drink and drugs, don’t take it from us, otherwise you’re mad, John, you’re crazy, silly John wants to take this all away.
Would you take it all back?
What?
Being a Beatle?
If I could be a fuckin’ fisherman, I would. If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it’s torture. I read about Van Gogh, Beethoven, any of the fuckers. If they had psychiatrists, we wouldn’t have had Gauguin’s great pictures. These bastards are just socking us to death; that’s about all that we can do, is do it like circus animals.
I resent being an artist, in that respect; I resent performing for fucking idiots who don’t know anything. They can’t feel. I’m the one that’s feeling because I’m the one that is expressing. They live vicariously through me and other artists, and we are the ones . . . even with the boxers—when Oscar comes in the ring, they’re booing the shit out of him; he only hits Clay once and they’re all cheering him. I’d sooner be in the audience, really, but I’m not capable of it.
One of my big things is that I wish to be a fisherman. I know it sounds silly—and I’d sooner be rich than poor, and all the rest of that shit—but I wish the pain was ignorance or bliss or something. If you don’t know, man, then there’s no pain; that’s how I express it.
What do you think the effect was of the Beatles on the history of Britain?
I don’t know about the “history”; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle-class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word “fuck.” Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything. It is exactly the same.
We’ve grown up a little, all of us, there has been a change, and we’re all a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game. Shit, they’re doing exactly the same thing, selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street; people are living in fucking poverty, with rats crawling over them. It just makes you puke, and I woke up to that, too.
The dream is over. It’s just the same, only I’m thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair. That’s what it is, man, nothing happened except that we grew up, we did our thing—just like they were telling us. You kids—most of the so-called “now generation” are getting a job. We’re a minority, you know; people like us always were, but maybe we
are a slightly larger minority because of maybe something or other.
Why do you think the impact of the Beatles was so much bigger in America than it was in England?
The same reason that American stars are so much bigger in England: The grass is greener. We were really professional by the time we got to the States; we had learned the whole game. When we arrived here we knew how to handle the press; the British press were the toughest in the world, and we could handle anything. We were all right.
On the plane over, I was thinking, “Oh, we won’t make it,” or I said it on a film or something, but that’s that side of me. We knew we would wipe you out if we could just get a grip on you. We were new.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 6