Lennon Remembers: The Complete Rolling Stone Interviews by Jann Wenner. Verso, 151 pp., £20, 9 October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
Buy it at BOL
John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Rolling Stone published the interview early the following year, with the album already in the shops. Between them, the record and the interview seemed to round off the 1960s nicely - or nastily, come to that. Many things seemed to do the same, of course, but in this case the dating was pretty precise. It was ten years since John, Paul, George and Ringo had recorded their first session together at the Akustik, a small studio in Hamburg (apparently a single 78 rpm copy of 'Summertime' still survives); and Lennon's declaration that 'the dream isover' in 'God', track ten on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, felt like a speech from the heart at the last-ever anniversary party.
What makes the Lennon interview rewarding second time around is not that this is an interviewer's cut, so to speak - very little of interest was excised for the magazine edition: it's simply that the perplexing contradictions it revealed at the time seem easier to grasp in retrospect. They're still interesting: rock and roll fundamentalism v. avant-gardism; therapy v. politics; and, above all for Lennon, John v. the Beatles and all they stood for. It's also clear that this clever man profited from his relationship with Yoko Ono, who served his purposes in serving her own. Under her guidance, he became both a public solipsist and something of a radical - affirming the paramount value of being John before going on to adopt the campaigning postures of the 1970s: anti-war, anti-consumerism, anti-Nixon, anti-clericalism, a brief bout of workerism, 'power to the people' and so on.
It was rickety stuff, but for most of the time he meant it, and within a few years of his liaison with Yoko, he had graduated from the knowing boy of the 1960s to the naive man-child we associate with his last years. 'Imagine' - his transnational anthem of 1971 - is typical of the new universalist peering out through smoked-glass spectacles. Direct, fantastical, awash with grandeur and schmaltz, and apparently harmless, it might nowadays have been commissioned for a Vodafone ad. Even so, it must have had an edge to it when Lennon performed it at a benefit for the relatives of inmates killed by police after the Attica State Prison riot in 1971 and it was BBC policy, nearly twenty years later, to keep it off the air for the duration of the Gulf War.
For the rest, the John Lennon story is a tortuous family affair, in many intersecting senses of the term, and it's remained so, largely because the heyday of his avatar, John Beatle, and of his three siblings, must for commercial reasons be extended for as long as possible. But early on, everyone sensed that there was something distinctive about Lennon. In my family and others I knew, the Beatles met with condescending parental approval, and so it was natural to view them with suspicion. In 1966, when the press got hold of Lennon's 'bigger than Jesus' remark, he became a villain, at least where I grew up - one of a mixed bunch of Labour ministers, student revolutionaries and TV personalities (including, for some reason, the variety pianists Russ Conway and Mrs Mills). In the Home Counties, the maxim 'Know your enemy' was applied with latitude and as Lennon entered the pantheon of hate figures - a medium to al dente subversive whose name was reviled at gymkhanas and golf tournaments around the county - he rose in our esteem.
I find it odd, but not surprising, that he's once again a family man - in my family at any rate. In the last two years I've reinvested in the productions of Mopheads Inc at the request of two boys under the age of six for whom the death of the person who didn't 'believe in Beatles' is so significant that it determines most of what they know or think about music. (For example: 'Who is this music by?' 'Johann Sebastian Bach.' 'Is he dead?' 'Yes.' 'Was he shot?') Striking, too, that in the run-and-run saga of the Beatles, we can't get away from the band and they can't get away from each other. It's as though they'd been condemned to an eternity of group therapy without a counsellor, a slanging match between the living and the dead, while younger admirers, plunderers and acolytes-at-one-remove, like Blur and the Gallaghers, pin messages of sympathy to the door of the consulting room. And then, quite easily, that little room begins to expand in a dream-like distortion until it's a vast concourse that appears to contain us all. Here, every thought or memory, however private, comes complete with a transfiguring riff by Lennon and McCartney. The stores are decorated with Pepperland hangings, the sun shines like a cartoon sun, the coffee machines play 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' and mobile phones ring with a digitised version of 'Penny Lane'. Another family affair, on a much larger scale. 'Very strange.'
Not so strange, perhaps, is Lennon's wish, from the late 1960s, to have done with this ever-extending artificial family. Neither is the fact that he failed to do so. On the face of it, the relationship with Yoko Ono was a more intimate venture, but it was also extraordinarily stagey and public. And 'the public' - that's us - was part of the baggage Lennon carried with him. We went as an enormous cast of pseudo-cousins, adopted brothers and sisters. We didn't have to concur with his snide (and amusing) remarks about the other Beatles: it was more a case of taking an interest in a new branch of the family, a divagation of an extreme kind that was sometimes hard to put up with.
There were memorable lows - among them, 'Don't Worry Kyoko' and 'John, John', Yoko's contributions to the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace in Toronto 1969 - but you could always spin back to Rubber Soul or Revolver for a big family get-together, repatriating Lennon to the land from which he'd done a very noisy runner. 'That... album with the drawing by Klaus Voorman on it,' he asks Jann Wenner apropos Revolver. 'Was that before Rubber Soul or after?' Nowadays, too, the happy family solution's at hand, with both those albums somewhere in the upper layer of chaos spread around the tape deck of the car. But as younger consumers in the Beatles Emporium come 'onstream', lapping up the recordings of the mid-1960s and imagining that Bach was wasted on the way to choir practice, one longs for a break in the story and a breather from the Beatlish-Lennonish mixture of knowing chic and know-nothing bonhomie which little boys seem to find as seductive as their mothers and fathers did.
But perhaps not their grandparents, in whose eyes Lennon had blown it by becoming the person he is in this interview: self-engrossed, witty, malicious, foolish - someone who is always ready to be disabused and reabused, obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin, aloft between frying pan and fire and flipping like a dervish pancake, yet equally convinced of a redemptive universe which has delivered him safe and sound into the arms of Yoko Ono ('nothing works better than to have somebody you love hold you'). A confused figure waging several wars at once and taking no prisoners. An attractive figure, I find, and a model of frankness. This is a person gloriously incapable of circumspection.
Even so, he has a project, which comes into focus early on in the interview: the articulation of a revitalised John Lennon, a chip off the old block certainly, but a New Man, too, replenished with the old values of rock and roll; a pain-artist with a Promethean gift to offer (rock and roll again, in its raw form, without the dinky, mediating talents of the Beatles) and a Promethean sacrifice to make: this welcome ordeal is forecast in 'Yer Blues' on the 'White Album' (1968), where the liver's left alone, but the eagle goes straight for the eyes - vision itself, a Lennonologist would tell you.
This notion of the rock and roll performer going back to what he knows best is opposed to what the made-over Lennon describes as 'that sort of dead Beatles sound or dead recording sound', a multitude of tracks laid down under the supervision of George Martin and Paul McCartney. And not long after the old production values have come under fire, so has the material itself. Again, the issue is mediation, a lack of feeling or veracity in the fanciful little narratives - 'Eleanor Rigby' comes to mind - that stormed up the charts but had nothing to do with the business of speaking one's mind and singing one's soul.
From this morass of trivia, apparently, the new, discerning Lennon rescues his best songs, his 'me' songs: 'In My Life', 'I'm a Loser', 'Help!', 'Strawberry Fields' ('all personal records'). 'They were the ones that I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it, which I always found phony' - 'third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things'. The emphasis now is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, none of the courtesies of 'projection', no more correlative niceties. Instead, a 'first-person music', bubbling forth from the self in anguish, revealed at last, like a run of leaking pipes with the lagging triumphantly torn away.
It's stretching it a bit to describe 'In My Life' or 'Strawberry Fields' as rock and roll, but perhaps it's a manner of speaking as well as an expression of narrow allegiance. What matters is how to be John Lennon with a minimum of interference and rock and roll does a lot of work on this front. It also puts everyone in their place.
'What do your personal tastes run to?'
'Wop bop a loo bop. You know?... I don't like much else.'
'Why rock and roll?'
'That's the music that inspired me to play... There's nothing conceptually better than rock and roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, has ever improved on 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' on' for my money.' Rock and roll sorts you out, then; like a therapy, it helps to distinguish the real you from the specious ones. And, of course, it's by means of this distinction that you're able to identify the good songs you wrote and the not-so-good songs, which is how you elect a song like 'Strawberry Fields' to the canon. It is by you and about you and about what you felt. What it has in common with 'Money' or 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy' (there are good renditions of both these standards on Live Peace in Toronto) is lack of adornment, and the quality of something properly authentic, an encounter in which the material has come readily to the composer, presenting itself in the form of an abundant natural resource: the opposite of the synthetic rummage-and-collage process that begins in 1967 with 'A Day in the Life' on Sgt Pepper and goes on through the 'White Album' to Abbey Road (1969). 'Real', 'true' and 'simple' are Lennon's catch-all descriptions of what he's after. On rock and roll again: 'You recognise something in it that is true, like all true art. Whatever art is, readers. Okay? It's that. If it's real, it's simple usually. And if it's simple, it's true. Something like that.'
These remarks are by way of priming - maybe bracing - both himself and his fans for the forthcoming album. And in December 1970, with the record finished but not yet released, it's as though everything will stand or fall on this piece of work. The ground needs preparing for its reception -'people have to be hyped in a way, they've got to have it presented to them in all the best ways possible' - and a certain amount needs to be said about the real and the unreal, about the unpacking of the self and the recovery of the authentic John Lennon. Fans must also be readied for the album's hair-raising combination of fury and defencelessness - and for my money (as Lennon liked to say), 'Look at Me' is as good as any other song he elects to the party of simplicity, reality and truth. Much of the interview, then, is about the distresses and rewards of his self-revelation, under the tutelage of Yoko Ono and - from April 1970, when he embarked on primal therapy - Arthur Janov, author of The Primal Scream. These are the new and more helpful Maharishis chaperoning John towards his irreducible core of Lennonness.
The old mentor is reviled. So is the stab at self-abandon, in the form of meditation, a natural place to have gone with LSD, hard on the heels of Brian Epstein's death in 1967 ('I thought: "We've fuckin' had it"'), but it didn't work out. It was a fraud masterminded by an earthly purveyor of cosmic wisdom who splashed his transcendental pheromones around the ashram, or whatever it was, every time he set eyes on Mia Farrow or her sister Prudence, all the while raking it in, courtesy of John, the three siblings and their girls. On the double album, the Maharishi becomes 'Sexy Sadie' - 'You made a fool of everyone' - and here, in one of several parting shots, Lennon describes how the news of Epstein's death reached the Beatles as they were set to attend a lecture by the Maharishi in Bangor. It was probably the moment that propelled Lennon to India, and it's revisited in that faintly hysterical, yet deeply economical style that reduces the world to a three-way contest between pain, intelligence and cant. The press said: '"Brian's dead." I was stunned. We all were. And the Maharishi - we went into him, "He's dead," and all that. And he was sort of saying: "Oh, forget it, be happy." Fucking idiot.'
Arthur Janov was a huge improvement. Sadie had shed no light, after all, on Lennon's feelings for his first family, the real disaster waiting to happen on the steps of Mount Pleasant Register Office, Liverpool, in December 1938, two years before he was born. The album proved that Janov could help him feel his way around the business of Freddy, the absconded father ('I wanted you but you didn't want me'), and Julia, the dead mother ('you had me but I never had you'). Janov also seems to have come up with a cure for the cure (screaming as the remedy for meditation), which must have posed a serious challenge.
The most pressing issue was surely that Lennon had been boxed into a world of fantastic disproportion. With millions of people doting on your songs - the ones you like and the others you don't - you could be forgiven for thinking your difficulties were more than merely personal. Inasmuch as the real you was being consumed, understood or misunderstood across about a quarter of the earth's non-marine surface (plus a few bobbing pirate radio stations), your problems could be said to have a global dimension. And with the teachings of the Maharishi kicking in, and then out, it would all have taken on another dimension still. You may not have remained at one with the universe, but somehow the erstwhile notion that you became it by being part of it, then all of it, and that it became you in microcosm, would have left you feeling that immense forces were in play when you tried to figure out who you were.
Janov was more usefully parochial. The thing to do with the 'self' was to shuck it, like something on a seafood platter, get 'in touch' with the injured child and redeem that injury with a primal enactment of pain. Lennon took to Janov, and after the embarrassing remark, 'We primal almost daily,' he disposes of the therapy quite honourably, refusing to betray it or allow it to betray him. In explaining what it was and how it worked, he contrives to strip it of babble, i.e. to Lennonise it. 'Primal therapy allowed us to feel feelings continually, and those feelings usually make you cry. That's all.' Whatever the vices of simplicity, they're hard to finger here.
Lennon had called John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band 'the first primal album', but screaming and wailing were already modes that he knew well before his sessions with Janov. For years, the fans had been screaming and wailing and fainting wherever the Beatles went, and like spent witchfinders huddling in their cowls, the band would beat a retreat from this Devils of Loudun sound-effect to their blowsy cars and hotel suites. (I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon around the time they released Beatles for Sale - 1964, I suppose. The screaming was so wild that my 12-year-old soulmate removed his shoe and threatened the girls in front, but they were intent on burning at the stake.) Screaming, too, was part of the band's act. 'Pain and screaming was before Janov,' Lennon says. 'Listen to "Twist and Shout"' - an Isley Brothers cover - 'I couldn't sing the damn thing. I was just screaming. Listen to"a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom"' - a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from 'Tutti Frutti'. 'Don't get the therapy confused with the music.' And what's true (and 'simple' and 'real') of the voice is also true of the instrument:
'How do you rate yourself as a guitarist?'
'Well, it depends what kind of guitarist... '
'Rock and roll.'
'I'm okay. I'm not technically very good, but I can make it fucking howl and move.' Janov, then, is a way station - a 'mirror', as the unexpurgated Yoko now interjects - like all Lennon's 'phases'. Matters are reassessed; there's a pause from the general exhaustion, perhaps the first real pause since Hamburg, and a retrospective. A narrative order is impressed on the junkheap of fame and talent; John learns how to get 'centred'; scores are settled, good jokes are made; ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.