John Lennon on "Revolution"

"Ah, sure, 'Revolution.' There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said, 'Count me out.' The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too. I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrète, kinds of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution -- but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution. On the version released as a single I said, 'When you talk about destruction, you can count me out.' I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt -- I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class, I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game. At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around describing myself as a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalized madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that made me feel my pain won."