by Walter Everett
First published April, 1999
Oxford University Press
"This is an excellent book that will appeal to musicologists, theorists, and general readers with any interest in the Beatles. . . . Everett has written the most important book on the Beatles to appear so far; it will become an indispensable part of any future work on the group and their music. He nicely and securely balances detailed music-analytical, historical, and biographical information while providing a compelling interpretation of the ways in which the group's music changed and developed."
-John Covach, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Impressive. . . . I've never seen anything like it before. . . . This unique book offers a seamless narrative of the latter half of the Beatles' career as music makers. What is new in these pages is new not only to the literature on the Beatles but to writing about popular music more generally. . . . Everett does many things more effectively than any previous writer on the Beatles. . . . A great book." -Charles Hamm, Dartmouth College
Given the phenomenal fame and commercial success that the Beatles knew for the entire course of their familiar career, their music per se has received surprisingly little detailed attention. Not all of their cultural influence can be traced to long hair and flashy clothing; the Beatles had numerous fresh ideas about melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form, colors, and textures. Or consider how much new ground was broken by their lyrics alone - both the themes and imagery of the Beatles' poetry are key parts of what made (and still makes) this group so important, so popular, and so imitated. This book is a comprehensive chronological study of every aspect of the Fab Four's musical life - including full examinations of compositions, performance practice, recording, and historical context - during their transcendent late period (1966-1970). Rich, authoritative interpretations are interwoven through a documentary study of many thousands of audio, print, and other sources.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Everett is Associate Professor of Music in Music Theory at the University of Michigan.
Excerpt
ONE
ANOTHER KIND OF MIND THERE
The Meaning of Within (1966)
The time line (Table 1.2) shows an obvious curtailment of activity compared with preceding years. Largely because more time was devoted to recording Revolver than any previous LP, this album and a prior single were the only new Beatles product released in 1966. But the recordings were stunning. Reflective of their reading of Timothy Leary, their own experiences with LSD, and an exploration of Hindustani msuci and philoshopy, Revolver was fundamentally unlike any rock album that had preceded it. The recording of its new and colorized sounds was inaugurated by a few bizarre homemade tape loops brought to EMI by McCartney, pushed beyond normal limits by expressive uses of audio filters, and introduced on the final product by a time-defying "one, two, three, four" countdown clearly worlds removed from that which opened Please Please Me. Revolver was an innovative example of electronic music as much as it advanced the leading edge of the rock world.
The Beatles' passion for studio creativity kept the band focused and intact through a difficult year of press-bashing, tours from hell, and extensive year-end solo projects conducted amid anxious rumors of the band's demise. With the end of the final concert tour, the Beatles virtually abandoned ensemble playing: rarely - prior to last-ditch efforts in 1969 - would they again perform a song in its entirety in a live format, even within the friendly confines of the studio. Indeed, the group had begun to break up in 1966 as its members discovered that they had individual lives with interests that were not always fully harmonious with those of their mates, a divergence that naturally would grow ever larger in the group's final years together. But the beginning of 1966 was a heady and most promising time . . .
Table 1.2 Time Line of Major Events for the Beatles, 1966
Apr. 6 - June 22:
June 10:
June 16:
June 24 - July 4:
Aug. 5:
Aug. 12 - 29:
Sept. 6 - Nov. 6:
Sept. 14 - Oct. 22:
Nov.-Dec.:
Nov. 24:
Recordings and postproduction for LP and single at EMI, London
"Paperback Writer"/"Rain" released in United Kingdom
Last "live" television appearance, miming single
Concerts in West Germany, Tokyo, and Manila
Revolver released in United Kingdom
U.S. tour: final live performances for ticketed audience
John Lennon shooting How I Won the War, West Germany and
Spain; composes "Strawberry Fields Forever"
George Harrison in India, studying sitar under Ravi Shankar
Paul McCartney writes material for The Family Way soundtrack
Beatles return to EMI, London, to begin work ostensibly for next LP
Early 1966: McCartney and the Avant-garde
Little has been documented about the Beatles' first three months of 1966; presumably, the period had been served for a film project that enver materialized. No performance were scheduled before May, so a January dubbing session for a television film was the only group project prior to April recording sessions.
Whereas the other Beatles resided in the suburbs west of London, McCartney bought a home on Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood, a very short walk from EMI Studios, in April 1965. McCartney, the swinging London bachelor, had fallen in with the underground pop culturati - writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, filmmakers such as Michael Antonioni, and art critics such as John Dunbar - whom he had met as early as 1963 through singers Peter Asher and Marianne Faithfull. In January 1966, McCartney helped Asher, Dunbar, and Barry Miles open the youth-oriented Indica Bookshop on Southampton Row; the following October, he aided Miles in founding the underground paper International Times. McCartney attended avant-garde concerts of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, began collecting the surrealistic paintings of Rene Magritte, and made his own avant-garde films: Andy Warhol once sat through a home screening on Cavendish Avenue. Two such films, The Defeat of the Dog and The Next Spring Then, were described by one guest in Punch magazine: "They were not like ordinary people's home movies. There were over-exposures, double-exposures, blinding orange lights, quick cuts from professional wrestling to a crowded car park to a close-up of a television weather map. There were long still shots of a grey cloudy sky and a wet, grey pavement, jumping Chinese ivory carvings and affectionate slow-motion studies of his sheepdog Martha and his cat. The accompanying music, on a record player and faultlessly synchronised, was by the Modern Jazz Quartet and Bach." All of these activities represented a drive to discover the new aesthetic experience and would reverberate with the new sound images the Beatels would discvoer, especially with the promotional films made for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "A Day in the Life" in 1967.
McCartney's dabbling was more serious in his home recording studio, which was based on a coupled pair of Brennell tape machines. "He's become an expert at recording and double-tracking - he'll start with a basic sound on one tape, re-record something over it and then repeat the process umpteen times using two tape decks. He specializes in curious space noises and electronic music." McCartney once threatened to release a solo LP called Paul McCartney Goes Too Far, but Lennon called his bluff, and the notion came to nothing. Lennon, on the other hand, would complete such exercises in 1968 and 1969. McCartney's home recordings, whether demos for the Beatles or something more experimental, became a regular practice and culminated in the more conservative homemade solo LPs, McCartney (1969-70) and McCartney II (1979-80). "In interviews with Miles, Paul talked about the yearnings he felt for grasping what was unheard in music and unseen in film: 'To see the potential in it all. To take a note and wreck it and see in that note what else there is in it, that a simple act like distorting it has caused. . . . I'd like a lot more things to happen like they did when you were kids, when you didn't know how the conjuror did it, and were happy just to see it there and say, "Well, it's magic." ' This desire for the distortion of sound and the yearning for the mystical is reflected in the timbres and structures of the Beatles' only LP of 1966, for which Abracadabra and Magic Circles were considered as titles.
A New Beginning: Revolver
American projects dominated the early plans for the Beatles' spring 1966 recordings, perhaps in accord with the fact that the film considered for shooting in early 1966 was to be a western. Motown Records in Detroit announced that the Beatles had commissioned two songs from their writers Holland-Dozier-Holland, and the group was also reported to have scheduled recording sessions in Memphis. Instead, the Beatles cut sixteen of their own compositions at the usual EMI Studios, although the intimate Studio Three would often be used as well as the more familiar Studio Two. In the end, the characteristics of America C&W and R&B so unadulterated in Rubber SOul would not appear nearly to such an extent in the new songs.
Revolver, as the LP was to be called, is an often mystifying blend of more new sounds from guitar and unusual instruments, sound effects, and non-Western materials, all engineered with creative wizardry. These sounds accompany newly demanding poetic texts that explore levels of consciousness other than simple wakeful awareness. The sixteen songs for the LP and single were recorded, mixed, and edited on thirty-seven days between April 6 and June 22. Building on the Rubber Soul process, much composition and arranging was done in the studio: the group devoted an average of eighteen hours of studio time to each song, ranging from just under ten for "She Said She Said" to some thirty-three for "Got to Get You into My Life." "'We're quite big with EMI at the moment,' understated Ringo. 'They don't argue if we take the time we want.'"
The Beatles' sound was altered with both acoustic and electronic effects. Geoff Emerick was assigned as engineer to the Revolver sessions when Norman Smith - who had worked the controls for every Beatles session through 1965 - became head of Parlophone upon George Martin's resignation. Emerick provides an example of the new sound-distortion techniques: "I moved the bass drum microphone much closer to the drum than had been done before. There's an early picture of the Beatles wearing a woollen jumper with four necks. I stuffed that inside the drum to deaden the sound. Then we put the sound through Fairchild 600 valve limiters and compressors. It became [Ringo's drum] sound of Revolver and Pepper really." Through 1966 and 1967, the Beatles pushed against all boundaries: at turns, Lennon would ask to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, would wish a passage to sound "orange," or would say a listener should be able to taste sawdust: it was up to the imagination of George Martin's team to find a way. Additionally, Revolver introduced a technical alternative to the tedious double-tracking of vocals. Artificial Double-Tracking (ADT), invented by Ten Townshend during a Cilla Black session, allowed an existing lead vocal track to be duplicated out of phase, but with steady pitch, by a variable 24 - 30 milliseconds on a second tape machine during mixing.
The Beatles apparently sensed early on that the LP was to indicate a new beginning; before the pioneering first recording for the album was to receive its eventual title. "Tomorrow Never Knows," it was referred to as "Mark I." The album begins with Harrison's artificial, off-tempo, secretive-sounding count-off, "one, two, three, four, one, two," added to the top of the otherwise completed "Taxman." This beginning contrasts strongly with the opening sounds of the Beatles' first LP, McCartney's energizing count-off to "I Saw Her Standing There"; the contrast is especially one between a live performance in the early work and a studio creation in the later. Serious artistic ambitions signaled by Rubber SOul were fulfilled with a newly mature confidence and strong creative individuality in Revolver. We shall document the compositional and recording histories, and interpret the final results, for each of the sixteen new songs in turn, taken in order of the date of each one's preliminary recording
One Song Each from Lennon, McCartney,
and Harrison
"Tomorrow Never Knows" The LP sessions began with the Beatles' first recording that was to reflect the LSD experience. The lyrics of "Tomorrow Never Knows" are the group's first to not rely on any rhyme scheme. This results from the fact that they are taken directly from a prose source: a set of instructions for a drug-enhanced search for spiritual bliss given in The Psychedelic Experience, an interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead - the Buddhist guide to nirvana - written by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. LSD leads to realms of consciousness analogous to the illumination achieved by Tibetan-taught meditation on the nature of death and rebirth. Leary and his colleagues believed that psychedelic drugs cause and permit the ego to become lost among the nervous system's encoded meories of all human history. Therefore, Leary and Alpert thought it valuable to provide a yoga-based manual for the control of awareness beyond this drug-induced death of the ego. The instructions therein that would allow a surrender of the ego, such as "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," a quotation only slightly altered in the song, guided Lennon's early conception of "Tomorrow Never Knows": "I'd imagined in my head that in the background you would hear thousands of monks chanting. That was impractical of course and we did something different."
The song's title was Ringo's twist of the phrase "tomorrow never comes" and, like "A Hard Day's Night," was once considered as the title for the Beatles' 1965 film until "Help!" was supplied. Lennon remembered the phrase and, two months after the backing tracks were recorded as "Mark I," applied the Ringoism to the song during mixing for the LP, "to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics." Beginning with this song and continuing through his final recordings, Lennon was to lead the Beatles and his listeners through a fantasy world of dreams, Lewis Carroll, and the circus: the hypnotic meditative state of relaxation of the mind and body, in which ideas and wishes are observed but not followed, and in which initiative is an alien force, is heard here and reverberates in such later pieces as "Across the Universe."
Beatles assistant Neil Aspinall recalls the five-hour April 6 session for the basic track of "Tomorrow Never Knows": "The boys had been storing up all sorts of thoughts for the album and a lot of them came pouring out at that first session! The words were written before the tune and there was no getting away from the fact that the words were very powerful. So all four boys were anxious to build a tune and a backing which would be as strong as the actual lyrics. The basic tune was written during the first hours of the recording session." The track, guided by such a "powerful" text, was eventually deemed strong enough to conclude the album.
Take 1 of "Mark I" (not part of the original release but made available on Beatles 1996a) features a basic track consisting of a heavily slowed-down, reverberating percussive tape loop with slowed-down guitar repeating the ostinato of example 1.4a. Overdubs (which begins at the ostinato's tempo but gradually go out of phase) consisted only of Ringo's heavily compressed drums, which provided a Motown-like straight backbeat without the eventual syncopation, and Lennon's vocal, which was amplified through a Leslie speaker. Before further overdubs were made, this entire version was scrapped for a new set of basic tracks that were to include the characteristic bass, tamboura, organ, and tape effects. The tamboura is a long-necked Indian gourd instrument with four to six strings tuned to 1 and 5, always plucked open to furnish a simple, open drone. The use of non-Western instruments thus begins on the album's first day of work. The vocal melody's arpeggiation is a heavily slowed-down version of Bo Diddley's 1955 eponymous R&B hit; the connection is strengthened by the harmonic restriction to I and its modal lower neighbor, bVII. (This connection is interestingly similar to that drawn between McCartney's "Got to Get You into My Life" and Stevie Wonder's "Uptight (Everybody's Alright)," in n. 44 below.)
Some tape reduction (i.e. "bouncing" a full tape down to one or two tracks of a second generation) may have been required, but the following summary of the contents of the final stereo mix, which was based on Take 3, could have been produced with only four tracks. The first recordings other than outtakes from April 6 are heard on two tracks, one placed in the center of the stereo image and one on the right. The center is devoted to an ostinato more completely repetitive than that of "If You've Got Trouble" (a 1965 outtake heard on Beatles 1996a). The ostinato is heard continuously in Ringo's damped, limited, and compressed drums, with an odd accent on the second half of every third beat and a constant cymbal sheen, and McCartney's bass and Harrison's tamboura, both simply droning on the tonic, C. The right channel has a second track with Lennon's tambourine, an organ, and Martin's honky-tonk piano. Perhaps Mal Evans plays the simple Hammond organ part, as he did on "You Won't See Me": it is heard only as bVII resolves to I at A+5-8 (0:19-0:22) and in the coda (2:20 through the fade). Martin's piano enters the coda with a flourish at 2:43, with a coloring duplicated later in the year for the "Strawberry Fields Forever" coda. This second track is interrupted abruptly between 0:52 and 1:49, and laid in this place is Harrison's guitar solo overdubbed on the same day. This solo (B+7-16, 1:08-1:24) marks an important event in the Beatles' history - it was recorded backward, as well as being treated with a fuzz box and run through the Leslie cabinet. What was recorded as a typical blues solo in C pentatonic minor takes on a vaguely Eastern sound, due to the "other-worldly" articulation and complex rhythms, when reversed. Only part of this original guitar recording survives in the finished mix, as the solo is surrounded by forty seconds of blank tape on its own track.
Lennon added his lead vocal on a third track, heard center, the same day. The first verses were recorded straight, but the vocal following the solo (beginning at 1:26) is also run through the Leslie speaker. Martin recalled, "He wanted to sound like a Dalai Lama singing on a hilltop. . . . So I put his voice through a loudspeaker and rotated it. It actually did come out as that strangled sort of cry from the hillside."
McCartney applied his magic on the fourth track, added in a five-hour session on April 7. This track is wild, panning between left and center (and occasionally right), yet another Beatles innovation.
Monday, June 09, 2008
The Beatles Anthology
by The Beatles
Artwork by Klaus Voormann
Illustrations by Klaus Voormann and Alfons Kiefer
First published October 5, 2000
Chronicle Books
THE BEATLES' STORY
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
IN THEIR OWN
WORDS AND PICTURES
JOHN: 'The Sixties saw a revolution among youth - not just concentrating in small pockets or classes, but a revolution in a whole way of thinking. The youth got it first and the next generation second. The Beatles were part of the revolution, which is really an evolution, and is continuing. We were all on this ship - a ship going to discover the New World. And The Beatles were in the crow's nest.'
PAUL: ' "To thine own self be true." I think that was very apt with The Beatles. We always were very true to ourselves - and I think that the brutal honesty The Beatles had was important. So sticking to our own guns and really saying what we thought in some way gave some other people in the world the idea that they too could be truthful and get away with it, and in fact it was a good thing.'
GEORGE: 'The moral of the story is that if you accept the high points you're going to have to go through the lows. For The Beatles, our lives were a very heightened version of that: of how to learn about love and hate, and up and down, and good and bad, and loss and gain. It was a hyper-version of what everybody else was going through. So, basically, it's all good. Whatever happened is good as long as we've learnt something. It's only bad if we didn't learn: "Who am I? Where am I going? Where have I come from?" '
RINGO: 'They became the closest friends I'd ever had. I was an only child and suddenly I felt as though I'd got three brothers. We really looked out for each other and we had many laughs together. In the old days we'd have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other.'
HERE, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN PRINT, IS THE HISTORY OF THE BEATLES - BY THE BEATLES.
This extraordinary project has been made possible because Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr have agreed to tell their combined story especially for this book. Together with Yoko Ono Lennon, they have also made available the full transcripts (including all the outtakes) of the television and video series The Beatles Anthology. Through painstaking compilation of sources worldwide, John Lennon's words are equally represented in this remarkable volume. Furthermore, The Beatles have opened their personal and management archives specifically for this project, allowing the unprecedented release of photographs which they took along their ride to fame, as well as fascinating doucments and memorabilia from their homes and offices.
What a book The Beatles Anthology is! Each page is brimming with personal stories and rare and vintage images. Snapshots from their family collections take us back to the days when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey were just boys growing up in Liverpool. They talk in turn about those early years and how they came to join the band that would make them known around the world as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Then, weaving back and forth, they tell the astonishing story of life as The Beatles: the first rough gigs, the phenomenon of their rise to fame, the musical and social change of their heyday, all the way through to their breakup. From the time Ringo tried to take his drum kit home on the bus to their eagerly anticipated meeting with Elvis, from the making of the Sgt. Pepper album to their last photo session together at John's house, The Beatles Anthology is a once-in-a-lifetime collection of The Beatles' own memories.
Interwoven with these are the recollections of such associates as road manager Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin and spokesman Derek Taylor. And included in the vast array of photographs are materials from both Apple and EMI, who also opened their archives for this project. This, indeed, is the inside story, providing a wealth of previously unpublished material in both word and image.
Created with their full cooperation, The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles' autobiography. Like their music, which has been a part of so many of our lives, it's warm, frank, funny, poignant and bold. At last, here is The Beatles' own story.
Excerpt
JOHN LENNON
WHAT CAN I TELL YOU ABOUT MYSELF WHICH YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY FOUND OUT FROM THOSE WHO DO NOT LIE?
I wear glasses. Being born on 9th October 1940, I wasn't the first Beatle to happen. Ringo, being born on 7th July 1940, was. Although he didn't happen as a Beatle until much later than the rest of us, having played with his beard at Butlins and things before realising where his awful destiny lay.
Ninety per cent of the people on this planet, especially in the West, were born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night, and there was no intent to have children. Ninety per cent of us were accidents - I don't know anybody who has planned a child. All of us were Saturday-night specials.
My mother was a housewife, I suppose. She was a comedienne and a singer. Not professional, but she used to get up in pubs and things like that. She had a good voice. She could do Kay Starr. She used to do this little tune when I was just a one- or two-year-old. The tune was from the Disney movie - 'Want to know a secret? Promise not to tell. You are standing by a wishing well.'
My mother and father split when I was four and I lived with an auntie, Mimi.
Mimi told me my parents had fallen out of love. She never said anything directly against my father and mother. I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I'd never realised for a long time that she was living no more than five or ten miles away.
There were five women that were my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women; five sisters. One happened to be my mother. My mother just couldn't deal with life. She was the youngest and she couldn't cope with me and I ended up living with her elder sister.
Those women were fantastic. One day I might do a kind of Forsyte Saga about them, because they dominated the situation in the family.
The men were invisible. I was always with the women. I always them talk about men and talk about life, and they always knew what was going on. The men never ever knew. That was my first feminist education.
The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.
I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'.
Sometimes I was relieved to have no parents. Most of my friends' relations bore little resemblance to humanity. Their heads were filled with petty-cash bourgeois fears. Mine was full of my own ideas! Life was spent entertaining myself, whilst secretly waiting to find someone to communicate with. Most people were dead. A few were half-dead. It didn't take much to amuse them.
Most people never get out of it. Some people cannot see that their parents are still torturing them, even when they are in their forties and fifties. They still have that stranglehold over them, their thoughts and their minds. I never had that fear of, and adulation for, parents.
Penny Lane is a suburban district where I lived with my mother and father (although my father was a sailor, always at sea), and my grandfather. I lived on a street called Newcastle Road.
That's the first place I remember. It's a good way to start - red brick; front room never used, always curtains drawn, picture of a horse and carriage on the wall. There were only three bedrooms upstairs, one on the front of the street, one in the back, and one teeny little room in the middle.
After I left Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie, who lived in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place [251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton] with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around, not the poor, slummy image that was projected. I was a nice clean-cut suburban boy, and in the class system that was about a half a niche higher-class than Paul, George and Ringo who lived in council houses. We owned our own house, had our own garden; they didn't have anything like that. So I was a bit of a fruit compared to them, in a way. Ringo was the only real city kid. I think he came out of the lousiest area. He doesn't care, he probably had more fun there.
The first thing I remember is a nightmare.
I dream in colour, and it's always very surreal. My dream world is complete Hieronymus Bosch and Dali. I love it, I look forward to it every night.
One recurrent dream, all through my life, was the flying bit. I'd always fly in time of danger. I remember it as a child, flying around, like swimming in the air. I'd be swimming round where I lived or somewhere I knew very well usually. The other times in dreams I remember are nightmarish, where there'd be a giant horse or something and whenever it would get near to a danger point I would fly away. I used to translate it to myself, when I used to dream it in Liverpool, that it was that I wanted to get away from the place.
Some of my most vivid dreams were about me being in a plane, flying over a certain part of Liverpool. It was when I was at school. The plane used to fly over time and time again, going higher and higher.
One really big one was about thousands of half-crowns all around me. And finding lots of money in old houses - as much of the stuff as I could carry. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, and I could still never carry as much as I wanted. I must have had ambition without realising it - a subconscious urge to get above people or out of a rut.
You dream your way out until you actually, physically get out of it. I got out.
I have exactly the same feeling anybody does about their home town. I have met people who don't like their home town. Probably because they've had a lousy time. I had a happy, healthy childhood in Liverpool and I like it. It doesn't stop you living somewhere else or going somewhere else, it's still my home town.
Liverpool is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it's where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever. We were a great amount of Irish descent and blacks and Chinamen, all sorts.
It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty. And we talk through our noses. I suppose it's adenoids.
We were a port, the second biggest in England. The North is where the money was made in the 1800s. That was where all the brass and heavy people were, and that's where the despised people were. We were the ones that were looked down upon as animals by the Southerners, the Londoners.
There were two famous houses [in Woolton]. One was owned by Gladstone - a reformatory for boys, which I could see out my window. And Strawberry Field, just around the corner from that, an old Victorian house converted for Salvation Army orphans. (Apparently, it used to be a farm that made strawberries.) As a kid I used to go to their garden parties with my friends Ivan, Nigel and Pete. We'd all go up there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles. We always had fun at Strawberry Field.
I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from others. I was different all my life. It's not a case of 'then he took acid and woke up', or 'then he had a marijuana joint and woke up'. Everything is as important as everything else. My influences are tremendous, from Lewis Carroll to Oscar Wilde to tough little kids that used to live near me who ended up in prison. It's that same problem I had when I was five: 'There is something wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don't see.'
I was always a homebody; I think that a lot of musicians are - you write and you play in the house. When I was wanting to be a painter when I was younger, or write poetry, it was always in the house.
I spent a lot of time reading. Hanging around the home never bothered me. I enjoy it. I love it. I thought it was because I was an only child. Although I had half-sisters, I lived alone. I always tripped out on my own or in books.
I always had this dream of being the artist in a little cottage in a little road. My real thing is just to write a little poetry and do a few oils. It seemed like such a dream, living in a cottage and wandering in the trees.
I was passionate about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of 'Jabberwocky'. I used to love Alice, and Just William. I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things. Wind in the Willows, I loved. After I'd read a book, I'd re-live it all. That was one reason why I wanted to be the gang leader at school. I'd want them all to play games that I wanted to play, the ones I'd just been reading.
I did fight all the way through Dovedale [primary school], winning by psychological means if ever anyone looked bigger than me. I threatened them in a strong enough way that I would beat them, so they thought I could.
With the fact that I wasn't tied to parents I would infiltrate the other boys' minds. That was the gift I got, of not having parents. I cried a lot about not having them, but I also had the gift of awareness of not being something.
I was shot at once for stealing apples. I used to go thieving with this kid. We used to ride on the bumpers of tram cars in Penny Lane and ride miles without paying. I'd be shitting myself all the time. I was so scared. I nearly fell off while riding on the bumpers.
I was the kingpin of my age group. I learnt lots of dirty jokes very young; there was a girl who lived near who told me them.
I wasn't taught anything about sex. I learnt it all from the bog walls. I knew everything when I was about eight. Everything had been shown, everybody had seen dirty pictures, everybody knew all the perversities and the naughty things that there were - you just found out. When we are free of our guilt and hypocrisy about it, sex will take its rightful place in society - just part of living.
Edinburgh is one of my favourite dreams. The Edinburgh Festival and the Tattoo in the castle. All the bands of the world's armies would come and march and play. The favourites were the Americans, because they swung like shit - apart from the Scots, who were really the favourites. I always remember feeling very emotional about it, especially at the end where they put all the lights out and there's just one guy playing the bagpipes, lit by a lone spotlight. Och aye.
I was obviously musical from very early, and I wonder why nobody ever did anything about it - maybe because they couldn't afford it.
[When I was young] I was travelling to Edinburgh on my own to see my auntie, and I played the mouth organ all the way up on the bus. The driver liked it and told me to meet him at a place in Edinburgh the next morning and he'd give me a fantastic one. It really got me going. I also had a little accordion which I used to play - only the right hand - and I played the same things on this that I played on mouth organ, things like 'Swedish Rhapsody', 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Greensleeves'.
I can't remember why I took it [harmonica] up in the first place - I must have picked one up very cheap. I know we used to take in students and one of them had a mouth organ and said he'd buy me one if I could learn a tune by the next morning. So I learnt two. I was somewhere between eight and twelve at the time; in short pants, anyway.
There's an exam in England that they hang over your head from age five, called the Eleven Plus: 'If you don't pass the Eleven Plus, you're finished in life.' So that was the only exam that I ever passed, because I was terrified.
(After the exam's over, the teacher says you can do whatever you want. So I just painted.)
I looked at all the hundreds of new kids [at Quarry Bank grammar school] and thought, 'Christ, I'll have to fight all my way through this lot,' having just made it at Dovedale. There was some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I got really hurt. Not that there was much real fighting; I did a lot of swearing and shouting, then got a quick punch. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, 'OK, we'll have wrestling instead.'
I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss. I suppose I did try to do a bit of school work at first, as I often did at Dovedale. I'd been honest at Dovedale, if nothing else, always owning up. But I began to realise that was foolish; they just got you. So I started lying about everything.
I only got one beating from Mimi - for taking money from her handbag. I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinky's, but this day I must have taken too much.
When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius but nobody's noticed. I thought, 'I'm a genius or I'm mad. Which is it? I can't be mad because nobody's put me away - therefore I'm a genius.' I mean, a genius is a form of mad person. We're all that way, but I used to be a bit coy about it - like my guitar-playing. If there's such a thing as genius, I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care. I used to think it when I was a kid writing my poetry and doing my paintings. I didn't become something when The Beatles made it; I've been like this all my life. Genius is pain, too. It's just pain.
I always wondered, 'Why has no one discovered me?' In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school?
If I look through my report card, it's the same thing: 'Too content to get a cheap laugh hiding behind this,' or, 'Daydreaming his life away.'
I daydreamed my way through the whole school. I absolutely was in a trance for twenty years because it was absolutely boring. If I wasn't in a trance, I wasn't there - I was at the movies, or running around.
I used to embarrass authority by chanting out a weird version of 'The Happy Wanderer' at inappropriate moments. I was suspended for a spell. I think it was for eating chocolate in prayers or ducking a swimming instructor; something daft like that.
One maths master wrote, 'He's on the road to failure if he carries on this way.' Most of them disliked me, so I'm always glad to remind them of the incredible awareness they had.
But there was always one teacher in each school, usually an art teacher or English language or literature. If it was anything to do with art or writing, I was OK, but if it was anything to do with science or maths, I couldn't get it in.
When I was fifteen I was thinking, 'If only I can get out of Liverpool and be famous and rich, wouldn't it be great?
I wanted to write Alice in Wonderland, but when you think, 'Whatever I do I'm never going to topple Leonardo,' you get to thinking, 'What's the use?' A lot of people had more pain than me and they've done better things.
I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker. I'd always been able at school - when they want you to imagine something instead of giving you a subject; I could do that.
At school we used to draw a lot and pass it round. We had blind dogs leading ordinary people around.
I suppose I did have a cruel humour. It was at school that it first started. We were once coming home from a school speech day and we'd had a few bevvies. Liverpool is full of deformed people, three-foot-high men selling newspapers. I'd never really noticed them before, but all the way home that day they seemed to be everywhere. It got funnier and funnier and we couldn't stop laughing. I suppose it's a way of hiding your emotions, or covering it up. I would never hurt a cripple. It was just part of our jokes, our way of life.
All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, 'You're no good.' That's all we get told all our lives: 'You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler.' It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, 'Yeah, you're a great artist,' I would have been a more secure person.
They should give you time to develop, encourage what you're interested in. I was always interested in art and came top for many years, yet no one took any interest.
It's like when they ask you, 'What do you want to be?' I would say, 'Well, a journalist.' I never would dare to say, 'An artist,' because in the social background that I came from - as I used to say to my auntie - you read about artists and you worship them in museums, but you don't want them living around the house. So the teachers said, 'No, something real.' And I'd say, 'Well, present me with some alternative.' They'd suggest veterinarian, doctor, dentist, lawyer. And I knew there was no hope in hell of me ever becoming that. So there was never anywhere for me to go.
They only wanted scientists in the Fifties. Any artsy-fartsy people were spies. They still are, in society.
Even at art school they tried to turn me into a teacher - they try to discourage you from painting - and said, 'Why not be a teacher? Then you can paint on Sunday?' I decided against it.
At school I saw a lot wrong with society. I revolted the same way as all my colleagues. Anyone who had anything didn't fit in with the school curriculum, and all my reports from Quarry Bank were on the line: 'He is clever, but doesn't try.' I was a particularly offensive schoolboy. I am one of your typical working-class heroes. Mine was the same sort of revolution as D. H. Lawrence's - I didn't blieve in class and the whole fight was against class structure.
I always was a rebel because of whatever sociological thing gave me a chip on the shoulder. But on the other hand, I want to be loved and accepted. That's why I'm on stage, like a performing flea. Because I would like to belong. Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouth, lunatic, poet/musician. But I cannot be what I'm not. What the hell do you do? You want to belong, but you don't because you cannot belong.
I was fairly tough at school, but I could organise it so it seemed like I was tough. It used to get me into trouble. I used to dress tough like a Teddy boy, but if I went into the tough districts and came across other Teddy boys, I was in danger. At school it was easier because I could control it with my head so they thought I was tougher than I was. It was a game. I mean, we used to shoplift and all those things, but nothing really heavy. Liverpool's quite a tough city. A lot of the real Teddy boys were actually in their early twenties. They were dockers. We were only fifteen, we were only kids - they had hatchets, belts, bicycle chains and real weapons. We never really got into that, and if somebody came in front of us we ran, me and my gang.
The sort of gang I led went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls' knickers down. When the bomb fell and everyone got caught, I was always the one they missed. I was scared at the time, but Mimi was the only parent who never found out. Most of the masters hated me like shit. As I got older, we'd go on from just stuffing rubbish like sweets in our pockets from shops, and progressed to getting enough to sell to others, like ciggies.
I'm not a tough guy. I've always had to have a facade of being tough to protect myself from other people's neuroses. But really, I'm a very sensitive weak guy.
I'd say I had a happy childhood. I came out aggressive, but I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh.
We [Mimi's husband and I] got on fine. He was nice and kind. [When] he died, I didn't know how to be sad publicly - what you did or said - so I went upstairs. Then my cousin arrived and she came upstairs as well. We both had hysterics. We just laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.
Mimi was looking after me on her own and she wanted to keep up this semi-detached house and not go down, and so we took students in at one time.
She always wanted me to be a rugby type or a chemist. I was writing poetry and singing since she had me. All the time I used to fight and say, 'Look, I'm an artist, don't bug me with all this maths. Don't try and make me into a chemist or a vet. I can't do it.'
I used to say, 'Don't you destroy my papers.' I'd come home when I was fourteen and she'd rooted all my things and thrown all my poetry out. I was saying, 'One day I'll be famous and you're going to regret it.'
I'd seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard-on. I'd wondered who wrote them and thought I'd try one myself. Mimi found it under my pillow. I said I'd been made to write it out for another lad who couldn't write very well. I'd written it myself, of course.
When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn't read it.
My mother [Julia] came to see us one day in a black coat with her face bleeding. She'd had some sort of accident. I couldn't face it. I thought, 'That's my mother in there, bleeding.' I went out into the garden. I loved her, but I didn't want to get involved. I suppose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.
Julia gave me my first coloured shirt. I staarted going to visit her at her house. I met her new bloke and didn't think much of him. I called him Twitchy. Julia became a sort of young aunt to me, or a big sister. As I got bigger and had more rows with Mimi, I used to go and live with Julia for a weekend.
[Twitchy was] otherwise known as Robert Dykins or Bobbie Dykins. Her second husband - I don't know if she married him or not; little waiter with a nervous cough and the thinning, margarine-coated hair. He always used to push his hand in the margarine or the butter, usually the margarine, and grease his hair with it before he left. He used to keep his tips in a big tin on top of a cupboard in the kitchen, and I used to always steal them. I believe Mother got the blame. That's the least they could do for me.
I'd always had a fantasy about a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheekboned, free-spirited artist (a la Juliette Green). My soul mate. Someone that I had already known, but somehow had lost. Of course, as a teenager, my sexual fantasies were full of Anita Ekberg and the usual giant Nordic goddesses. That is, until Brigitte Bardot became the love of my life in the late Fifties. (All my girlfriends who weren't dark-haired suffered my constant pressure to become Brigitte. By the time I married my first wife - who was a natural auburn - she too had become a long-haired blonde with the obligatory bangs. I met the real Brigitte a few years later. I was on acid and she was on her way out.)
I read some guy saying about the sexual fantasies and urges that he had all his life. When he was twenty, and then when he was thirty, he thought they'd cool down a bit. Then when he got in his forties he thought they'd cool down, but they didn't, they went on sixty, seventy... until he was still dribbling in his mind when he couldn't possibly do anything about it. I thought, 'Shit!' because I was always waiting for them to lessen, but I suppose it's going to go on forever. 'Forever' is a bit too strong a word - let's say you go on until you leave this body, anyway. Let's hope. Maybe the game is to conquer it before you leave, otherwise you come back for more (and who wants to come back just to come?).
I remember a night, or should I say day, in my teens when I was fucking my girlfriend on a gravestone and my arse got covered in greenfly. This was a good lesson in karma and/or gardening. Barbara, where are you now? Fat and ugly? Fifteen kids? Years of hell with me should have made you ready for anything. What's so sad about the past is it's passed. I wonder who's kissing her now.
America used to be the big youth place in everybody's imagination. America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.
We all knew America, all of us. All those movies, every movie we ever saw as children, whether it was Disneyland or Doris Day, Rock Hudson, James Dean or Marilyn. Everything was American: Coca-Cola, Heinz ketchup - I thought Heinz ketchup was English until I went to America.
The music was mainly American before rock'n'roll. We still had our own artists, but the big artists were American. It was the Americans coming to the London Palladium. They wouldn't even make an English movie without an American in it, even a B movie, because nobody would go to the movie. They'd have a Canadian if they couldn't get an American.
There was no such thing as an English record. I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was 'Move It' by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing.
Liverpool is cosmopolitan. It's where the sailors would come home on the ships with the blues records from America. We were hearing old funky blues records in Liverpool that people across Britain or Europe had never heard about or knew about, only the port areas.
There is the biggest country-and-western following in England in Liverpool, besides London. I heard country-and-western music in Liverpool before I heard rock'n'roll. The people there - the Irish in Ireland are the same - they take their music very seriously. There were established folk, blues and country-and-western clubs in Liverpool before rock'n'roll.
As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing in la-di-da voices. 'I worked in a mine in Newcastle,' and all that shit. There were very few and folk singers, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland singing, and the power is fantastic. But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet, a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today's folk music is rock'n'roll.
Folk music isn't an acoustic guitar with a singer who talks about mines and railways, because we don't sing like that any more. We sing about karma, peace, anything.
In our family the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to pop later; not like Paul and George who'd been groomed in pop music coming over the radio all the time. I only heard it at other people's homes.
The Bill Haley era passed me by, in a way. When his records came on the wireless my other would start dancing around, she thought they were so good. I used to hear them, but they didn't do anything for me.
This fella I knew called Don Beatty showed me the name Elvis Presley in the New Musical Express and said he was great. It was 'Heartbreak Hotel'. I thought it sounded a bit phoney: 'Heart-break Hotel'.
The music papers were saying that Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. 'Heartbreak Hotel' seemed a corny title and his name seemed strange in those days. But then, when I heard it, it was the end for me. I first heard it on Radio Luxembourg. He turned out to be fantastic. I remember rushing home with the record and saying, 'He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford!"
I'm an Elvis fan because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool. Once I heard it and got into it, that was life, there was no other thing. I thought of nothing else but rock'n'roll; apart from sex and food and money - but that's all the same thing, really.
People have been trying to stamp out rock'n'roll since it started. It was mainly parents who were against rock'n'roll. The words had a lot of double entendre in the early days.
They cleaned it up for the white audience, a lot of it. That black stuff was very sexual. They made Little Richard re-record 'Tutti Frutti'. Whatever was going on, they had to clean up a lot of words. Elvis did 'One Night With You'. The original was 'One Night Of Sin' - 'One night of sin is what I'm praying for.' The words were pretty good; they were street words or black words.
They've been saying it will never last ever since I heard about it, and it's always written in the papers that it's dying. It'll never die. It's been apparent in all the music since it began. It came out of its roots of blues and rhythm-and-blues and jazz and country. It was really a combination of black and white music. That's what finally made it.
There have only been two great albums that I listened to all the way through when I was about sixteen. One was Carl Perkins's first or second, I can't remember which. And one was Elvis's first. Those are the only ones on which I really enjoyed every track.
On things like 'Ready Teddy' and 'Rip It Up' I have visions of listening to the record when I was younger. I remember how the London-American label looked. I remember playing it to my auntie and she was saying, 'What is it?' Or I remember dance-hall scenes where we were all dancing.
Buddy Holly was great and he wore glasses, which I liked, although I didn't wear them in public for years and years. But Buddy Holly was the first one that we were really aware of in England who could play and sing at the same time - not just strum, but actually play the licks. I never met him, I was too young. I never saw him live either. I saw Eddie Cochran. I saw Gene Vincent and Little Richard, but I met them later. Eddie Cochran was the only one I saw as a fan, just sitting in an audience.
Little Richard was one of the all-time greats. The first time I heard him a friend of mine had been to Holland and brought back a 78 with 'Long Tall Sally' on one side, and 'Slippin' And Slidin'' on the other. It blew our heads - we'd never heard anybody sing like that in our lives, and all those saxes playing like crazy.
The most exciting thing about early Little Richard was when he screamed just before the solo; that was howling. It used to make your hair stand on end when he did that long, long scream into the solo.
I still love Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They're like primitive painters. Chuck Berry is one of the all-time great poets; a rock poet, you could call him. He was well advanced of his time, lyric-wise. We all owe a lot to him, including Dylan. I've loved everything he's done, ever. He was in a different class from the other performers. He was in the tradition of the great blues artists but he really wrote his own stuff - I know Richard did, but Berry really wrote stuff. The lyrics were fantastic, even though we didn't know what he was saying half the time.
In the Fifties, when people were virtually singing about nothing, Chuck Berry was writing social-comment songs, with incredible metre to the lyrics. When I hear rock, good rock, of the calibre of Chuck Berry, I just fall apart and I have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if rock'n'roll is playing. It's a disease of mine.
That's the music that brought me from the provinces of England to the world. That's what made me what I am, whatever it is I am. I don't know where we'd have been without rock'n'roll and I really love it.
Rock'n'roll was real, everything else was unreal. It was the only thing to get through to me out of all the things that were happening when I was fifteen.
I had no idea about doing music as a way of life until rock'n'roll hit me. That's the music that inspired me to play music.
When I was sixteen my mother taught me music. She first taught me how to play banjo chords - that's why in very early photos of the group I'm playing funny chords - and from that I progressed to guitar.
I remember the first guitar I ever saw. It belonged to guy in a cowboy suit in a province of Liverpool, with stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro. They were real cowboys, and they took it seriously. There had been cowboys long before there was rock'n'roll.
I used to borrow a guitar at first. I couldn't play, but my mother bought me one from one of those mail-order firms. It was a bit crummy, but I played it all the time and got a lot of practice.
I played the guitar like a banjo, with the sixth string hanging loose. My first guitar cost £10. All I ever wanted to do was to vamp; I only learnt to play to back myself.
When I got the guitar I'd play it for a bit then give it up, then take it up again. It took me about two years, on and off, to be able to strum tunes without thinking. I think I had one lesson, but it was so much like school I gave up. I learnt mostly by picking up bits here and there. One of the first things I learnt was 'Ain't That A Shame' and it has a lot of memories for me. Then I learnt 'That'll Be The Day'. I learned the solos on 'Johnny B. Goode' and 'Carol', but I couldn't play the one on 'Blue Suede Shoes'. In those days I was very much influenced by Chuck Berry, Scotty Moore and Carl Perkins.
The best quote Mimi ever said was: 'The guitar's all right for a hobby, John, but you'll never make a living at it.' (Fans in America had that framed on steel and sent it to her, and she has it in the house I bought her; she has it looking at her the whole time.)
About the time of rock'n'roll in Britain - I think I was about fifteen so it would be about 1955 - there was a big thing called 'skiffle', which was a kind of folk music; American folk music with washboards, and all the kids from fifteen onwards had these groups.
I listen to country music. I started imitating Hank Williams when I was fifteen, before I could play the guitar - although a friend had one. I used to go round to his house, because he had the record-player, and we sang all that Lonnie Donegan stuff and Hank Williams. He had all the records. 'Honky Tonk Blues' is the one I used to do. Presley was country, country-rock. Carl Perkins was really country, just with more backbeat.
We eventually formed ourselves into a group from school. I think the bloke whose idea it was didn't get in the group. We met in his house the first time. There was Eric Griffiths on guitar, Pete Shotton on washboard, Len Garry, Colin Hanton on drums and Rod [Davis] on banjo - and somebody named Ivan [Vaughan]. Ivan went to the same school as Paul.
Our first appearance was in Rosebery Street - it was their Empire Day celebrations. They had this party out in the street. We played from the back of a lorry. We didn't get paid. We played at blokes' parties after that; perhaps got a few bob, but mostly we just played for fun. We didn't mind about not being paid.
The Quarry Men is the name of the group before it turned into The Beatles. The original group was named after my school, which was Quarry Bank and had a Latin motto which meant 'ou of this rock' - that's symbolic - 'you will find truth'.
Anyway, we always failed the exams and never did any work and Pete was always worried about his future. I would say, 'Don't worry, it'll work out,' to him and the gang that was around me then. I always had a group of three or four or five guys around with me who would play various roles in my life, supportive and subservient. In general, me being the bully boy. The Beatles became my new gang.
I always believed that something would turn up. I didn't make plans for the future. I didn't study for the exam. I didn't put a little bit on the side, I wasn't capable. Therefore I was the one that all the other boys' parents would say, 'Keep away from him.' Because they knew what I was. The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home. Partly out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home. (But I did. I had an auntie and an uncle and a nice suburban home. This image of me being the orphan is garbage because I was well protected by my auntie and my uncle, and they looked after me very well.)
I think I went a bit wild. I was just drifting. I wouldn't study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs I was a hopeless failure. Even in the mock I got English and art, but in the real one I didn't even get art.
I was disappointed at not getting art at GCE, but I'd given up. All they were interested in was neatness. I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question which said do a picture of 'travel'. I drew a picture of a hunchback with warts all over him. They obviously didn't dig that.
We knew that the GCE wasn't the opening to anything. We could have ground through all that and gone further, but not me. I believed something was going to happen which I'd have to get through - and I knew it wasn't GCE.
Up to the age of fifteen I was no different to any other little cunt of fifteen. Then I decided I'd write a little song, and I did. But it didn't make me any different. That's a load of crap that I discovered a talent. I just did it. I've no talent, except for being happy, or a talent for skiving.
I was always thinking I was going to be a famous artist and possibly I'd have to marry a very rich old lady, or man, to look after me while I did my art. But then rock'n'roll came along, and I thought, 'Ah-ha, this is the one.' So I didn't have to marry anybody or live with them.
I didn't really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up an eccentric millionaire. I had to be a millionaire. If I couldn't do it without being crooked, then I'd have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that - nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings - but I was too much of a coward. I'd never have made it. I did plan to knock off a shop with another bloke, do it properly for a change, not just shoplifting. We used to look at shops at night, but we never got round to doing it.
Mimi had said to me that I'd done it at last: I was now a real Teddy boy. I seemed to digust everybody, not just Mimi. That was the day that I met Paul.
It was through Ivan that I first met Paul. Seems that he knew Paul was always dickering around in music and thought he would be a good lad to have in the group. So one day, when we were playing at Woolton, he brought him along. We can both remember it quite well. The Quarry Men were playing on a raised platform and there was a good crowd because it was a warm, sunny day.
[It was] the first day I did 'Be Bop A Lula' live on stage. 'Be Bop A Lula' has always been one of my all-time favourites. It was at a church-hall garden fete, and I was performing with a mutual friend of Paul's and mine. Another mutual friend who lived next door brought Paul along and said, 'I think you two will get along.' We talked after the show and I saw he had talent. He was playing guitar backstage, doing 'Twenty Flight Rock' by Eddie Cochran.
Paul could play guitar, trumpet and piano. That doesn't mean to say he has a greater talent, but his musical education was better. I could only play the mouth organ and two chords on a guitar when we met. I tuned the guitar like a banjo, so my guitar only had five strings on it. (Paul taught me how to play properly 0 but I had to learn the chords left-handed, because Paul is left-handed. So I learnt them upside down, and I'd go home and reverse them.) That's what I was doing - playing on stage with a group, playing a five-string guitar like a banjo - when he was brought around from the audience to meet me.
Paul told me the chords I had been playing weren't real chords - and his dad said that they weren't even banjo chords, though I think they were. He had a good guitar at the time, it cost about £14. He'd got it in exchange for a trumpet his dad had given him.
I was very impressed by Paul playing 'Twenty Flight Rock'. He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself, 'He's as good as me.' I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' It went through my head that I'd have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.
Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger? Instead of going for an individual thing we went for the strongest format - equals.
I turned round to him right then on first meeting and said, 'Do you want to join the group?' And he said 'yes' the next day as I recall it.
Paul had a trumpet and had this wild theory that he'd actually learnt how to play the oldie 'When The Saints Go Marching In'. He just blew away as hard as he could, drowning out everything we were trying to do. He thought he was doing a great job on the tune, but we didn't recognise any of it!
Now George came through Paul.
Paul introduced me to George and I had to make the decision whether to let George in. I listened to him play and said, 'Play "Raunchy".' I let him in and that was the three of us then, and the rest of group was thrown out, practically.
We asked George to join us because he knew more chords, a lot more than we knew. We got a lot from him. Paul had a friend at school who would discover chords, and these would be passed round Liverpool. Every time we learnt a new chords, we'd write a song round it.
Artwork by Klaus Voormann
Illustrations by Klaus Voormann and Alfons Kiefer
First published October 5, 2000
Chronicle Books
THE BEATLES' STORY
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
IN THEIR OWN
WORDS AND PICTURES
JOHN: 'The Sixties saw a revolution among youth - not just concentrating in small pockets or classes, but a revolution in a whole way of thinking. The youth got it first and the next generation second. The Beatles were part of the revolution, which is really an evolution, and is continuing. We were all on this ship - a ship going to discover the New World. And The Beatles were in the crow's nest.'
PAUL: ' "To thine own self be true." I think that was very apt with The Beatles. We always were very true to ourselves - and I think that the brutal honesty The Beatles had was important. So sticking to our own guns and really saying what we thought in some way gave some other people in the world the idea that they too could be truthful and get away with it, and in fact it was a good thing.'
GEORGE: 'The moral of the story is that if you accept the high points you're going to have to go through the lows. For The Beatles, our lives were a very heightened version of that: of how to learn about love and hate, and up and down, and good and bad, and loss and gain. It was a hyper-version of what everybody else was going through. So, basically, it's all good. Whatever happened is good as long as we've learnt something. It's only bad if we didn't learn: "Who am I? Where am I going? Where have I come from?" '
RINGO: 'They became the closest friends I'd ever had. I was an only child and suddenly I felt as though I'd got three brothers. We really looked out for each other and we had many laughs together. In the old days we'd have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other.'
HERE, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN PRINT, IS THE HISTORY OF THE BEATLES - BY THE BEATLES.
This extraordinary project has been made possible because Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr have agreed to tell their combined story especially for this book. Together with Yoko Ono Lennon, they have also made available the full transcripts (including all the outtakes) of the television and video series The Beatles Anthology. Through painstaking compilation of sources worldwide, John Lennon's words are equally represented in this remarkable volume. Furthermore, The Beatles have opened their personal and management archives specifically for this project, allowing the unprecedented release of photographs which they took along their ride to fame, as well as fascinating doucments and memorabilia from their homes and offices.
What a book The Beatles Anthology is! Each page is brimming with personal stories and rare and vintage images. Snapshots from their family collections take us back to the days when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey were just boys growing up in Liverpool. They talk in turn about those early years and how they came to join the band that would make them known around the world as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Then, weaving back and forth, they tell the astonishing story of life as The Beatles: the first rough gigs, the phenomenon of their rise to fame, the musical and social change of their heyday, all the way through to their breakup. From the time Ringo tried to take his drum kit home on the bus to their eagerly anticipated meeting with Elvis, from the making of the Sgt. Pepper album to their last photo session together at John's house, The Beatles Anthology is a once-in-a-lifetime collection of The Beatles' own memories.
Interwoven with these are the recollections of such associates as road manager Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin and spokesman Derek Taylor. And included in the vast array of photographs are materials from both Apple and EMI, who also opened their archives for this project. This, indeed, is the inside story, providing a wealth of previously unpublished material in both word and image.
Created with their full cooperation, The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles' autobiography. Like their music, which has been a part of so many of our lives, it's warm, frank, funny, poignant and bold. At last, here is The Beatles' own story.
Excerpt
JOHN LENNON
WHAT CAN I TELL YOU ABOUT MYSELF WHICH YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY FOUND OUT FROM THOSE WHO DO NOT LIE?
I wear glasses. Being born on 9th October 1940, I wasn't the first Beatle to happen. Ringo, being born on 7th July 1940, was. Although he didn't happen as a Beatle until much later than the rest of us, having played with his beard at Butlins and things before realising where his awful destiny lay.
Ninety per cent of the people on this planet, especially in the West, were born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night, and there was no intent to have children. Ninety per cent of us were accidents - I don't know anybody who has planned a child. All of us were Saturday-night specials.
My mother was a housewife, I suppose. She was a comedienne and a singer. Not professional, but she used to get up in pubs and things like that. She had a good voice. She could do Kay Starr. She used to do this little tune when I was just a one- or two-year-old. The tune was from the Disney movie - 'Want to know a secret? Promise not to tell. You are standing by a wishing well.'
My mother and father split when I was four and I lived with an auntie, Mimi.
Mimi told me my parents had fallen out of love. She never said anything directly against my father and mother. I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I'd never realised for a long time that she was living no more than five or ten miles away.
There were five women that were my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women; five sisters. One happened to be my mother. My mother just couldn't deal with life. She was the youngest and she couldn't cope with me and I ended up living with her elder sister.
Those women were fantastic. One day I might do a kind of Forsyte Saga about them, because they dominated the situation in the family.
The men were invisible. I was always with the women. I always them talk about men and talk about life, and they always knew what was going on. The men never ever knew. That was my first feminist education.
The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.
I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'.
Sometimes I was relieved to have no parents. Most of my friends' relations bore little resemblance to humanity. Their heads were filled with petty-cash bourgeois fears. Mine was full of my own ideas! Life was spent entertaining myself, whilst secretly waiting to find someone to communicate with. Most people were dead. A few were half-dead. It didn't take much to amuse them.
Most people never get out of it. Some people cannot see that their parents are still torturing them, even when they are in their forties and fifties. They still have that stranglehold over them, their thoughts and their minds. I never had that fear of, and adulation for, parents.
Penny Lane is a suburban district where I lived with my mother and father (although my father was a sailor, always at sea), and my grandfather. I lived on a street called Newcastle Road.
That's the first place I remember. It's a good way to start - red brick; front room never used, always curtains drawn, picture of a horse and carriage on the wall. There were only three bedrooms upstairs, one on the front of the street, one in the back, and one teeny little room in the middle.
After I left Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie, who lived in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place [251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton] with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around, not the poor, slummy image that was projected. I was a nice clean-cut suburban boy, and in the class system that was about a half a niche higher-class than Paul, George and Ringo who lived in council houses. We owned our own house, had our own garden; they didn't have anything like that. So I was a bit of a fruit compared to them, in a way. Ringo was the only real city kid. I think he came out of the lousiest area. He doesn't care, he probably had more fun there.
The first thing I remember is a nightmare.
I dream in colour, and it's always very surreal. My dream world is complete Hieronymus Bosch and Dali. I love it, I look forward to it every night.
One recurrent dream, all through my life, was the flying bit. I'd always fly in time of danger. I remember it as a child, flying around, like swimming in the air. I'd be swimming round where I lived or somewhere I knew very well usually. The other times in dreams I remember are nightmarish, where there'd be a giant horse or something and whenever it would get near to a danger point I would fly away. I used to translate it to myself, when I used to dream it in Liverpool, that it was that I wanted to get away from the place.
Some of my most vivid dreams were about me being in a plane, flying over a certain part of Liverpool. It was when I was at school. The plane used to fly over time and time again, going higher and higher.
One really big one was about thousands of half-crowns all around me. And finding lots of money in old houses - as much of the stuff as I could carry. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, and I could still never carry as much as I wanted. I must have had ambition without realising it - a subconscious urge to get above people or out of a rut.
You dream your way out until you actually, physically get out of it. I got out.
I have exactly the same feeling anybody does about their home town. I have met people who don't like their home town. Probably because they've had a lousy time. I had a happy, healthy childhood in Liverpool and I like it. It doesn't stop you living somewhere else or going somewhere else, it's still my home town.
Liverpool is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it's where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever. We were a great amount of Irish descent and blacks and Chinamen, all sorts.
It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humour because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty. And we talk through our noses. I suppose it's adenoids.
We were a port, the second biggest in England. The North is where the money was made in the 1800s. That was where all the brass and heavy people were, and that's where the despised people were. We were the ones that were looked down upon as animals by the Southerners, the Londoners.
There were two famous houses [in Woolton]. One was owned by Gladstone - a reformatory for boys, which I could see out my window. And Strawberry Field, just around the corner from that, an old Victorian house converted for Salvation Army orphans. (Apparently, it used to be a farm that made strawberries.) As a kid I used to go to their garden parties with my friends Ivan, Nigel and Pete. We'd all go up there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles. We always had fun at Strawberry Field.
I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from others. I was different all my life. It's not a case of 'then he took acid and woke up', or 'then he had a marijuana joint and woke up'. Everything is as important as everything else. My influences are tremendous, from Lewis Carroll to Oscar Wilde to tough little kids that used to live near me who ended up in prison. It's that same problem I had when I was five: 'There is something wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don't see.'
I was always a homebody; I think that a lot of musicians are - you write and you play in the house. When I was wanting to be a painter when I was younger, or write poetry, it was always in the house.
I spent a lot of time reading. Hanging around the home never bothered me. I enjoy it. I love it. I thought it was because I was an only child. Although I had half-sisters, I lived alone. I always tripped out on my own or in books.
I always had this dream of being the artist in a little cottage in a little road. My real thing is just to write a little poetry and do a few oils. It seemed like such a dream, living in a cottage and wandering in the trees.
I was passionate about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of 'Jabberwocky'. I used to love Alice, and Just William. I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things. Wind in the Willows, I loved. After I'd read a book, I'd re-live it all. That was one reason why I wanted to be the gang leader at school. I'd want them all to play games that I wanted to play, the ones I'd just been reading.
I did fight all the way through Dovedale [primary school], winning by psychological means if ever anyone looked bigger than me. I threatened them in a strong enough way that I would beat them, so they thought I could.
With the fact that I wasn't tied to parents I would infiltrate the other boys' minds. That was the gift I got, of not having parents. I cried a lot about not having them, but I also had the gift of awareness of not being something.
I was shot at once for stealing apples. I used to go thieving with this kid. We used to ride on the bumpers of tram cars in Penny Lane and ride miles without paying. I'd be shitting myself all the time. I was so scared. I nearly fell off while riding on the bumpers.
I was the kingpin of my age group. I learnt lots of dirty jokes very young; there was a girl who lived near who told me them.
I wasn't taught anything about sex. I learnt it all from the bog walls. I knew everything when I was about eight. Everything had been shown, everybody had seen dirty pictures, everybody knew all the perversities and the naughty things that there were - you just found out. When we are free of our guilt and hypocrisy about it, sex will take its rightful place in society - just part of living.
Edinburgh is one of my favourite dreams. The Edinburgh Festival and the Tattoo in the castle. All the bands of the world's armies would come and march and play. The favourites were the Americans, because they swung like shit - apart from the Scots, who were really the favourites. I always remember feeling very emotional about it, especially at the end where they put all the lights out and there's just one guy playing the bagpipes, lit by a lone spotlight. Och aye.
I was obviously musical from very early, and I wonder why nobody ever did anything about it - maybe because they couldn't afford it.
[When I was young] I was travelling to Edinburgh on my own to see my auntie, and I played the mouth organ all the way up on the bus. The driver liked it and told me to meet him at a place in Edinburgh the next morning and he'd give me a fantastic one. It really got me going. I also had a little accordion which I used to play - only the right hand - and I played the same things on this that I played on mouth organ, things like 'Swedish Rhapsody', 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Greensleeves'.
I can't remember why I took it [harmonica] up in the first place - I must have picked one up very cheap. I know we used to take in students and one of them had a mouth organ and said he'd buy me one if I could learn a tune by the next morning. So I learnt two. I was somewhere between eight and twelve at the time; in short pants, anyway.
There's an exam in England that they hang over your head from age five, called the Eleven Plus: 'If you don't pass the Eleven Plus, you're finished in life.' So that was the only exam that I ever passed, because I was terrified.
(After the exam's over, the teacher says you can do whatever you want. So I just painted.)
I looked at all the hundreds of new kids [at Quarry Bank grammar school] and thought, 'Christ, I'll have to fight all my way through this lot,' having just made it at Dovedale. There was some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I got really hurt. Not that there was much real fighting; I did a lot of swearing and shouting, then got a quick punch. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, 'OK, we'll have wrestling instead.'
I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss. I suppose I did try to do a bit of school work at first, as I often did at Dovedale. I'd been honest at Dovedale, if nothing else, always owning up. But I began to realise that was foolish; they just got you. So I started lying about everything.
I only got one beating from Mimi - for taking money from her handbag. I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinky's, but this day I must have taken too much.
When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius but nobody's noticed. I thought, 'I'm a genius or I'm mad. Which is it? I can't be mad because nobody's put me away - therefore I'm a genius.' I mean, a genius is a form of mad person. We're all that way, but I used to be a bit coy about it - like my guitar-playing. If there's such a thing as genius, I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care. I used to think it when I was a kid writing my poetry and doing my paintings. I didn't become something when The Beatles made it; I've been like this all my life. Genius is pain, too. It's just pain.
I always wondered, 'Why has no one discovered me?' In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school?
If I look through my report card, it's the same thing: 'Too content to get a cheap laugh hiding behind this,' or, 'Daydreaming his life away.'
I daydreamed my way through the whole school. I absolutely was in a trance for twenty years because it was absolutely boring. If I wasn't in a trance, I wasn't there - I was at the movies, or running around.
I used to embarrass authority by chanting out a weird version of 'The Happy Wanderer' at inappropriate moments. I was suspended for a spell. I think it was for eating chocolate in prayers or ducking a swimming instructor; something daft like that.
One maths master wrote, 'He's on the road to failure if he carries on this way.' Most of them disliked me, so I'm always glad to remind them of the incredible awareness they had.
But there was always one teacher in each school, usually an art teacher or English language or literature. If it was anything to do with art or writing, I was OK, but if it was anything to do with science or maths, I couldn't get it in.
When I was fifteen I was thinking, 'If only I can get out of Liverpool and be famous and rich, wouldn't it be great?
I wanted to write Alice in Wonderland, but when you think, 'Whatever I do I'm never going to topple Leonardo,' you get to thinking, 'What's the use?' A lot of people had more pain than me and they've done better things.
I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker. I'd always been able at school - when they want you to imagine something instead of giving you a subject; I could do that.
At school we used to draw a lot and pass it round. We had blind dogs leading ordinary people around.
I suppose I did have a cruel humour. It was at school that it first started. We were once coming home from a school speech day and we'd had a few bevvies. Liverpool is full of deformed people, three-foot-high men selling newspapers. I'd never really noticed them before, but all the way home that day they seemed to be everywhere. It got funnier and funnier and we couldn't stop laughing. I suppose it's a way of hiding your emotions, or covering it up. I would never hurt a cripple. It was just part of our jokes, our way of life.
All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, 'You're no good.' That's all we get told all our lives: 'You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler.' It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, 'Yeah, you're a great artist,' I would have been a more secure person.
They should give you time to develop, encourage what you're interested in. I was always interested in art and came top for many years, yet no one took any interest.
It's like when they ask you, 'What do you want to be?' I would say, 'Well, a journalist.' I never would dare to say, 'An artist,' because in the social background that I came from - as I used to say to my auntie - you read about artists and you worship them in museums, but you don't want them living around the house. So the teachers said, 'No, something real.' And I'd say, 'Well, present me with some alternative.' They'd suggest veterinarian, doctor, dentist, lawyer. And I knew there was no hope in hell of me ever becoming that. So there was never anywhere for me to go.
They only wanted scientists in the Fifties. Any artsy-fartsy people were spies. They still are, in society.
Even at art school they tried to turn me into a teacher - they try to discourage you from painting - and said, 'Why not be a teacher? Then you can paint on Sunday?' I decided against it.
At school I saw a lot wrong with society. I revolted the same way as all my colleagues. Anyone who had anything didn't fit in with the school curriculum, and all my reports from Quarry Bank were on the line: 'He is clever, but doesn't try.' I was a particularly offensive schoolboy. I am one of your typical working-class heroes. Mine was the same sort of revolution as D. H. Lawrence's - I didn't blieve in class and the whole fight was against class structure.
I always was a rebel because of whatever sociological thing gave me a chip on the shoulder. But on the other hand, I want to be loved and accepted. That's why I'm on stage, like a performing flea. Because I would like to belong. Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouth, lunatic, poet/musician. But I cannot be what I'm not. What the hell do you do? You want to belong, but you don't because you cannot belong.
I was fairly tough at school, but I could organise it so it seemed like I was tough. It used to get me into trouble. I used to dress tough like a Teddy boy, but if I went into the tough districts and came across other Teddy boys, I was in danger. At school it was easier because I could control it with my head so they thought I was tougher than I was. It was a game. I mean, we used to shoplift and all those things, but nothing really heavy. Liverpool's quite a tough city. A lot of the real Teddy boys were actually in their early twenties. They were dockers. We were only fifteen, we were only kids - they had hatchets, belts, bicycle chains and real weapons. We never really got into that, and if somebody came in front of us we ran, me and my gang.
The sort of gang I led went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls' knickers down. When the bomb fell and everyone got caught, I was always the one they missed. I was scared at the time, but Mimi was the only parent who never found out. Most of the masters hated me like shit. As I got older, we'd go on from just stuffing rubbish like sweets in our pockets from shops, and progressed to getting enough to sell to others, like ciggies.
I'm not a tough guy. I've always had to have a facade of being tough to protect myself from other people's neuroses. But really, I'm a very sensitive weak guy.
I'd say I had a happy childhood. I came out aggressive, but I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh.
We [Mimi's husband and I] got on fine. He was nice and kind. [When] he died, I didn't know how to be sad publicly - what you did or said - so I went upstairs. Then my cousin arrived and she came upstairs as well. We both had hysterics. We just laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.
Mimi was looking after me on her own and she wanted to keep up this semi-detached house and not go down, and so we took students in at one time.
She always wanted me to be a rugby type or a chemist. I was writing poetry and singing since she had me. All the time I used to fight and say, 'Look, I'm an artist, don't bug me with all this maths. Don't try and make me into a chemist or a vet. I can't do it.'
I used to say, 'Don't you destroy my papers.' I'd come home when I was fourteen and she'd rooted all my things and thrown all my poetry out. I was saying, 'One day I'll be famous and you're going to regret it.'
I'd seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard-on. I'd wondered who wrote them and thought I'd try one myself. Mimi found it under my pillow. I said I'd been made to write it out for another lad who couldn't write very well. I'd written it myself, of course.
When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn't read it.
My mother [Julia] came to see us one day in a black coat with her face bleeding. She'd had some sort of accident. I couldn't face it. I thought, 'That's my mother in there, bleeding.' I went out into the garden. I loved her, but I didn't want to get involved. I suppose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.
Julia gave me my first coloured shirt. I staarted going to visit her at her house. I met her new bloke and didn't think much of him. I called him Twitchy. Julia became a sort of young aunt to me, or a big sister. As I got bigger and had more rows with Mimi, I used to go and live with Julia for a weekend.
[Twitchy was] otherwise known as Robert Dykins or Bobbie Dykins. Her second husband - I don't know if she married him or not; little waiter with a nervous cough and the thinning, margarine-coated hair. He always used to push his hand in the margarine or the butter, usually the margarine, and grease his hair with it before he left. He used to keep his tips in a big tin on top of a cupboard in the kitchen, and I used to always steal them. I believe Mother got the blame. That's the least they could do for me.
I'd always had a fantasy about a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheekboned, free-spirited artist (a la Juliette Green). My soul mate. Someone that I had already known, but somehow had lost. Of course, as a teenager, my sexual fantasies were full of Anita Ekberg and the usual giant Nordic goddesses. That is, until Brigitte Bardot became the love of my life in the late Fifties. (All my girlfriends who weren't dark-haired suffered my constant pressure to become Brigitte. By the time I married my first wife - who was a natural auburn - she too had become a long-haired blonde with the obligatory bangs. I met the real Brigitte a few years later. I was on acid and she was on her way out.)
I read some guy saying about the sexual fantasies and urges that he had all his life. When he was twenty, and then when he was thirty, he thought they'd cool down a bit. Then when he got in his forties he thought they'd cool down, but they didn't, they went on sixty, seventy... until he was still dribbling in his mind when he couldn't possibly do anything about it. I thought, 'Shit!' because I was always waiting for them to lessen, but I suppose it's going to go on forever. 'Forever' is a bit too strong a word - let's say you go on until you leave this body, anyway. Let's hope. Maybe the game is to conquer it before you leave, otherwise you come back for more (and who wants to come back just to come?).
I remember a night, or should I say day, in my teens when I was fucking my girlfriend on a gravestone and my arse got covered in greenfly. This was a good lesson in karma and/or gardening. Barbara, where are you now? Fat and ugly? Fifteen kids? Years of hell with me should have made you ready for anything. What's so sad about the past is it's passed. I wonder who's kissing her now.
America used to be the big youth place in everybody's imagination. America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.
We all knew America, all of us. All those movies, every movie we ever saw as children, whether it was Disneyland or Doris Day, Rock Hudson, James Dean or Marilyn. Everything was American: Coca-Cola, Heinz ketchup - I thought Heinz ketchup was English until I went to America.
The music was mainly American before rock'n'roll. We still had our own artists, but the big artists were American. It was the Americans coming to the London Palladium. They wouldn't even make an English movie without an American in it, even a B movie, because nobody would go to the movie. They'd have a Canadian if they couldn't get an American.
There was no such thing as an English record. I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was 'Move It' by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing.
Liverpool is cosmopolitan. It's where the sailors would come home on the ships with the blues records from America. We were hearing old funky blues records in Liverpool that people across Britain or Europe had never heard about or knew about, only the port areas.
There is the biggest country-and-western following in England in Liverpool, besides London. I heard country-and-western music in Liverpool before I heard rock'n'roll. The people there - the Irish in Ireland are the same - they take their music very seriously. There were established folk, blues and country-and-western clubs in Liverpool before rock'n'roll.
As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing in la-di-da voices. 'I worked in a mine in Newcastle,' and all that shit. There were very few and folk singers, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland singing, and the power is fantastic. But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet, a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today's folk music is rock'n'roll.
Folk music isn't an acoustic guitar with a singer who talks about mines and railways, because we don't sing like that any more. We sing about karma, peace, anything.
In our family the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to pop later; not like Paul and George who'd been groomed in pop music coming over the radio all the time. I only heard it at other people's homes.
The Bill Haley era passed me by, in a way. When his records came on the wireless my other would start dancing around, she thought they were so good. I used to hear them, but they didn't do anything for me.
This fella I knew called Don Beatty showed me the name Elvis Presley in the New Musical Express and said he was great. It was 'Heartbreak Hotel'. I thought it sounded a bit phoney: 'Heart-break Hotel'.
The music papers were saying that Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. 'Heartbreak Hotel' seemed a corny title and his name seemed strange in those days. But then, when I heard it, it was the end for me. I first heard it on Radio Luxembourg. He turned out to be fantastic. I remember rushing home with the record and saying, 'He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford!"
I'm an Elvis fan because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool. Once I heard it and got into it, that was life, there was no other thing. I thought of nothing else but rock'n'roll; apart from sex and food and money - but that's all the same thing, really.
People have been trying to stamp out rock'n'roll since it started. It was mainly parents who were against rock'n'roll. The words had a lot of double entendre in the early days.
They cleaned it up for the white audience, a lot of it. That black stuff was very sexual. They made Little Richard re-record 'Tutti Frutti'. Whatever was going on, they had to clean up a lot of words. Elvis did 'One Night With You'. The original was 'One Night Of Sin' - 'One night of sin is what I'm praying for.' The words were pretty good; they were street words or black words.
They've been saying it will never last ever since I heard about it, and it's always written in the papers that it's dying. It'll never die. It's been apparent in all the music since it began. It came out of its roots of blues and rhythm-and-blues and jazz and country. It was really a combination of black and white music. That's what finally made it.
There have only been two great albums that I listened to all the way through when I was about sixteen. One was Carl Perkins's first or second, I can't remember which. And one was Elvis's first. Those are the only ones on which I really enjoyed every track.
On things like 'Ready Teddy' and 'Rip It Up' I have visions of listening to the record when I was younger. I remember how the London-American label looked. I remember playing it to my auntie and she was saying, 'What is it?' Or I remember dance-hall scenes where we were all dancing.
Buddy Holly was great and he wore glasses, which I liked, although I didn't wear them in public for years and years. But Buddy Holly was the first one that we were really aware of in England who could play and sing at the same time - not just strum, but actually play the licks. I never met him, I was too young. I never saw him live either. I saw Eddie Cochran. I saw Gene Vincent and Little Richard, but I met them later. Eddie Cochran was the only one I saw as a fan, just sitting in an audience.
Little Richard was one of the all-time greats. The first time I heard him a friend of mine had been to Holland and brought back a 78 with 'Long Tall Sally' on one side, and 'Slippin' And Slidin'' on the other. It blew our heads - we'd never heard anybody sing like that in our lives, and all those saxes playing like crazy.
The most exciting thing about early Little Richard was when he screamed just before the solo; that was howling. It used to make your hair stand on end when he did that long, long scream into the solo.
I still love Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They're like primitive painters. Chuck Berry is one of the all-time great poets; a rock poet, you could call him. He was well advanced of his time, lyric-wise. We all owe a lot to him, including Dylan. I've loved everything he's done, ever. He was in a different class from the other performers. He was in the tradition of the great blues artists but he really wrote his own stuff - I know Richard did, but Berry really wrote stuff. The lyrics were fantastic, even though we didn't know what he was saying half the time.
In the Fifties, when people were virtually singing about nothing, Chuck Berry was writing social-comment songs, with incredible metre to the lyrics. When I hear rock, good rock, of the calibre of Chuck Berry, I just fall apart and I have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if rock'n'roll is playing. It's a disease of mine.
That's the music that brought me from the provinces of England to the world. That's what made me what I am, whatever it is I am. I don't know where we'd have been without rock'n'roll and I really love it.
Rock'n'roll was real, everything else was unreal. It was the only thing to get through to me out of all the things that were happening when I was fifteen.
I had no idea about doing music as a way of life until rock'n'roll hit me. That's the music that inspired me to play music.
When I was sixteen my mother taught me music. She first taught me how to play banjo chords - that's why in very early photos of the group I'm playing funny chords - and from that I progressed to guitar.
I remember the first guitar I ever saw. It belonged to guy in a cowboy suit in a province of Liverpool, with stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro. They were real cowboys, and they took it seriously. There had been cowboys long before there was rock'n'roll.
I used to borrow a guitar at first. I couldn't play, but my mother bought me one from one of those mail-order firms. It was a bit crummy, but I played it all the time and got a lot of practice.
I played the guitar like a banjo, with the sixth string hanging loose. My first guitar cost £10. All I ever wanted to do was to vamp; I only learnt to play to back myself.
When I got the guitar I'd play it for a bit then give it up, then take it up again. It took me about two years, on and off, to be able to strum tunes without thinking. I think I had one lesson, but it was so much like school I gave up. I learnt mostly by picking up bits here and there. One of the first things I learnt was 'Ain't That A Shame' and it has a lot of memories for me. Then I learnt 'That'll Be The Day'. I learned the solos on 'Johnny B. Goode' and 'Carol', but I couldn't play the one on 'Blue Suede Shoes'. In those days I was very much influenced by Chuck Berry, Scotty Moore and Carl Perkins.
The best quote Mimi ever said was: 'The guitar's all right for a hobby, John, but you'll never make a living at it.' (Fans in America had that framed on steel and sent it to her, and she has it in the house I bought her; she has it looking at her the whole time.)
About the time of rock'n'roll in Britain - I think I was about fifteen so it would be about 1955 - there was a big thing called 'skiffle', which was a kind of folk music; American folk music with washboards, and all the kids from fifteen onwards had these groups.
I listen to country music. I started imitating Hank Williams when I was fifteen, before I could play the guitar - although a friend had one. I used to go round to his house, because he had the record-player, and we sang all that Lonnie Donegan stuff and Hank Williams. He had all the records. 'Honky Tonk Blues' is the one I used to do. Presley was country, country-rock. Carl Perkins was really country, just with more backbeat.
We eventually formed ourselves into a group from school. I think the bloke whose idea it was didn't get in the group. We met in his house the first time. There was Eric Griffiths on guitar, Pete Shotton on washboard, Len Garry, Colin Hanton on drums and Rod [Davis] on banjo - and somebody named Ivan [Vaughan]. Ivan went to the same school as Paul.
Our first appearance was in Rosebery Street - it was their Empire Day celebrations. They had this party out in the street. We played from the back of a lorry. We didn't get paid. We played at blokes' parties after that; perhaps got a few bob, but mostly we just played for fun. We didn't mind about not being paid.
The Quarry Men is the name of the group before it turned into The Beatles. The original group was named after my school, which was Quarry Bank and had a Latin motto which meant 'ou of this rock' - that's symbolic - 'you will find truth'.
Anyway, we always failed the exams and never did any work and Pete was always worried about his future. I would say, 'Don't worry, it'll work out,' to him and the gang that was around me then. I always had a group of three or four or five guys around with me who would play various roles in my life, supportive and subservient. In general, me being the bully boy. The Beatles became my new gang.
I always believed that something would turn up. I didn't make plans for the future. I didn't study for the exam. I didn't put a little bit on the side, I wasn't capable. Therefore I was the one that all the other boys' parents would say, 'Keep away from him.' Because they knew what I was. The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home. Partly out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home. (But I did. I had an auntie and an uncle and a nice suburban home. This image of me being the orphan is garbage because I was well protected by my auntie and my uncle, and they looked after me very well.)
I think I went a bit wild. I was just drifting. I wouldn't study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs I was a hopeless failure. Even in the mock I got English and art, but in the real one I didn't even get art.
I was disappointed at not getting art at GCE, but I'd given up. All they were interested in was neatness. I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question which said do a picture of 'travel'. I drew a picture of a hunchback with warts all over him. They obviously didn't dig that.
We knew that the GCE wasn't the opening to anything. We could have ground through all that and gone further, but not me. I believed something was going to happen which I'd have to get through - and I knew it wasn't GCE.
Up to the age of fifteen I was no different to any other little cunt of fifteen. Then I decided I'd write a little song, and I did. But it didn't make me any different. That's a load of crap that I discovered a talent. I just did it. I've no talent, except for being happy, or a talent for skiving.
I was always thinking I was going to be a famous artist and possibly I'd have to marry a very rich old lady, or man, to look after me while I did my art. But then rock'n'roll came along, and I thought, 'Ah-ha, this is the one.' So I didn't have to marry anybody or live with them.
I didn't really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up an eccentric millionaire. I had to be a millionaire. If I couldn't do it without being crooked, then I'd have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that - nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings - but I was too much of a coward. I'd never have made it. I did plan to knock off a shop with another bloke, do it properly for a change, not just shoplifting. We used to look at shops at night, but we never got round to doing it.
Mimi had said to me that I'd done it at last: I was now a real Teddy boy. I seemed to digust everybody, not just Mimi. That was the day that I met Paul.
It was through Ivan that I first met Paul. Seems that he knew Paul was always dickering around in music and thought he would be a good lad to have in the group. So one day, when we were playing at Woolton, he brought him along. We can both remember it quite well. The Quarry Men were playing on a raised platform and there was a good crowd because it was a warm, sunny day.
[It was] the first day I did 'Be Bop A Lula' live on stage. 'Be Bop A Lula' has always been one of my all-time favourites. It was at a church-hall garden fete, and I was performing with a mutual friend of Paul's and mine. Another mutual friend who lived next door brought Paul along and said, 'I think you two will get along.' We talked after the show and I saw he had talent. He was playing guitar backstage, doing 'Twenty Flight Rock' by Eddie Cochran.
Paul could play guitar, trumpet and piano. That doesn't mean to say he has a greater talent, but his musical education was better. I could only play the mouth organ and two chords on a guitar when we met. I tuned the guitar like a banjo, so my guitar only had five strings on it. (Paul taught me how to play properly 0 but I had to learn the chords left-handed, because Paul is left-handed. So I learnt them upside down, and I'd go home and reverse them.) That's what I was doing - playing on stage with a group, playing a five-string guitar like a banjo - when he was brought around from the audience to meet me.
Paul told me the chords I had been playing weren't real chords - and his dad said that they weren't even banjo chords, though I think they were. He had a good guitar at the time, it cost about £14. He'd got it in exchange for a trumpet his dad had given him.
I was very impressed by Paul playing 'Twenty Flight Rock'. He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself, 'He's as good as me.' I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' It went through my head that I'd have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.
Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger? Instead of going for an individual thing we went for the strongest format - equals.
I turned round to him right then on first meeting and said, 'Do you want to join the group?' And he said 'yes' the next day as I recall it.
Paul had a trumpet and had this wild theory that he'd actually learnt how to play the oldie 'When The Saints Go Marching In'. He just blew away as hard as he could, drowning out everything we were trying to do. He thought he was doing a great job on the tune, but we didn't recognise any of it!
Now George came through Paul.
Paul introduced me to George and I had to make the decision whether to let George in. I listened to him play and said, 'Play "Raunchy".' I let him in and that was the three of us then, and the rest of group was thrown out, practically.
We asked George to join us because he knew more chords, a lot more than we knew. We got a lot from him. Paul had a friend at school who would discover chords, and these would be passed round Liverpool. Every time we learnt a new chords, we'd write a song round it.
All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Conducted by David Sheff
Includes a New Introduction by David Sheff with Yoko Ono
Twenty years ago David Sheff climbed the back steps of the Dakota into the personal thoughts and dreams of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Moving from their kitchen to the studio, Sheff recorded twenty hours of tape, discussing everything from their childhoods to the Beatles.
"This will be THE reference book."
-JOHN LENNON
Sheff gives a rare and last glimpse of John and Yoko, one that seemed to look beyond the kitchen table to the future of the world, with startling premonitions of what was to come.
"Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic nonviolents who died violently. I can never work that out. We're pacifists, but I'm not sure what it means when you're such a pacifist that you get shot. I can never understand that."
-JOHN LENNON
David Sheff's articles and interviews have appeared in Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Outside, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Esquire, as well as The Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He also writes for and is West Coast editor of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine.
Other Sheff interviews, including those with Ansel Adams, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Gore Vidal, Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Scott Peck, Betty Friedan, and Keith Haring, received wide recognition, as did his "Portrait of a Generation" in Rolling Stone. His documentaries for National Public Radio on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird won several awards.
A Literary Guild Selection when it first appeared in 1981, Sheff's Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono has been described as "historic," "compelling and compassionate," and "definitive."
"A fascinating, detailed glimpse into the workings of a musical genius...A valuable piece of work."
--The New York Times Book Review
"David Sheff's sympathetic questions evoked so much of the Beatle past and of Lennon's intellectual past and present and future plans that the interview would hardly have been less engrossing and important even if it were not illuminated by tragedy." --Los Angeles Times
"The interview is lively proof that some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life." --Time magazine
Excerpt
At the Dakota, the elderly guard, more a fixture than a comfort in front of the gray, ghostly apartment house, opened the car doors for us. John greeted the man by name and hastily but gently smiled for some snapshots posed with a fan who had been waiting up late just on the off chance of meeting him. After two quick flashes of the bulbs, John blindly headed for the entryway. Blinking to regain his eyesight, he stopped short. "Oooop, dear, I hope you have your house key. I forgot mine." Yoko didn't answer but used her key to call the elevator. John looked sheepishly at me. "I needn't have asked," he grinned.
Within the apartment, John guided me through a hall covered with photographs to the kitchen, where he instructed me to wait while he freshened up. Yoko was off in a different part of the apartment. As I looked around the huge, freshly painted kitchen, stocked with containers of tea and coffee, spices and grains, I heard voices from a distant bedroom: a child's giggling and a father's mock scolding. "So, you rascal, why aren't you asleep? Ahh haa! Well, I would have kissed you goodnight even if you were sleeping, silly boy."
John came tripping back into the kitchen, wholly revitalized, and, while putting a pot of water on to boil, he explained that their child Sean wasn't used to his and Yoko's new schedule, working on the album all hours. Before this project, John had been home virtually all the time.
Yoko entered the kitchen, wearing a kimonolike robe, and John poured three cups of tea. "Well, shall we start?" he asked as he sat down.
I looked at the two of them, waiting intently, and began. "The word is out: John Lennon and Yoko Ono are back--"
John interrupted immediately, and laughingly nudged Yoko. "Oh, really?" he joked. "From where?"
I smiled and continued: "--in the studio, recording again for the first time since 1975, when they vanished from public view. What have you been doing?"
John turned playfully to Yoko. "Do you want to start, or should I start?" he asked.
"You should start," she replied firmly.
"I should? Really? OK . . ." John leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped tightly around the cup of tea. He watched the steam float upward as he began.
LENNON: I've been baking bread.
PLAYBOY: Bread?
LENNON: And looking after the baby.
PLAYBOY: With what secret projects going on in the basement?
LENNON: Are you kidding? There were no secret projects going on in the basement. Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. There ain't no space for other projects.
After I had made the loaves, I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus! Don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
And it is such a tremendous responsibility to see that the baby has the right amount of food and doesn't overeat and gets the right amount of sleep. If I, as housemother, had not put him to sleep and made sure that he was in the bath by 7:30, no one else would have. It's a tremendous responsibility. Now I understand the frustration of those women because of all the work. And there is no gold watch at the end of the day . . .
PLAYBOY: What about the little rewards--the pleasure of watching somebody eat the bread or the baby sleep?
LENNON: There is great satisfaction. I took a Polaroid of my first loaf. [Yoko laughs.] I was overjoyed! I was that excited by it. I couldn't believe it! It was like an album coming out of the oven. The instantness of it was great. I was so into it, so thrilled with it, that I ended up cooking for the staff! Every day I was cooking lunch for the drivers, office boys, anybody who was working with us. "Come on up!" I loved it.
But then it was beginning to wear me out, you see. I thought, What is this? Screw this for a lark. I'd make two loaves on Friday and they'd be gone by Saturday afternoon. The thrill was wearing off and it became the routine again. So the joy is still there when I see Sean. He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish. That's because I took him to the "Y." I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of those things. He is my biggest pride, you see.
PLAYBOY: Why did you become a househusband?
LENNON: It was a case of heal thyself.
ONO: It was asking, "What is more important in our life?"
LENNON: It was more important to face ourselves and face that reality than to continue a life of rock 'n' roll show biz, going up and down with the winds of either your own performance or the public's opinion of you. And it was something else, too. Let's use Picasso as an example. He just repeated himself into his grave. It's not to take away from his great talent, but his last forty years were a repetition. It didn't go anywhere. What do you call that? Living on your laurels.
You see, I found myself in my midthirties in a position where, for whatever reason, I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it and the so-called pain of the artist was always paid for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock 'n' roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was great. But then I found I wasn't free. I'd got boxed in. It wasn't just because of my contract, but the contract was a physical manifestation of being in prison. And with that I might as well have gone to a nine-to-five job as to carry on the way I was carrying on. Rock 'n' roll was not fun anymore. So there were the standard options in my business: going to Vegas and singing your greatest hits--if you're lucky--or going to hell, which is where Elvis went.
Includes a New Introduction by David Sheff with Yoko Ono
Twenty years ago David Sheff climbed the back steps of the Dakota into the personal thoughts and dreams of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Moving from their kitchen to the studio, Sheff recorded twenty hours of tape, discussing everything from their childhoods to the Beatles.
"This will be THE reference book."
-JOHN LENNON
Sheff gives a rare and last glimpse of John and Yoko, one that seemed to look beyond the kitchen table to the future of the world, with startling premonitions of what was to come.
"Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic nonviolents who died violently. I can never work that out. We're pacifists, but I'm not sure what it means when you're such a pacifist that you get shot. I can never understand that."
-JOHN LENNON
David Sheff's articles and interviews have appeared in Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Outside, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Esquire, as well as The Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He also writes for and is West Coast editor of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine.
Other Sheff interviews, including those with Ansel Adams, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Gore Vidal, Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Scott Peck, Betty Friedan, and Keith Haring, received wide recognition, as did his "Portrait of a Generation" in Rolling Stone. His documentaries for National Public Radio on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird won several awards.
A Literary Guild Selection when it first appeared in 1981, Sheff's Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono has been described as "historic," "compelling and compassionate," and "definitive."
"A fascinating, detailed glimpse into the workings of a musical genius...A valuable piece of work."
--The New York Times Book Review
"David Sheff's sympathetic questions evoked so much of the Beatle past and of Lennon's intellectual past and present and future plans that the interview would hardly have been less engrossing and important even if it were not illuminated by tragedy." --Los Angeles Times
"The interview is lively proof that some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life." --Time magazine
Excerpt
At the Dakota, the elderly guard, more a fixture than a comfort in front of the gray, ghostly apartment house, opened the car doors for us. John greeted the man by name and hastily but gently smiled for some snapshots posed with a fan who had been waiting up late just on the off chance of meeting him. After two quick flashes of the bulbs, John blindly headed for the entryway. Blinking to regain his eyesight, he stopped short. "Oooop, dear, I hope you have your house key. I forgot mine." Yoko didn't answer but used her key to call the elevator. John looked sheepishly at me. "I needn't have asked," he grinned.
Within the apartment, John guided me through a hall covered with photographs to the kitchen, where he instructed me to wait while he freshened up. Yoko was off in a different part of the apartment. As I looked around the huge, freshly painted kitchen, stocked with containers of tea and coffee, spices and grains, I heard voices from a distant bedroom: a child's giggling and a father's mock scolding. "So, you rascal, why aren't you asleep? Ahh haa! Well, I would have kissed you goodnight even if you were sleeping, silly boy."
John came tripping back into the kitchen, wholly revitalized, and, while putting a pot of water on to boil, he explained that their child Sean wasn't used to his and Yoko's new schedule, working on the album all hours. Before this project, John had been home virtually all the time.
Yoko entered the kitchen, wearing a kimonolike robe, and John poured three cups of tea. "Well, shall we start?" he asked as he sat down.
I looked at the two of them, waiting intently, and began. "The word is out: John Lennon and Yoko Ono are back--"
John interrupted immediately, and laughingly nudged Yoko. "Oh, really?" he joked. "From where?"
I smiled and continued: "--in the studio, recording again for the first time since 1975, when they vanished from public view. What have you been doing?"
John turned playfully to Yoko. "Do you want to start, or should I start?" he asked.
"You should start," she replied firmly.
"I should? Really? OK . . ." John leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped tightly around the cup of tea. He watched the steam float upward as he began.
LENNON: I've been baking bread.
PLAYBOY: Bread?
LENNON: And looking after the baby.
PLAYBOY: With what secret projects going on in the basement?
LENNON: Are you kidding? There were no secret projects going on in the basement. Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. There ain't no space for other projects.
After I had made the loaves, I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus! Don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
And it is such a tremendous responsibility to see that the baby has the right amount of food and doesn't overeat and gets the right amount of sleep. If I, as housemother, had not put him to sleep and made sure that he was in the bath by 7:30, no one else would have. It's a tremendous responsibility. Now I understand the frustration of those women because of all the work. And there is no gold watch at the end of the day . . .
PLAYBOY: What about the little rewards--the pleasure of watching somebody eat the bread or the baby sleep?
LENNON: There is great satisfaction. I took a Polaroid of my first loaf. [Yoko laughs.] I was overjoyed! I was that excited by it. I couldn't believe it! It was like an album coming out of the oven. The instantness of it was great. I was so into it, so thrilled with it, that I ended up cooking for the staff! Every day I was cooking lunch for the drivers, office boys, anybody who was working with us. "Come on up!" I loved it.
But then it was beginning to wear me out, you see. I thought, What is this? Screw this for a lark. I'd make two loaves on Friday and they'd be gone by Saturday afternoon. The thrill was wearing off and it became the routine again. So the joy is still there when I see Sean. He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish. That's because I took him to the "Y." I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of those things. He is my biggest pride, you see.
PLAYBOY: Why did you become a househusband?
LENNON: It was a case of heal thyself.
ONO: It was asking, "What is more important in our life?"
LENNON: It was more important to face ourselves and face that reality than to continue a life of rock 'n' roll show biz, going up and down with the winds of either your own performance or the public's opinion of you. And it was something else, too. Let's use Picasso as an example. He just repeated himself into his grave. It's not to take away from his great talent, but his last forty years were a repetition. It didn't go anywhere. What do you call that? Living on your laurels.
You see, I found myself in my midthirties in a position where, for whatever reason, I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it and the so-called pain of the artist was always paid for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock 'n' roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was great. But then I found I wasn't free. I'd got boxed in. It wasn't just because of my contract, but the contract was a physical manifestation of being in prison. And with that I might as well have gone to a nine-to-five job as to carry on the way I was carrying on. Rock 'n' roll was not fun anymore. So there were the standard options in my business: going to Vegas and singing your greatest hits--if you're lucky--or going to hell, which is where Elvis went.
All You Need Is Ears: The Inside Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles
by George Martin with Jeremy Hornsby
"George," he said, "I don't know if you'd be interested, but there's a chap who's come in with a tape of a group he runs. They haven't got a recording contract, and I wonder if you'd like to see him and listen to what he's got?"
"Certainly," I said, "I'm willing to listen to anything. Ask him to come and see me."
"O.K., I will. His name's Brian Epstein...."
All You Need Is Ears is the story of George Martin, the man who spotted the Beatles' talent, who recorded and produced them from the start, and who brought their musical ideas to life. In this witty and charming autobiography, he describes exactly what it was like to work in the studio with the Beatles--from the first audition (and his decision to scrap Pete Best on drums) to the wild experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (complete with sound effects, animal noises, and full orchestras in evening dress at the direct request of Paul McCartney). This is a singular look at the most important musical group of all time, and how they made the music that changed the world: No other book can provide George Martin's inside look at their creative process, at the play of genius and practical improvisation that gave them their sound; it is an indispensable read for Beatle lovers and anyone interested in the music world.
Excerpt: Classical Primer
I was woken by the sound of a bell ringing demandingly in my ear. It didn't seem the best way to start the day, any day. For a moment, I wondered where on earth I was, then recalled that it was a bedroom in a Paris hotel, and it wasn't morning, but the middle of the night.
The immediate problem was to stop that infernal ringing, and reaching for the phone I whispered a sleepy and dubious 'Hallo' in its general direction.
'George, I'm sorry to wake you, but I just had to tell you the news.'
Brian Epstein's voice sounded very excited, and just a little drunk. It seemed early to be in that condition. I soon knew why he was.
'I've just left the boys celebrating, and they're as thrilled as I am,' he said, pausing for a moment to build up the suspense. I said nothing. It was too early in the morning or too late at night to formulate sentences. Then he said it.
'We're number one in America on next week's charts. It's quite definite. I've just been on the phone to New York.'
So that was it. At last we had made it, through the medium of a song called 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. After a year of really hard graft we had finally breached teh walls of the biggest record market in the world.
I forgot any idea of more sleep. That was no hardship. For the past year, sleep had been a rare enough commodity. I just lay there, thinking of what had been, and what might be to come.
But what mattered immediately were the two reasons why I had come to Paris with the Beatles. The first was that they were due to make their French debut at the Paris Olympia, and I wanted to be there. The second was to make a quick record with them at EMI's Paris studio.
By the end of 1963, we had conquered England, musically at any rate. Now, as well as America, we were trying to make it big on the Continent. The EMI people in Germany, fired -- who knows? -- by some patriotic fervour, had insisted that the Beatles would get no big sales there unless they had a record sung in German. The boys thought this was nonsense, and I didn't believe a word of it myself, but equally I did not want to give the German EMI people any excuse for not selling Beatles records.
So, after some argument, I had persuaded John and Paul to re-record 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' in German. The lyrics were provided by a German, who turned up at the recording to make sure their accents were all right. I didn't know about the accents, but I could see that the words were almost literal translations. 'Sie liebt dich, ja, ja, ja' sounded just like the sort of send-up Peter Sellers would have done.
The recording was set for a day that the boys had free from their rehearsals at the Olympia, and when I arrived at the studio I didn't really expect them to be there on time. Even in those early days they were not renowned for their punctuality. But after an hour had gone by I decided to ring their hotel.
None of them would come to the phone. Neil Aspinall, their road manager, had been deputed to do the talking, and he informed me that they had decided that, after all, they did not want to do the record and wouldn't be coming.
To describe my reaction as angry would be like calling Everest a good-sized hill. 'You tell them,' I yelled at Neil down a blushing Paris phone line, 'you just tell them I'm coming right over to let them know exactly what I think of them.'
I slammed the phone down. This was the first time that the boys had stood me up; and I was particularly irritated that they hadn't had the guts to speak to me themselves. I raced back to the Hotel Georges Cinq, where they had an extravagant suite, and burst in on them in their drawing-room. The scene was straight out of Lewis Carroll. All that was missing was the White Rabbit. Around a long table sat John, Paul, George, Ringo, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, his assistant. In the centre, pouring tea, was Jane Asher, a beautiful Alice with long golden hair. At my appearance, the whole tableau exploded. Beatles ran in all directions, hiding behind sofas, cushions, the piano -- anything that gave them cover.
'You bastards,' I yelled. 'I don't care if you record or not, but I do care about your rudeness!'
One by one, Beatle faces appeared from Beatle hiding-places, looking like naughty schoolboys, with sheepish smiles. There was a murmured chorus of 'Sorry, George'. If they wanted to be charming, as they did then, it was impossible to maintain anger for very long, and within a few minutes I had calmed down and joined the tea party -- though in what guise it's hard for me to say: the Mad Hatter perhaps.
The following day we made the record. But of course they were right. Beatles records, in English, were to sell in their millions in every country, Germany included. Never again did they make a record in a foreign language.
And now, especially, there was no need to, because American had fallen. For me, it was a world away from the moment when I first placed a tentative forefinger upon middle C.
"George," he said, "I don't know if you'd be interested, but there's a chap who's come in with a tape of a group he runs. They haven't got a recording contract, and I wonder if you'd like to see him and listen to what he's got?"
"Certainly," I said, "I'm willing to listen to anything. Ask him to come and see me."
"O.K., I will. His name's Brian Epstein...."
All You Need Is Ears is the story of George Martin, the man who spotted the Beatles' talent, who recorded and produced them from the start, and who brought their musical ideas to life. In this witty and charming autobiography, he describes exactly what it was like to work in the studio with the Beatles--from the first audition (and his decision to scrap Pete Best on drums) to the wild experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (complete with sound effects, animal noises, and full orchestras in evening dress at the direct request of Paul McCartney). This is a singular look at the most important musical group of all time, and how they made the music that changed the world: No other book can provide George Martin's inside look at their creative process, at the play of genius and practical improvisation that gave them their sound; it is an indispensable read for Beatle lovers and anyone interested in the music world.
Excerpt: Classical Primer
I was woken by the sound of a bell ringing demandingly in my ear. It didn't seem the best way to start the day, any day. For a moment, I wondered where on earth I was, then recalled that it was a bedroom in a Paris hotel, and it wasn't morning, but the middle of the night.
The immediate problem was to stop that infernal ringing, and reaching for the phone I whispered a sleepy and dubious 'Hallo' in its general direction.
'George, I'm sorry to wake you, but I just had to tell you the news.'
Brian Epstein's voice sounded very excited, and just a little drunk. It seemed early to be in that condition. I soon knew why he was.
'I've just left the boys celebrating, and they're as thrilled as I am,' he said, pausing for a moment to build up the suspense. I said nothing. It was too early in the morning or too late at night to formulate sentences. Then he said it.
'We're number one in America on next week's charts. It's quite definite. I've just been on the phone to New York.'
So that was it. At last we had made it, through the medium of a song called 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. After a year of really hard graft we had finally breached teh walls of the biggest record market in the world.
I forgot any idea of more sleep. That was no hardship. For the past year, sleep had been a rare enough commodity. I just lay there, thinking of what had been, and what might be to come.
But what mattered immediately were the two reasons why I had come to Paris with the Beatles. The first was that they were due to make their French debut at the Paris Olympia, and I wanted to be there. The second was to make a quick record with them at EMI's Paris studio.
By the end of 1963, we had conquered England, musically at any rate. Now, as well as America, we were trying to make it big on the Continent. The EMI people in Germany, fired -- who knows? -- by some patriotic fervour, had insisted that the Beatles would get no big sales there unless they had a record sung in German. The boys thought this was nonsense, and I didn't believe a word of it myself, but equally I did not want to give the German EMI people any excuse for not selling Beatles records.
So, after some argument, I had persuaded John and Paul to re-record 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' in German. The lyrics were provided by a German, who turned up at the recording to make sure their accents were all right. I didn't know about the accents, but I could see that the words were almost literal translations. 'Sie liebt dich, ja, ja, ja' sounded just like the sort of send-up Peter Sellers would have done.
The recording was set for a day that the boys had free from their rehearsals at the Olympia, and when I arrived at the studio I didn't really expect them to be there on time. Even in those early days they were not renowned for their punctuality. But after an hour had gone by I decided to ring their hotel.
None of them would come to the phone. Neil Aspinall, their road manager, had been deputed to do the talking, and he informed me that they had decided that, after all, they did not want to do the record and wouldn't be coming.
To describe my reaction as angry would be like calling Everest a good-sized hill. 'You tell them,' I yelled at Neil down a blushing Paris phone line, 'you just tell them I'm coming right over to let them know exactly what I think of them.'
I slammed the phone down. This was the first time that the boys had stood me up; and I was particularly irritated that they hadn't had the guts to speak to me themselves. I raced back to the Hotel Georges Cinq, where they had an extravagant suite, and burst in on them in their drawing-room. The scene was straight out of Lewis Carroll. All that was missing was the White Rabbit. Around a long table sat John, Paul, George, Ringo, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, his assistant. In the centre, pouring tea, was Jane Asher, a beautiful Alice with long golden hair. At my appearance, the whole tableau exploded. Beatles ran in all directions, hiding behind sofas, cushions, the piano -- anything that gave them cover.
'You bastards,' I yelled. 'I don't care if you record or not, but I do care about your rudeness!'
One by one, Beatle faces appeared from Beatle hiding-places, looking like naughty schoolboys, with sheepish smiles. There was a murmured chorus of 'Sorry, George'. If they wanted to be charming, as they did then, it was impossible to maintain anger for very long, and within a few minutes I had calmed down and joined the tea party -- though in what guise it's hard for me to say: the Mad Hatter perhaps.
The following day we made the record. But of course they were right. Beatles records, in English, were to sell in their millions in every country, Germany included. Never again did they make a record in a foreign language.
And now, especially, there was no need to, because American had fallen. For me, it was a world away from the moment when I first placed a tentative forefinger upon middle C.
Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four's Instruments, From Stage to Studio
by Andy Babiuk
Revised Edition
Including Many Previously Unseen Photographs
This book details exactly which guitars, drums, amplifiers and keyboards The Beatles used at the key points of their relatively brief but entirely revolutionary career -- from the formation of The Quarry men skiffle group in the 1950s to the dissolution of The Beatles in 1970. It provides a fascinating fresh insight into Beatle history from an entirely new viewpoint, and along the way many myths are exploded and dozens of stories told for the first time. John, Paul, George and Ringo's moves from cheap early instruments to the pick of 1960s technology is carefully and entertainingly documented in an easy-to-read narrative, fully illustrated with many unseen photographs, a cache of rare memorabilia, and a unique collection of specially-photographed actual Beatle instruments. This landmark book is perfect for the fan absorbed by music rather than hairstyles, for the tribute-band member with an eye for detail, and for any reader with an abiding interest in the 1960s. At last, Beatles Gear gets right inside the music.
Andy Babiuk is a musician and writer, has worked in a major instrument store, The House Of Guitars, for over 20 years, and is Staff Consultant to The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Andy perceived the need for a book about The Beatles' gear when he tried to emulate some of their recorded sounds for his own band, The Chesterfield Kings. Andy then embarked on six years of research for Beatles Gear, during which time he interviewed over 400 people who worked with or were closely associated with The Beatles, listened to hundreds of recordings, watched miles of film, and amassed a vast library of documents and photographic evidence of The Beatles using their instruments and equipment. The result is this most detailed account of The Beatles and the tools that they used, on-stage and in the studio. Beatles Gear is a book that manages to be both a historical document and an entertaining read. Andy lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife, five children and a very large collection of guitars and Beatles memorabilia.
Just how did The Beatles get those fantastic sounds? Now it can be told: here at last in this revised edition the story of all the instruments and gear that the Fab Four used from their earliest days to the group's break-up, with a foreword by acclaimed Beatle author Mark Lewisohn, this book tells it like it was.
Revised Edition
Including Many Previously Unseen Photographs
This book details exactly which guitars, drums, amplifiers and keyboards The Beatles used at the key points of their relatively brief but entirely revolutionary career -- from the formation of The Quarry men skiffle group in the 1950s to the dissolution of The Beatles in 1970. It provides a fascinating fresh insight into Beatle history from an entirely new viewpoint, and along the way many myths are exploded and dozens of stories told for the first time. John, Paul, George and Ringo's moves from cheap early instruments to the pick of 1960s technology is carefully and entertainingly documented in an easy-to-read narrative, fully illustrated with many unseen photographs, a cache of rare memorabilia, and a unique collection of specially-photographed actual Beatle instruments. This landmark book is perfect for the fan absorbed by music rather than hairstyles, for the tribute-band member with an eye for detail, and for any reader with an abiding interest in the 1960s. At last, Beatles Gear gets right inside the music.
Andy Babiuk is a musician and writer, has worked in a major instrument store, The House Of Guitars, for over 20 years, and is Staff Consultant to The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Andy perceived the need for a book about The Beatles' gear when he tried to emulate some of their recorded sounds for his own band, The Chesterfield Kings. Andy then embarked on six years of research for Beatles Gear, during which time he interviewed over 400 people who worked with or were closely associated with The Beatles, listened to hundreds of recordings, watched miles of film, and amassed a vast library of documents and photographic evidence of The Beatles using their instruments and equipment. The result is this most detailed account of The Beatles and the tools that they used, on-stage and in the studio. Beatles Gear is a book that manages to be both a historical document and an entertaining read. Andy lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife, five children and a very large collection of guitars and Beatles memorabilia.
Just how did The Beatles get those fantastic sounds? Now it can be told: here at last in this revised edition the story of all the instruments and gear that the Fab Four used from their earliest days to the group's break-up, with a foreword by acclaimed Beatle author Mark Lewisohn, this book tells it like it was.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
The Day John Met Paul: An Hour-By-Hour Account of How the Beatles Began
by Jim O'Donnell
"Meticulously researched..."
--Washington Post
"A superb re-creation of a moment in music history based on detailed research and imaginative insight. Jim O'Donnell has a reporter's curiosity, a rock 'n' roller's heart, and he writes like a lyrical Irish poet."
--Michael Lydon, a Founding Editor of Rolling Stone
"It reads like a drama, a thriller even . . . You won't be able to put the bloody book down!"
--Andy Davis, Record Collector Magazine
"The Day John Met Paul is one of the best Beatles books ever written... Extraordinary research, fresh approach, entertaining tone, deep insight . . ."
--Ray Coleman, John Lennon's Authorized Biographer
"Once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. This is a realistic portrayal of Lennon as a teenager. O'Donnell gets it right."
--Pete Shotton, John Lennon's Best Friend
The Day John Met Paul is a spellbinding hour-by-hour account of July 6, 1957, when fate brought together two men who would radically change the face of popular music: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This second edition includes a new introduction and photos of the many Liverpool landmarks--from Strawberry Fields to Penny Lane--that played a role in the Beatles' life and works.
Jim O'Donnell is a veteran journalist and author. His books include The Rock Book, Born to Rock and Wonderful Tonight. He is editor of RockandRollJournal.com.
"Meticulously researched..."
--Washington Post
"A superb re-creation of a moment in music history based on detailed research and imaginative insight. Jim O'Donnell has a reporter's curiosity, a rock 'n' roller's heart, and he writes like a lyrical Irish poet."
--Michael Lydon, a Founding Editor of Rolling Stone
"It reads like a drama, a thriller even . . . You won't be able to put the bloody book down!"
--Andy Davis, Record Collector Magazine
"The Day John Met Paul is one of the best Beatles books ever written... Extraordinary research, fresh approach, entertaining tone, deep insight . . ."
--Ray Coleman, John Lennon's Authorized Biographer
"Once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. This is a realistic portrayal of Lennon as a teenager. O'Donnell gets it right."
--Pete Shotton, John Lennon's Best Friend
The Day John Met Paul is a spellbinding hour-by-hour account of July 6, 1957, when fate brought together two men who would radically change the face of popular music: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This second edition includes a new introduction and photos of the many Liverpool landmarks--from Strawberry Fields to Penny Lane--that played a role in the Beatles' life and works.
Jim O'Donnell is a veteran journalist and author. His books include The Rock Book, Born to Rock and Wonderful Tonight. He is editor of RockandRollJournal.com.
Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America
by Jonathan Gould
A brilliant work of cultural history, musical analysis and group biography, Jonathan Gould's Can't Buy Me Love is more than just a book on the Beatles; it's a stunning recreation of the 1960s in England and America through the prism of the world's most iconic band. The Beatles, perhaps more than any musical act before or since, were a quintessential product of their time, and Gould draws on widely ranging sources of information and imagination to show the unique part they played in the shaping of post-war Britain and America.
Gould examines the influence of R&B, rockabilly, skiffle and Motown as the Fab Four forged a sound of their own; he illuminates the mercurial relationship -- the most productive and lucrative in the history of popular music -- between John Lennon and Paul McCartney; he critiques the songs they played and the movies they made, and their impact on competing bands and musicians, as well as on fashion, hairstyles, and humour; and he shows how events on both sides of the Atlantic -- from the Angry Young Man movement of John Osborne and the Profumo scandal to the advent of television and the assassination of John F Kennedy -- created exactly the right cultural climate for the biggest music phenomenon of 20th century. Beautifully written, insightful, and wonderfully evocative, Can't Buy Me Love is a magisterial biography by a popular historian of the very first rank.
Jonathan Gould has been researching and writing Can't Buy Me Love for almost twenty years. He is a former professional musician who studied with the eminent jazz drummer Alan Dawson and spent many years working in bands and recording studios. He lives in upstate New York. This is his first book.
'The Beatles saved the world from boredom.'
George Harrison
A brilliant work of cultural history, musical analysis and group biography, Jonathan Gould's Can't Buy Me Love is more than just a book on the Beatles; it's a stunning recreation of the 1960s in England and America through the prism of the world's most iconic band. The Beatles, perhaps more than any musical act before or since, were a quintessential product of their time, and Gould draws on widely ranging sources of information and imagination to show the unique part they played in the shaping of post-war Britain and America.
Gould examines the influence of R&B, rockabilly, skiffle and Motown as the Fab Four forged a sound of their own; he illuminates the mercurial relationship -- the most productive and lucrative in the history of popular music -- between John Lennon and Paul McCartney; he critiques the songs they played and the movies they made, and their impact on competing bands and musicians, as well as on fashion, hairstyles, and humour; and he shows how events on both sides of the Atlantic -- from the Angry Young Man movement of John Osborne and the Profumo scandal to the advent of television and the assassination of John F Kennedy -- created exactly the right cultural climate for the biggest music phenomenon of 20th century. Beautifully written, insightful, and wonderfully evocative, Can't Buy Me Love is a magisterial biography by a popular historian of the very first rank.
Jonathan Gould has been researching and writing Can't Buy Me Love for almost twenty years. He is a former professional musician who studied with the eminent jazz drummer Alan Dawson and spent many years working in bands and recording studios. He lives in upstate New York. This is his first book.
'The Beatles saved the world from boredom.'
George Harrison
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