The interview took place at John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's temporary basement flat in London — a flat where Jimi Hendrix, Ringo Star, and William Burroughs, among others, have stayed. But the flat seemed as much John's and Yoko's as the Indian incense which took over the living room. The walls were covered with photos of John, of Yoko, a giant Sgt. Pepper ensign, Richard Chamberlain's poster collage of news clippings of the Stones bust, the Time magazine cover of the Beatles.

We arrived at five on the afternoon of September 17, said hello to Robert Fraser, who arranged the interview, to John and Yoko, sitting together, looking "tres bien ensemble." We sat down around a simple wooden table, covered with magazines, newspapers, sketch paper, boxes, drawings, a beaded necklace shaped in the form of a pentangle.

John said he had to be at a recording session in a half hour, so we talked for a while about John's show at the Fraser gallery. John wrote some reminders to himself in the wonderfully intense and absorbed way that a kid has painting the sun for the first time. As a philosopher once remarked: "Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness."

When we arrived the next afternoon, Sept. 18, John was walking around the room, humming what sounded like "Hold Me Tight" — just singing the song to the air. Old '50's forty-fives were scattered about the floor, and John played Rosie and the Originals' version of "Give Me Love." We talked about the lyrics of Gene Vincent's "Woman Love." In spite of having slept only two hours, John asked us to sit down on the floor and begin the interview.

Any suspicions that John would be ornery, mean, cruel, or brutish — feelings attributed to him and imagined by press reports and various paranoic personalities — never arose even for the purpose of being pressed down. As John said simply about the interview: "There's nothing more fun than talking about your own songs and your own records. I mean you can't help it, it's your bit, really. We talk about them together. Remember that."

It's impossible to recapture in print John's inflections and pronunciations of words like "ahppens," for example. Wish you had been there.

— Jonathan Cott

(c) 1968 Rolling Stone Magazine

I've listed a group of songs that I associate with you, in terms of what you are or what you were, songs that struck me as embodying you a little bit: "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "Strawberry Fields," "It's Only Love," "She Said She Said," "Lucy in the Sky," "I'm Only Sleeping," "Run for Your Life," "I am the Walrus," "All You Need Is Love," "Rain," "Girl."

Ah, yeh! I agree with some of them, you see. Things like "Hide Your Love Away," right, I'd just discovered Dylan really. "It's Only Love" — I was always ashamed of that 'cause of the abominable lyrics you know — they're probably all right. George just came and talked about it last night. He said, remember we always used to cringe when the guitar bit came on, when we did that blamm blam blam-blam-blam, we liked it but there was something wrong.