The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon, Part II

On the plane over, I was thinking "Oh, we won't make it," or I said it on a film or something, but that's that side of me. We knew we would wipe you out if we could just get a grip on you. We were new.

And when we got here, you were all walking around in fuckin' bermuda shorts, with Boston crew cuts and stuff on your teeth. Now they're telling us, they're all saying, "Beatles are pass?© and this is like that, man." The chicks looked like fuckin' 1940 horses. There was no conception of dress or any of that jazz. We just thought "what an ugly race," it looked just disgusting. We thought how hip we were, but, of course, we weren't. It was just the five of us, us and the Stones were really the hip ones; the rest of England were just the same as they ever were.

You tend to get nationalistic, and we would really laugh at America, except for its music. It was the black music we dug, and over here even the blacks were laughing at people like Chuck Berry and the blues singers; the blacks thought it wasn't sharp to dig the really funky music, and the whites only listened to Jan and Dean and all that. We felt that we had the message which was "listen to this music." It was the same in Liverpool, we felt very exclusive and underground in Liverpool, listening to Richie Barret and Barrett Strong, and all those old-time records. Nobody was listening to any of them except Eric Burdon in Newcastle and Mick Jagger in London. It was that lonely, it was fantastic. When we came over here and it was the same — nobody was listening to rock and roll or to black music in America— we felt as though we were coming to the land of its origin but nobody wanted to know about it.

What part did you ever play in the songs that are heavily identified with Paul, like "Yesterday"?
"Yesterday," I had nothing to do with.

"Eleanor Rigby"?
"Eleanor Rigby" I wrote a good half of the lyrics or more.

When did Paul show you "Yesterday"?
I don't remember — I really don't remember, it was a long time ago. I think he was... I really don't remember, it just sort of appeared.

Who do you think has done the best versions of your stuff?
I can't think of anybody.

Did you hear Ike and Tina Turner doing "Come Together"?
Yeah, I didn't think they did too much of a job on it, I think they could have done it better. They did a better "Honky Tonk Woman."

Ray Charles doing "Yesterday"?
That was quite nice.

And you had Otis doing "Day Tripper," what did you think of that?
I don't think he did a very good job on "Day Tripper." I never went much for the covers. It doesn't interest me, really. I like people doing them — I've heard some nice versions on "In My Life," I don't know who it was, though. [Judy Collins], Jose Feliciano did "Help" quite nice once. I like people doing it, I get a kick out of it. I thought it was interesting that Nina Simone did a sort of answer to "Revolution." That was very good— it was sort of like "Revolution," but not quite. That I sort of enjoyed, somebody who reacted immediately to what I had said.

Who wrote "Nowhere Man"?
Me, me.

Did you write that about anybody in particular?
Probably about myself. I remember I was just going through this paranoia trying to write something and nothing would come out so I just lay down and tried to not write and then this came out, the whole thing came out in one gulp.

What songs really stick in your mind as being Lennon-McCartney songs?
"I Want to Hold Your Hand," "From Me To You," "She Loves You" — I'd have to have the list, there's so many, trillions of 'em. Those are the ones. In a rock band you have to make singles, you have to keep writing them. Plenty more. We both had our fingers in each others pies.

I remember that the simplicity on the new album was evident on the Beatles double album. It was evident in "She's So Heavy," in fact a reviewer wrote of "She's So Heavy": "He seems to have lost his talent for lyrics, it's so simple and boring." "She's So Heavy" was about Yoko. When it gets down to it, like she said, when you're drowning you don't say "I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me," you just scream. And in "She's So Heavy," I just sang "I want you, I want you so bad, she's so heavy, I want you," like that. I started simplifying my lyrics then, on the double album.

A song from the Help album, like "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." How did you write that? What were the circumstances? Where were you?
I was in Kenwood and I would just be songwriting. The period would be for songwriting and so every day I would attempt to write a song and it's one of those that you sort of sing a bit sadly to yourself, "Here I stand, head in hand..."

I started thinking about my own emotions— I don't know when exactly it started like "I'm a Loser" or "Hide Your Love Away" or those kind of things— instead of projecting myself into a situation I would just try to express what I felt about myself which I'd done in me books. I think it was Dylan helped me realize that — not by any discussion or anything but just by hearing his work— I had a sort of professional songwriter's attitude to writing pop songs; he would turn out a certain style of song for a single and we would do a certain style of thing for this and the other thing. I was already a stylized songwriter on the first album. But to express myself I would write "Spaniard in the Works" or "In His Own Write," the personal stories which were expressive of my personal emotions. I'd have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the sort of meat market, and I didn't consider them— the lyrics or anything— to have any depth at all. They were just a joke. Then I started being me about the songs, not writing them objectively, but subjectively.