Mount TBR #35

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Lennon Remembers - Jann Wenner

I listened to a recording while reading the text of the long interview John Lennon gave to the founder and chief editor the counter-culture weekly Rolling Stone in 1970. The Beatles were breaking up and the future of the Beatles as a business enterprise was unclear.

Generally speaking, Lennon expresses his feeling stuck. He’s exasperated at being tethered to weird expectations about what the four hard-pressed members of the Beatles should be. He feels angry at the racist and misogynist attacks on his Japanese wife Yoko Ono from business associates, fans, and reporters. He’s condescending and hurtful about George Harrison, aims thrusts at Paul McCartney, and get in digs at George Martin. And other times he just goes off against the whole obtuse unappreciative world:

John: That’s what makes me what I am. It comes out, the people I meet have to say it themselves, because we get fuckin’ kicked. Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me, a genius, for fuck’s sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don’t dare, don’t you dare fuckin’ dare criticize my work like that. You, who don’t know anything about it.

Fuckin’ bullshit!

I know what Zappa is going through, and a half. I’m just coming out of it. I just have been in school again. I’ve had teachers ticking me off and marking my work. If nobody can recognize what I am then fuck ’em, it’s the same for Yoko . . .

Yoko: That’s why it’s an amazing thing: after somebody has done something like the Beatles, they think that he’s sort of satisfied, where actually the Beatles . . .

John: The Beatles was nothing.

Yoko: It was like cutting him down to a smaller size than he is.

John: I learned lots from Paul and George, in many ways, but they learned a damned sight lot from me – they learned a fucking lot from me.

It’s not reasonable to expect that he would provide insights into his own experience. Do any of us have the tools to examine our lives coolly ad objectively, especially in the midst of trying times and transitions? We need hindsight to realize what felt like failure turned into a bullet dodged; what looked like a golden opportunity became a calamity.

Lennon had a fatherless childhood filled with adversity. Maybe all of us carry around that inner kid that is still miffed at the adult world not being more caring and supportive than it was. Till we remember that it’s irrational to demand of a fickle world patience and indulgence. And that the adults at the time had their own foibles, troubles and torments to deal with, of which we kids only had hints or if we were unlucky had to bear the brunt of.

Lennon had brought in Phil Spector to overhaul George Martin's production on Let It Be and then continued to work with Spector on projects such as the album with the now-neglected Jealous Guy and  the Christmas single which we are still hearing today at the end of the year. So, Lennon and Martin were estranged in the 1970s, meeting each other face to face only once before Lennon’s killing in late 1980. Legend has it Martin asked about the interview, “What was all that shit about, John,” and Lennon replied “Out of me head, wasn’t I?”