Had John Lennon lived he'd have turned 66 years old today. In honor of his birthday I've compiled a handful of quotes from the man himself on a variety of different subjects. I hope you enjoy them.... And remember, All You Need Is Love!!!!
ROCK AND ROLL
"There is nothing conceptually better than rock and roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on "Whole Lot Of Shakin", for my money. Or maybe I'm like our parents: That's my period and I dig it and I'll never leave it."
THE BEATLES
"From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred "pop type" music and we preferred what is now called "underground". This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but contrast in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm, musically speaking, and contributed to our success."
"There's many tracks, Beatles tracks, that I would redo, okay- I'd always make them all over again, they were never the way I wanted them to be, but they exist as they are, and that's what they are. So in that way, an artist is never satisfied with his work, that's the only reason to carry on doing it again."
"Admittedly, "I Am The Walrus" didn't mean anything- the melody came from hearing a wailing police siren- but a lot of the others were straight diaries. "Strawberry Fields Forever" meant a lot. It was about me, and I was having a hard time. "Help" was all about me, although it was a bit poetic. In "Help" I was in a hell of a state. I say in the song that when I was younger I was doing all right but then things got more difficult. "In My Life" was pretty truthful. And I suppose "I'm A Loser" was more of a mood than anything."
"The Beatles' "White Album". Listen, all you experts: none of you can hear. Every track is an individual track- there isn't any Beatle music on it. I just say, listen to the "White Album". It was John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band, like that."
"I knew on the flight over to Toronto or before we went to Toronto: I told Allen (Klein) I was leaving, I told Eric Clapton and Klaus (Voorman) that I was leaving then, but that I would probably like to use them as a group. I hadn't decided how to do it- to have a permanent new group or what- then, later on, I thought, fuck, I'm not going to get stuck with another set of people, whoever they are."
"Whatever wind was blowing at the time moved The Beatles too. I'm not saying we weren't flags on top of the ship, but the whole boat was moving."
"If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was learn to swim. Period. And once you learn to swim, swim. The people who are hung up on The Beatles and the 60's dream missed the whole point, when The Beatles and the 60's dream became the point."
YOKO
"I was used to a situation where the newspaper was there for me to read, and after I'd read it, somebody else could have it. It didn't occur to me that somebody else might want to look at it first. I think that's what kills people like Presley and others of that ilk. So-called stars who die in public and lots of people who die privately. The king is always killed by his courtiers, not by his enemies. The king is overfed, overdrugged, overindulged, anything to keep the king tied to his throne. Most people in that position never wake up. They either die mentally or physically or both. And what Yoko did for me, apart from liberating me to be a feminist, was to liberate me from that situation. And that's how the Beatles ended. Not because Yoko split the Beatles, but because she showed me what it was to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by sycophants and slaves who were only interested in keeping the situation as it was. And that's a kind of death."
"People couldn't understand our relationship. They said she was a Japanese witch who had made me crazy. We're both sensitive people and we were hurt by all the criticism of Yoko. I couldn't understand why people wanted to throw rocks at her or punish me for being in love with her. As far as I was concerned I was with the person who was my goddess of love and the fulfillment of my whole life. Because of all the hostility there were a few times when we really went under but our love helped us survive."
PLASTIC ONO BAND
"I think it's the best thing I've ever done. I think it's realistic, and it's true to the me that has been developing over the years from my life. "I'm A Loser", "Help", "Strawberry Fields Forever", they are all personal records. I always wrote about me when I could. I didn't really enjoy writing third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things like that. I like first-person music. But because of my hang-ups and many other things, I would only now and then specifically write about me. Now I wrote all about me, and that's why I like it. It's me! And nobody else. That's why I like it. It's real, that's all."
IMAGINE
"Imagine", both the song itself and the album, is the same thing as "Working Class Hero", "Mother" and "God" on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people, so nobody bought it. It was banned on the radio. But the song "Imagine" which says: "Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics" is virtually the communist manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist, and I do not belong to any movement. You see, "Imagine" was exactly the same message, but sugar coated. Now "Imagine" is a big hit almost everywhere- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it is sugar coated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey."
NEW YORK
"If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself."
"It was Yoko who sold me on New York. She's been poor here and she knew every inch. She made me walk around the streets and parks and square and examine every nook and cranny. In fact, you could say that I fell in love with New York on a street corner."
POLTICAL ACTIVISM
"I've always been political minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere, I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 and '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit- religion was an outlet for my repression, I thought, "Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?" But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledygook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirizing the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us- it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out- I got farther away from reality for a time."
DRUG USE
"A Hard Day's Night" I was on pills, that's drugs, that's bigger drugs than pot. Started on pills when I was fifteen, no, since I was seventeen, since I became a musician. The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them- the pills and drink. I was a fucking dropped-down drunk in art school. "Help" was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I've always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more everything because I'm more crazy, probably."
"It was only another mirror. It wasn't a miracle. It was more of a visual thing and a therapy, looking at yourself a bit. It did all that. You know, I don't quite remember. But it didn't write the music, neither did Janov or Maharishi in the same terms. I write the music in the circumstances in which I'm in, whether it's on acid or in water."
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
"Not thinking is the only way to get it right. To play music, to sing, to paint. Like the Zen painters paint. They train for all those times and make that one stroke. So for us to even presuppose what somebody's going to suppose, while we're still painting, is impossible- because we couldn't do it. And its impact will be whatever its impact will be when IT hits the airwaves. And then we can see...."
"I was never painstaking and slow. I produced "I Am The Walrus" at the same speed I produced "Whatever Gets You Through The Night". I would be painstaking on some things, as I am now. If there's a quality that occasionally gets in the way of my talent, it's that I get bored quick unless it's done quick. But "I Am The Walrus" sounds like a wonderful production. "Strawberry Fields" sounds like a big production. But I do them as quick as I possibly can, without losing (a) the feel and (b) where I'm going. The longest track I personally spent time on was "Revolution 9", which was an abstract track where I used a lot of tape loops and things like that. I still did it in one session. But I accept that criticism and I have it of myself. But I don't want to make myself so painstaking that it's boring. But I should maybe t'ink a little more. Maybe. But on the other hand I think my criticism of somebody like Richard Perry would be that he's great but he's too painstaking. It gets too slick and somewhere in between that is where I'd like to go. I keep finding out all the time- what I'm missing that I want to get out of it."
GROWING UP
"Watching the wheels? The whole universe is a wheel, right? Wheels go round and round. They're my own wheels mainly. But watching myself is like watching everybody else. And I watch myself through my child, too. Then, in a way, nothing is real, if you break the world down. As the Hindus or Buddhists say, it's an illusion, meaning all matter is floating atoms, right? We all see it, but the agreed upon illusion is what we live. The hardest thing is facing yourself. It's easier to shout "Revolution" and "Power To The People" than to look at yourself and try to find out what's real inside you and what isn't, when you're pulling the wool over your own eyes. That's the hardest one."
"I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owed me something, and that either the conservatives or the socialists or the fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews were doing something to me; and when you're a teenybopper, that's what you think. I'm forty now. I don't think that anymore, 'cause I found out it doesn't fucking work! The thing goes on anyway, and all you're doing is jacking off, screaming about what your mommy or daddy or society did, but one has to go through that. For the people who even bother to go through that- most assholes just accept what is and get on with it, right?- but for the few of us who did question what was going on.... I have found out personally -not for the whole world!- that I am responsible for it, as well as them. I am part of them. There's no separation; we're all one, so in that respect, I look at it all and think, 'Ah, well, I have to deal with me again in that way. What is real? What is the illusion I'm living or not living?' And I have to deal with it everyday. The layers of the onion. But that is what it's all about."
