PLAYBOY: "The word is out: John Lennon and Yoko Ono are back
in the studio, recording again for the first time since 1975, when
they vanished from public view. Let's start with you, John. What have
you been doing?"

LENNON: "I've been baking bread and looking after the baby."

PLAYBOY: "With what secret projects going on in the basement?"

LENNON: "That's like what everyone else who has asked me that question
over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To
which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every
housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I 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?"

PLAYBOY: "Why did you become a househusband?"

LENNON: "There were many reasons. I had been under obligation or
contract from the time I was 22 until well into my 30s. After all
those years, it was all I knew. I wasn't free. I was boxed in. My
contract was the physical manifestation of being in prison. It was
more important to face myself and face that reality than to continue a
life of rock 'n' roll... and to go up and down with the whims of
either your own performance or the public's opinion of you. Rock 'n'
roll was not fun anymore. I chose not to take the standard options in
my business... going to Vegas and singing your great hits, if you're
lucky, or going to hell, which is where Elvis went."

ONO: "John was like an artist who is very good at drawing circles. He
sticks to that and it becomes his label. He has a gallery to promote
that. And the next year, he will do triangles or something. It doesn't
reflect his life at all. When you continue doing the same thing for
ten years, you get a prize for having done it."

LENNON: "You get the big prize when you get cancer and you have been
drawing circles and triangles for ten years. I had become a craftsman
and I could have continued being a craftsman. I respect craftsmen, but
I am not interested in becoming one."

ONO: "Just to prove that you can go on dishing out things."

PLAYBOY: "You're talking about records, of course."

LENNON: "Yeah, to churn them out because I was expected to, like so
many people who put out an album every six months because they're
supposed to."

PLAYBOY: "Would you be referring to Paul McCartney?"

LENNON: "Not only Paul. But I had lost the initial freedom of the
artist by becoming enslaved to the image of what the artist is
supposed to do. A lot of artists kill themselves because of it,
whether it is through drink, like Dylan Thomas, or through insanity,
like Van Gogh, or through V.D., like Gauguin."

PLAYBOY: "Most people would have continued to churn out the product.
How were you able to see a way out?"

LENNON: "Most people don't live with Yoko Ono."

PLAYBOY: "Which means?"

LENNON: "Most people don't have a companion who will tell the truth
and refuse to live with a bullshit artist, which I am pretty good at.
I can bullshit myself and everybody around. Yoko: That's my answer."

PLAYBOY: "What did she do for you?"

LENNON: "She showed me the possibility of the alternative. 'You don't
have to do this.' 'I don't? Really? But-but-but-but-but...' Of course,
it wasn't that simple and it didn't sink in overnight. It took
constant reinforcement. Walking away is much harder than carrying on.
I've done both. On demand and on schedule, I had turned out records
from 1962 to 1975. Walking away seemed like what the guys go through
at 65, when suddenly they're supposed to not exist anymore and they're
sent out of the office..." (knocks on the desk three times) "'Your
life is over. Time for golf.'"

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, how did you feel about John's becoming a
househusband?"

ONO: "When John and I would go out, people would come up and say,
'John, what are you doing?' but they never asked about me, because, as
a woman, I wasn't supposed to be doing anything."

LENNON: "When I was cleaning the cat shit and feeding Sean, she was
sitting in rooms full of smoke with men in three-piece suits that they
couldn't button."

ONO: "I handled the business: old business... Apple, Maclen," (the
Beatles' record company and publishing company, respectively) "and new
investments."

LENNON: "We had to face the business. It was either another case of
asking some daddy to come solve our business or having one of us do
it. Those lawyers were getting a quarter of a million dollars a year
to sit around a table and eat salmon at the Plaza. Most of them didn't
seem interested in solving the problems. Every lawyer had a lawyer.
Each Beatle had four or five people working. So we felt we had to look
after that side of the business and get rid of it and deal with it
before we could start dealing with our own life. And the only one of
us who has the talent or the ability to deal with it on that level is
Yoko."

PLAYBOY: "Did you have experience handling business matters of that
proportion?"

ONO: "I learned. The law is not a mystery to me anymore. Politicians
are not a mystery to me. I'm not scared of all that establishment
anymore. At first, my own accountant and my own lawyer could not deal
with the fact that I was telling them what to do."

LENNON: "There was a bit of an attitude that this is John's wife, but
surely she can't really be representing him."

ONO: "A lawyer would send a letter to the directors, but instead of
sending it to me, he would send it to John or send it to my lawyer.
You'd be surprised how much insult I took from them initially. There
was all this 'But you don't know anything about law; I can't talk to
you.' I said, 'All right, talk to me in the way I can understand it. I
am a director, too.'"

LENNON: "They can't stand it. But they have to stand it, because she
is who represents us." (chuckles) "They're all male, you know, just
big and fat, vodka lunch, shouting males, like trained dogs, trained
to attack all the time. Recently, she made it possible for us to earn
a large sum of money that benefited all of them and they fought and
fought not to let her do it, because it was her idea and she was a
woman and she was not a professional. But she did it, and then one of
the guys said to her, 'Well, Lennon does it again.' But Lennon didn't
have anything to do with it."

PLAYBOY: "Why are you returning to the studio and public life?"

LENNON: "You breathe in and you breathe out. We feel like doing it and
we have something to say. Also, Yoko and I attempted a few times to
make music together, but that was a long time ago and people still had
the idea that the Beatles were some kind of sacred thing that
shouldn't step outside its circle. It was hard for us to work together
then. We think either people have forgotten or they have grown up by
now, so we can make a second foray into that place where she and I are
together, making music... simply that. It's not like I'm some
wondrous, mystic prince from the rock-'n'-roll world dabbling in
strange music with this exotic, Oriental dragon lady, which was the
picture projected by the press before."

PLAYBOY: "Some people have accused you of playing to the media. First
you become a recluse, then you talk selectively to the press because
you have a new album coming out."

LENNON: "That's ridiculous. People always said John and Yoko would do
anything for the publicity. In the Newsweek article," (September 29,
1980) "it says the reporter asked us, 'Why did you go underground?'
Well, she never asked it that way and I didn't go underground. I just
stopped talking to the press. It got to be pretty funny. I was calling
myself Greta Hughes or Howard Garbo through that period. But still the
gossip items never stopped. We never stopped being in the press, but
there seemed to be more written about us when we weren't talking to
the press than when we were."

PLAYBOY: "How do you feel about all the negative press that's been
directed through the years at Yoko, your 'dragon lady,' as you put
it?"

LENNON: "We are both sensitive people and we were hurt a lot by it. I
mean, we couldn't understand it. When you're in love, when somebody
says something like, 'How can you be with that woman?' you say, 'What
do you mean? I am with this goddess of love, the fulfillment of my
whole life. Why are you saying this? Why do you want to throw a rock
at her or punish me for being in love with her?' Our love helped us
survive it, but some of it was pretty violent. There were a few times
when we nearly went under, but we managed to survive and here we are."
(looks upward) "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

PLAYBOY: "But what about the charge that John Lennon is under Yoko's
spell, under her control?"

LENNON: "Well, that's rubbish, you know. Nobody controls me. I'm
uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just
barely possible."

PLAYBOY: "Still, many people believe it."

LENNON: "Listen, if somebody's gonna impress me, whether it be a
Maharishi or a Yoko Ono, there comes a point when the emperor has no
clothes. There comes a point when I will see. So for all you folks out
there who think that I'm having the wool pulled over my eyes, well,
that's an insult to me. Not that you think less of Yoko, because
that's your problem. What I think of her is what counts! Because...
fuck you, brother and sister... you don't know what's happening. I'm
not here for you. I'm here for me and her and the baby!"

ONO: "Of course, it's a total insult to me..."

LENNON: "Well, you're always insulted, my dear wife. It's natural..."

ONO: "Why should I bother to control anybody?"

LENNON: "She doesn't need me."

ONO: "I have my own life, you know."

LENNON: "She doesn't need a Beatle. Who needs a Beatle?"

ONO: "Do people think I'm that much of a con? John lasted two months
with the Maharishi. Two months. I must be the biggest con in the
world, because I've been with him 13 years."

LENNON: "But people do say that."

PLAYBOY: "That's our point. Why?"

LENNON: "They want to hold on to something they never had in the first
place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual
artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood
everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if
they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off
to... it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go
jack off to Mick Jagger, OK? I don't need it."

PLAYBOY: "He'll appreciate that."

LENNON: "I absolutely don't need it. Let them chase Wings. Just forget
about me. If that's what you want, go after Paul or Mick. I ain't here
for that. If that's not apparent in my past, I'm saying it in black
and green, next to all the tits and asses on page 196. Go play with
the other boys. Don't bother me. Go play with the Rolling Wings."

PLAYBOY: "Do you..."

LENNON: "No, wait a minute. Let's stay with this a second; sometimes I
can't let go of it." (He is on his feet, climbing up the refrigerator)
"Nobody ever said anything about Paul's having a spell on me or my
having one on Paul! They never thought that was abnormal in those
days, two guys together, or four guys together! Why didn't they ever
say, 'How come those guys don't split up? I mean, what's going on
backstage? What is this Paul and John business? How can they be
together so long?' We spent more time together in the early days than
John and Yoko: the four of us sleeping in the same room, practically
in the same bed, in the same truck, living together night and day,
eating, shitting and pissing together! All right? Doing everything
together! Nobody said a damn thing about being under a spell. Maybe
they said we were under the spell of Brian Epstein or George Martin."
(the Beatles' first manager and producer, respectively) "There's
always somebody who has to be doing something to you. You know,
they're congratulating the Stones on being together 112 years.
Whoooopee! At least Charlie and Bill still got their families. In the
Eighties, they'll be asking, 'Why are those guys still together? Can't
they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded by a
gang? Is the little leader scared somebody's gonna knife him in the
back?' That's gonna be the question. That's-a-gonna be the question!
They're gonna look back at the Beatles and the Stones and all those
guys as relics. The days when those bands were just all men will be on
the newsreels, you know. They will be showing pictures of the guy with
lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black
make-up on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That's gonna be the joke
in the future, not a couple singing together or living and working
together. It's all right when you're 16, 17, 18 to have male
companions and idols, OK? It's tribal and it's gang and it's fine. But
when it continues and you're still doing it when you're 40, that means
you're still 16 in the head."

PLAYBOY: "Let's start at the beginning. Tell us the story of how the
wondrous mystic prince and the exotic Oriental dragon lady met."

LENNON: "It was in 1966 in England. I'd been told about this
'event'... this Japanese avant-garde artist coming from America. I was
looking around the gallery and I saw this ladder and climbed up and
got a look in this spyglass on the top of the ladder... you feel like
a fool... and it just said, 'Yes.' Now, at the time, all the
avant-garde was smash the piano with a hammer and break the sculpture
and anti-, anti-, anti-, anti-, anti. It was all boring negative crap,
you know. And just that Yes made me stay in a gallery full of apples
and nails. There was a sign that said, Hammer A Nail In, so I said,
'Can I hammer a nail in?' But Yoko said no, because the show wasn't
opening until the next day. But the owner came up and whispered to
her, 'Let him hammer a nail in. You know, he's a millionaire. He might
buy it.' And so there was this little conference, and finally she
said, 'OK, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings.' So smartass
says, 'Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an
imaginary nail in.' And that's when we really met. That's when we
locked eyes and she got it and I got it and, as they say in all the
interviews we do, the rest is history."

PLAYBOY: "What happened next?"

LENNON: "Of course, I was a Beatle, but things had begun to change. In
1966, just before we met, I went to Almeria, Spain, to make the movie
'How I Won the War.' It did me a lot of good to get away. I was there
six weeks. I wrote 'Strawberry Fields Forever' there, by the way. It
gave me time to think on my own, away from the others. From then on, I
was looking for somewhere to go, but I didn't have the nerve to really
step out on the boat by myself and push it off. But when I fell in
love with Yoko, I knew, My God, this is different from anything I've
ever known. This is something other. This is more than a hit record,
more than gold, more than everything. It is indescribable."

PLAYBOY: "Were falling in love with Yoko and wanting to leave the
Beatles connected?"

LENNON: "As I said, I had already begun to want to leave, but when I
met Yoko is like when you meet your first woman. You leave the guys at
the bar. You don't go play football anymore. You don't go play snooker
or billiards. Maybe some guys do it on Friday night or something, but
once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever
other than being old school friends. 'Those wedding bells are breaking
up that old gang of mine.' We got married three years later, in 1969.
That was the end of the boys. And it just so happened that the boys
were well known and weren't just local guys at the bar. Everybody got
so upset over it. There was a lot of shit thrown at us. A lot of
hateful stuff."

ONO: "Even now, I just read that Paul said, 'I understand that he
wants to be with her, but why does he have to be with her all the
time?'"

LENNON: "Yoko, do you still have to carry that cross? That was years
ago."

ONO: "No, no, no. He said it recently. I mean, what happened with John
is like, I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked and suddenly
the next morning, I see these three in-laws, standing there."

LENNON: "I've always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul's
'Get Back.' When we were in the studio recording it, every time he
sang the line 'Get back to where you once belonged,' he'd look at
Yoko."

PLAYBOY: "Are you kidding?"

LENNON: "No. But maybe he'll say I'm paranoid."

(the next portion of the interview took place with Lennon alone)

PLAYBOY: "This may be the time to talk about those 'in-laws,' as Yoko
put it. John, you've been asked this a thousand times, but why is it
so unthinkable that the Beatles might get back together to make some
music?"

LENNON: "Do you want to go back to high school? Why should I go back
ten years to provide an illusion for you that I know does not exist?
It cannot exist."

PLAYBOY: "Then forget the illusion. What about just to make some great
music again? Do you acknowledge that the Beatles made great music?"

LENNON: "Why should the Beatles give more? Didn't they give everything
on God's earth for ten years? Didn't they give themselves? You're like
the typical sort of love-hate fan who says, 'Thank you for everything
you did for us in the Sixties... would you just give me another shot?
Just one more miracle?'"

PLAYBOY: "We're not talking about miracles... just good music."

LENNON: "When Rodgers worked with Hart and then worked with
Hammerstein, do you think he should have stayed with one instead of
working with the other? Should Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis have stayed
together because I used to like them together? What is this game of
doing things because other people want it? The whole Beatle idea was
to do what you want, right? To take your own responsibility."

PLAYBOY: "Alright, but get back to the music itself. You don't agree
that the Beatles created the best rock 'n roll that's been produced?"

LENNON: "I don't. The Beatles, you see... I'm too involved in them
artistically. I cannot see them objectively. I cannot listen to them
objectively. I'm dissatisfied with every record the Beatles ever
fucking made. There ain't one of them I wouldn't remake... including
all the Beatles records and all my individual ones. So I cannot
possibly give you an assessment of what the Beatles are. When I was a
Beatle, I thought we were the best fucking group in the god-damned
world. And believing that is what made us what we were... whether we
call it the best rock 'n roll group or the best pop group or whatever.
But you play me those tracks today and I want to remake every damn one
of them. There's not a single one... I heard 'Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds' on the radio last night. It's abysmal, you know. The track
is just terrible. I mean, it's great, but it wasn't made right, know
what I mean? But that's the artistic trip, isn't it? That's why you
keep going. But to get back to your original question about the
Beatles and their music, the answer is that we did some good stuff and
we did some bad stuff."

PLAYBOY: "Many people feel that none of the songs Paul has done alone
match the songs he did as a Beatle. Do you honestly feel that any of
your songs on the Plastic Ono Band records will have the lasting
imprint of 'Eleanor Rigby' or 'Strawberry Fields'?"

LENNON: "'Imagine,' 'Love' and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up
to any song that was written when I was a Beatle. Now, it may take you
20 or 30 years to appreciate that, but the fact is, if you check those
songs out, you will see that it is as good as any fucking stuff that
was ever done."

PLAYBOY: "It seems as if you're trying to say to the world, 'We were
just a good band making some good music,' while a lot of the rest of
the world is saying, 'It wasn't just some good music, it was the
best.'"

LENNON: "Well, if it was the best, so what?"

PLAYBOY: "So..."

LENNON: "It can never be again! Everyone always talks about a good
thing coming to an end, as if life was over. But I'll be 40 when this
interview comes out. Paul is 38. Elton John, Bob Dylan... we're all
relatively young people. The game isn't over yet. Everyone talks in
terms of the last record or the last Beatle concert... but, God
willing, there are another 40 years of productivity to go. I'm not
judging whether 'I am the Walrus' is better or worse than 'Imagine.'
It is for others to judge. I am doing it. I do. I don't stand back and
judge... I do."

PLAYBOY: "You keep saying you don't want to go back ten years, that
too much has changed. Don't you ever feel it would be interesting...
never mind cosmic, just interesting... to get together, with all your
new experiences, and cross your talents?"

LENNON: "Wouldn't it be interesting to take Elvis back to his Sun
Records period? I don't know. But I'm content to listen to his Sun
Records. I don't want to dig him up out of the grave. The Beatles
don't exist and can never exist again. John Lennon, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison and Richard Starkey could put on a concert... but it
can never be the Beatles singing 'Strawberry Fields' or 'I Am The
Walrus' again, because we are not in our 20s. We cannot be that again,
nor can the people who are listening."

PLAYBOY: "But aren't you the one who is making it too important? What
if it were just nostalgic fun? A high school reunion?"

LENNON: "I never went to high school reunions. My thing is, Out of
sight, out of mind. That's my attitude toward life. So I don't have
any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch
as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the
only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in
yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am
only interested in what I am doing now."

PLAYBOY: "What about the people of your generation, the ones who feel
a certain kind of music and spirit died when the Beatles broke up?"

LENNON: "If they didn't understand the Beatles and the Sixties then,
what the fuck could we do for them now? Do we have to divide the fish
and the loaves for the multitudes again? Do we have to get crucified
again? Do we have to do the walking on water again because a whole
pile of dummies didn't see it the first time, or didn't believe it
when they saw it? You know, that's what they're asking: 'Get off the
cross. I didn't understand the first bit yet. Can you do that again?'
No way. You can never go home. It doesn't exist."

PLAYBOY: "Do you find that the clamor for a Beatles reunion has died
down?"

LENNON: "Well, I heard some Beatles stuff on the radio the other day
and I heard 'Green Onion' ...no, 'Glass Onion,' I don't even know my
own songs! I listened to it because it was a rare track..."

PLAYBOY: "That was the one that contributed to the 'Paul McCartney is
dead' uproar because of the lyric 'The walrus is Paul.'"

LENNON: "Yeah. That line was a joke, you know. That line was put in
partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko, and I
knew I was finally high and dry. In a perverse way, I was sort of
saying to Paul, 'Here, have this crumb, have this illusion, have this
stroke... because I'm leaving you.' Anyway, it's a song they don't
usually play. When a radio station has a Beatles weekend, they usually
play the same ten songs... 'A Hard Day's Night,' 'Help!,' 'Yesterday,'
'Something,' 'Let It Be' ...you know, there's all that wealth of
material, but we hear only ten songs. So the deejay says, 'I want to
thank John, Paul, George and Ringo for not getting back together and
spoiling a good thing.' I thought it was a good sign. Maybe people are
catching on."

PLAYBOY: "Aside from the millions you've been offered for a reunion
concert, how did you feel about producer Lorne Michaels' generous
offer of $3200 for appearing together on 'Saturday Night Live' a few
years ago?"

LENNON: "Oh, yeah. Paul and I were together watching that show. He was
visiting us at our place in the Dakota. We were watching it and almost
went down to the studio, just as a gag. We nearly got into a cab, but
we were actually too tired."

PLAYBOY: "How did you and Paul happen to be watching TV together?"

LENNON: "That was a period when Paul just kept turning up at our door
with a guitar. I would let him in, but finally I said to him, 'Please
call before you come over. It's not 1956 and turning up at the door
isn't the same anymore. You know, just give me a ring.' He was upset
by that, but I didn't mean it badly. I just meant that I was taking
care of a baby all day and some guy turns up at the door... But,
anyway, back on that night, he and Linda walked in and he and I were
just sitting there, watching the show, and we went, 'Ha-ha, wouldn't
it be funny if we went down?' but we didn't."

PLAYBOY: "Was that the last time you saw Paul?"

LENNON: "Yes, but I didn't mean it like that."

PLAYBOY: "We're asking because there's always a lot of speculation
about whether the Fab Four are dreaded enemies or the best of
friends."

LENNON: "We're neither. I haven't seen any of the Beatles for I don't
know how much time. Somebody asked me what I thought of Paul's last
album and I made some remark like, I thought he was depressed and sad.
But then I realized I hadn't listened to the whole damn thing. I heard
one track... the hit 'Coming Up,' which I thought was a good piece of
work. Then I heard something else that sounded like he was depressed.
But I don't follow their work. I don't follow Wings, you know. I don't
give a shit what Wings is doing, or what George's new album is doing,
or what Ringo is doing. I'm not interested, no more than I am in what
Elton John or Bob Dylan is doing. It's not callousness, it's just that
I'm too busy living my own life to be following what other people are
doing, whether they're the Beatles or guys I went to college with or
people I had intense relationships with before I met the Beatles."

PLAYBOY: "Besides 'Coming Up,' what do you think of Paul's work since
he left the Beatles?"

LENNON: "I kind of admire the way Paul started back from scratch,
forming a new band and playing in small dance halls, because that's
what he wanted to do with the Beatles... he wanted us to go back to
the dance halls and experience that again. But I didn't. That was one
of the problems, in a way, that he wanted to relive it all or
something... I don't know what it was. But I kind of admire the way he
got off his pedestal. Now he's back on it again, but I mean, he did
what he wanted to do. That's fine, but it's just not what I wanted to
do."

PLAYBOY: "What about the music?"

LENNON: "'The Long and Winding Road' was the last gasp from him.
Although I really haven't listened."

PLAYBOY: "You say you haven't listened to Paul's work and haven't
really talked to him since that night in your apartment..."

LENNON: "Really talked to him, no, that's the operative word. I
haven't really talked to him in ten years. Because I haven't spent
time with him. I've been doing other things and so has he. You know,
he's got 25 kids and about 20,000,000 records out. How can he spend
time talking? He's always working."

PLAYBOY: "Then let's talk about the work you did together. Generally
speaking, what did each of you contribute to the Lennon-McCartney
songwriting team?"

LENNON: "Well, you could say that he provided a lightness, an
optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, a
certain bluesy edge. There was a period when I thought I didn't write
melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting
rock 'n roll. But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs...
'In My Life' or some of the early stuff... 'This Boy.' I was writing
melody with the best of them. Paul had a lot of training, could play a
lot of instruments. He'd say, 'Well, why don't you change that there?
You've done that note 50 times in the song.' You know, I'll grab a
note and ram it home. Then again, I'd be the one to figure out where
to go with a song... a story that Paul would start. In a lot of the
songs, my stuff is the middle-eight, the bridge."

PLAYBOY: "For example?"

LENNON: "Take 'Michelle.' Paul and I were staying somewhere, and he
walked in and hummed the first few bars, with the words, you know--
(sings verse of 'Michelle') and he says, 'Where do I go from here?'
I'd been listening to blues singer Nina Simone, who did something like
'I love you!' in one of her songs and that made me think of the
middle-eight for 'Michelle.' (sings) 'I love you, I love you, I lo-ove
you...'"

PLAYBOY: "What was the difference in terms of lyrics?"

LENNON: "I always had an easier time with lyrics, though Paul is quite
a capable lyricist who doesn't think he is. So he doesn't go for it.
Rather than face the problem, he would avoid it. 'Hey Jude' is a damn
good set of lyrics. I made no contribution to the lyrics there. And a
couple of lines he has come up with show indications of a good
lyricist. But he just hasn't taken it anywhere. Still, in the early
days, we didn't care about lyrics as long as the song had some vague
theme... she loves you, he loves him, they all love each other. It was
the hook, line and sound we were going for. That's still my attitude,
but I can't leave lyrics alone. I have to make them make sense apart
from the songs."

PLAYBOY: "What's an example of a lyric you and Paul worked on
together?"

LENNON: "In 'We Can Work It Out,' Paul did the first half, I did the
middle-eight. But you've got Paul writing, 'We can work it out/We can
work it out' --real optimistic, y' know, and me, impatient: 'Life is
very short and there's no time/For fussing and fighting, my
friend....'"

PLAYBOY: "Paul tells the story and John philosophizes."

LENNON: "Sure. Well, I was always like that, you know. I was like that
before the Beatles and after the Beatles. I always asked why people
did things and why society was like it was. I didn't just accept it
for what it was apparently doing. I always looked below the surface."

PLAYBOY: "When you talk about working together on a single lyric like
'We Can Work It Out,' it suggests that you and Paul worked a lot more
closely than you've admitted in the past. Haven't you said that you
wrote most of your songs separately, despite putting both of your
names on them?"

LENNON: "Yeah, I was lying. (laughs) It was when I felt resentful, so
I felt that we did everything apart. But, actually, a lot of the songs
we did eyeball to eyeball."

PLAYBOY: "But many of them were done apart, weren't they?

LENNON: "Yeah. 'Sgt. Pepper' was Paul's idea, and I remember he worked
on it a lot and suddenly called me to go into the studio, said it was
time to write some songs. On 'Pepper,' under the pressure of only ten
days, I managed to come up with 'Lucy in the Sky' and 'Day in the
Life.' We weren't communicating enough, you see. And later on, that's
why I got resentful about all that stuff. But now I understand that it
was just the same competitive game going on."

PLAYBOY: "But the competitive game was good for you, wasn't it?"

LENNON: "In the early days. We'd make a record in 12 hours or
something; they would want a single every three months and we'd have
to write it in a hotel room or in a van. So the cooperation was
functional as well as musical."

PLAYBOY: "Don't you think that cooperation, that magic between you, is
something you've missed in your work since?"

LENNON: "I never actually felt a loss. I don't want it to sound
negative, like I didn't need Paul, because when he was there,
obviously, it worked. But I can't... it's easier to say what I gave to
him than what he gave to me. And he'd say the same."

PLAYBOY: "Just a quick aside, but while we're on the subject of lyrics
and your resentment of Paul, what made you write 'How Do You Sleep?,'
which contains lyrics such as 'Those freaks was right when they said
you was dead' and 'The only thing you done was Yesterday/And since
you've gone, you're just Another Day'?"

LENNON: (smiles) "You know, I wasn't really feeling that vicious at
the time. But I was using my resentment toward Paul to create a song,
let's put it that way. He saw that it pointedly refers to him, and
people kept hounding him about it. But, you know, there were a few
digs on his album before mine. He's so obscure other people didn't
notice them, but I heard them. I thought, Well, I'm not obscure, I
just get right down to the nitty-gritty. So he'd done it his way and I
did it mine. But as to the line you quoted, yeah, I think Paul died
creatively, in a way."

PLAYBOY: "That's what we were getting at: You say that what you've
done since the Beatles stands up well, but isn't it possible that with
all of you, it's been a case of the creative whole being greater than
the parts?"

LENNON: "I don't know whether this will gel for you: When the Beatles
played in America for the first time, they played pure craftsmanship.
Meaning they were already old hands. The jism had gone out of the
performances a long time ago. In the same respect, the songwriting
creativity had left Paul and me in the mid-Sixties. When we wrote
together in the early days, it was like the beginning of a
relationship. Lots of energy. In the 'Sgt. Pepper'- 'Abbey Road'
period, the relationship had matured. Maybe had we gone on together,
more interesting things would have come, but it couldn't have been the
same."

PLAYBOY: "Let's move on to Ringo. What's your opinion of him
musically?"

LENNON: "Ringo was a star in his own right in Liverpool before we even
met. He was a professional drummer who sang and performed and had
Ringo Starr-time and he was in one of the top groups in Britain but
especially in Liverpool before we even had a drummer. So Ringo's
talent would have come out one way or the other as something or other.
I don't know what he would have ended up as, but whatever that spark
is in Ringo that we all know but can't put our finger on... whether it
is acting, drumming or singing I don't know... there is something in
him that is projectable and he would have surfaced with or without the
Beatles. Ringo is a damn good drummer. He is not technically good, but
I think Ringo's drumming is underrated the same way Paul's bass
playing is underrated. Paul was one of the most innovative bass
players ever. And half the stuff that is going on now is directly
ripped off from his Beatles period. He is an egomaniac about
everything else about himself, but his bass playing he was always a
bit coy about. I think Paul and Ringo stand up with any of the rock
musicians. Not technically great... none of us are technical
musicians. None of us could read music. None of us can write it. But
as pure musicians, as inspired humans to make the noise, they are as
good as anybody."

PLAYBOY: "How about George's solo music?"

LENNON: "I think 'All Things Must Pass' was all right. It just went on
too long."

PLAYBOY: "How did you feel about the lawsuit George lost that claimed
the music to 'My Sweet Lord' is a rip-off of the Shirelles' hit 'He's
So Fine?'"

LENNON: "Well, he walked right into it. He knew what he was doing."

PLAYBOY: "Are you saying he consciously plagiarized the song?"

LENNON: "He must have known, you know. He's smarter than that. It's
irrelevant, actually... only on a monetary level does it matter. He
could have changed a couple of bars in that song and nobody could ever
have touched him, but he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he
thought God would just sort of let him off."

(At presstime, the court has found Harrison guilty of 'subconscious'
plagiarism but has not yet ruled on damages.)

PLAYBOY: "You actually haven't mentioned George much in this
interview."

LENNON: "Well, I was hurt by George's book, 'I, Me, Mine' ...so this
message will go to him. He put a book out privately on his life that,
by glaring omission, says that my influence on his life is absolutely
zilch and nil. In his book, which is purportedly this clarity of
vision of his influence on each song he wrote, he remembers every
two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in
the book."

PLAYBOY: "Why?"

LENNON: "Because George's relationship with me was one of young
follower and older guy. He's three or four years younger than me. It's
a love/hate relationship and I think George still bears resentment
toward me for being a daddy who left home. He would not agree with
this, but that's my feeling about it. I was just hurt. I was just left
out, as if I didn't exist. I don't want to be that egomaniacal, but he
was like a disciple of mine when we started. I was already an art
student when Paul and George were still in grammar school."
(equivalent to high school in the U.S.) "There is a vast difference
between being in high school and being in college and I was already in
college and already had sexual relationships, already drank and did a
lot of things like that. When George was a kid, he used to follow me
and my first girlfriend, Cynthia.. who became my wife... around. We'd
come out of art school and he'd be hovering around like those kids at
the gate of the Dakota now. I remember the day he called to ask for
help on 'Taxman,' one of his bigger songs. I threw in a few one-liners
to help the song along, because that's what he asked for. He came to
me because he couldn't go to Paul, because Paul wouldn't have helped
him at that period. I didn't want to do it. I thought, Oh, no, don't
tell me I have to work on George's stuff. It's enough doing my own and
Paul's. But because I loved him and I didn't want to hurt him when he
called me that afternoon and said, 'Will you help me with this song?'
I just sort of bit my tongue and said OK. It had been John and Paul so
long, he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until
then. As a singer, we allowed him only one track on each album. If you
listen to the Beatles' first albums, the English versions, he gets a
single track. The songs he and Ringo sang at first were the songs that
used to be part of my repertoire in the dance halls. I used to pick
songs for them from my repertoire... the easier ones to sing. So I am
slightly resentful of George's book. But don't get me wrong. I still
love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and
Ringo go on."

PLAYBOY: "Didn't all four Beatles work on a song you wrote for Ringo
in 1973?"

LENNON: "'I'm the Greatest.' It was the Muhammad Ali line, of course.
It was perfect for Ringo to sing. If I said, 'I'm the greatest,'
they'd all take it so seriously. No one would get upset with Ringo
singing it."

PLAYBOY: "Did you enjoy playing with George and Ringo again?"

LENNON: "Yeah, except when George and Billy Preston started saying,
'Let's form a group. Let's form a group.' I was embarrassed when
George kept asking me. He was just enjoying the session and the spirit
was very good, but I was with Yoko, you know. We took time out from
what we were doing. The very fact that they would imagine I would form
a male group without Yoko! It was still in their minds..."

PLAYBOY: "Just to finish your favorite subject, what about the
suggestion that the four of you put aside your personal feelings and
regroup to give a mammoth concert for charity, some sort of giant
benefit?"

LENNON: "I don't want to have anything to do with benefits. I have
been benefited to death."

PLAYBOY: "Why?"

LENNON: "Because they're always rip-offs. I haven't performed for
personal gain since 1966, when the Beatles last performed. Every
concert since then, Yoko and I did for specific charities, except for
a Toronto thing that was a rock 'n roll revival. Every one of them was
a mess or a rip-off. So now we give money to who we want. You've heard
of tithing?"

PLAYBOY: "That's when you give away a fixed percentage of your
income."

LENNON: "Right. I am just going to do it privately. I am not going to
get locked into that business of saving the world on stage. The show
is always a mess and the artist always comes off badly."

PLAYBOY: "What about the Bangladesh concert, in which George
and other people such as Dylan performed?"

LENNON: "Bangladesh was ca-ca."

PLAYBOY: "You mean because of all the questions that were raised about
where the money went?"

LENNON: "Yeah, right. I can't even talk about it, because it's still a
problem. You'll have to check with Mother (Yoko) because she knows the
ins and outs of it, I don't. But it's all a rip-off. So forget about
it. All of you who are reading this, don't bother sending me all that
garbage about, 'Just come and save the Indians, come and save the
blacks, come and save the war veterans,' Anybody I want to save will
be helped through our tithing, which is ten percent of whatever we
earn."

PLAYBOY: "But that doesn't compare with what one promoter, Sid
Bernstein, said you could raise by giving a world-wide televised
concert... playing separately, as individuals, or together, as the
Beatles. He estimated you could raise over $200,000,000 in one day."

LENNON: "That was a commercial for Sid Bernstein written with Jewish
schmaltz and showbiz and tears, dropping on one knee. It was Al
Jolson. OK. So I don't buy that. OK?"

PLAYBOY: "But the fact is, $200,000,000 to a poverty-stricken country
in South America..."

LENNON: "Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give
$200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions
into places like that. It doesn't mean a damn thing. After they've
eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the
$200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles.
You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain.
There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our
lives to one world concert tour, and I'm not ready for it. Not in this
lifetime, anyway."

(Ono rejoins the conversation)

PLAYBOY: "On the subject of your own wealth, the New York Post
recently said you admitted to being worth over $150,000,000 and..."

LENNON: "We never admitted anything."

PLAYBOY: "The Post said you had."

LENNON: "What the Post says... OK, so we are rich; so what?"

PLAYBOY: "The question is, How does that jibe with your political
philosophies? You're supposed to be socialists, aren't you?"

LENNON: "In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You
are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement.
Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I
am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was. That meant
I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked
after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and
I wanted to be rich. So what the hell... if that's a paradox, then I'm
a socialist. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about
money. That's why I lost it, either by giving it away or by allowing
myself to be screwed by so-called managers."

PLAYBOY: "Whatever your politics, you've played the capitalist game
very well, parlaying your Beatles royalties into real estate,
livestock..."

ONO: "There is no denying that we are still living in the capitalist
world. I think that in order to survive and to change the world, you
have to take care of yourself first. You have to survive yourself. I
used to say to myself, I am the only socialist living here. (laughs) I
don't have a penny. It is all John's, so I'm clean. But I was using
his money and I had to face that hypocrisy. I used to think that money
was obscene, that the artists didn't have to think about money. But to
change society, there are two ways to go: through violence or the
power of money within the system. A lot of people in the Sixties went
underground and were involved in bombings and other violence. But that
is not the way, definitely not for me. So to change the system... even
if you are going to become a mayor or something... you need money."

PLAYBOY: "To what extent do you play the game without getting caught
up in it... money for the sake of money, in other words?"

ONO: "There is a limit. It would probably be parallel to our level of
security. Do you know what I mean? I mean the emotional-security level
as well."

PLAYBOY: "Has it reached that level yet?"

ONO: "No, not yet. I don't know. It might have."

PLAYBOY: "You mean with $150,000,000? Is that an accurate estimate?"

ONO: "I don't know what we have. It becomes so complex that you need
to have ten accountants working for two years to find out what you
have. But let's say that we feel more comfortable now."

PLAYBOY: "How have you chosen to invest your money?"

ONO: "To make money, you have to spend money. But if you are going to
make money, you have to make it with love. I love Egyptian art. I make
sure to get all the Egyptian things, not for their value but for their
magic power. Each piece has a certain magic power. Also with houses. I
just buy ones we love, not the ones that people say are good
investments."

PLAYBOY: "The papers have made it sound like you are buying up the
Atlantic Seaboard."

ONO: "If you saw the houses, you would understand. They have become a
good investment, but they are not an investment unless you sell them.
We don't intend to sell. Each house is like a historic landmark and
they're very beautiful."

PLAYBOY: "Do you actually use all the properties?"

ONO: "Most people have the park to go to and run in... the park is a
huge place... but John and I were never able to go to the park
together. So we have to create our own parks, you know."

PLAYBOY: "We heard that you own $60,000,000 worth of dairy cows. Can
that be true?"

ONO: "I don't know. I'm not a calculator. I'm not going by figures.
I'm going by excellence of things."

LENNON: "Sean and I were away for a weekend and Yoko came over to sell
this cow and I was joking about it. We hadn't seen her for days; she
spent all her time on it. But then I read the paper that said she sold
it for a quarter of a million dollars. Only Yoko could sell a cow for
that much." (laughter)

PLAYBOY: "For an artist, your business sense seems remarkable."

ONO: "I was doing it just as a chess game. I love chess. I do
everything like it's a chess game. Not on a Monopoly level... that's a
bit more realistic. Chess is more conceptual."

PLAYBOY: "John, do you really need all those houses around the
country?"

LENNON: "They're good business."

PLAYBOY: "Why does anyone need $150,000,000? Couldn't you be perfectly
content with $100,000,000? Or $1,000,000?"

LENNON: "What would you suggest I do? Give everything away and walk
the streets? The Buddhist says, 'Get rid of the possessions of the
mind.' Walking away from all the money would not accomplish that. It's
like the Beatles. I couldn't walk away from the Beatles. That's one
possession that's still tagging along, right? If I walk away from one
house or 400 houses, I'm not gonna escape it."

PLAYBOY: "How do you escape it?"

LENNON: "It takes time to get rid of all this garbage that I've been
carrying around that was influencing the way I thought and the way I
lived. It had a lot to do with Yoko, showing me that I was still
possessed. I left physically when I fell in love with Yoko, but
mentally it took the last ten years of struggling. I learned
everything from her."

PLAYBOY: "You make it sound like a teacher-pupil relationship."

LENNON: "It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That's what people don't
understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one,
the one who's supposed to know everything, but she's my teacher. She's
taught me everything I fucking know. She was there when I was nowhere,
when I was the nowhere man. She's my Don Juan." (a reference to Carlos
Castaneda's Yaqui Indian teacher) "That's what people don't
understand. I'm married to fucking Don Juan, that's the hardship of
it. Don Juan doesn't have to laugh; Don Juan doesn't have to be
charming; Don Juan just is. And what goes on around Don Juan is
irrelevant to Don Juan."

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, how do you feel about being John's teacher?"

ONO: "Well, he had a lot of experience before he met me, the kind of
experience I never had, so I learned a lot from him, too. It's both
ways. Maybe it's that I have strength, a feminine strength. Because
women develop it... in a relationship, I think women really have the
inner wisdom and they're carrying that while men have sort of the
wisdom to cope with society, since they created it. Men never
developed the inner wisdom; they didn't have time. So most men do rely
on women's inner wisdom, whether they express that or not."

PLAYBOY: "Is Yoko John's guru?"

LENNON: "No, a Don Juan doesn't have a following. A Don Juan isn't in
the newspaper and doesn't have disciples and doesn't proselytize."

PLAYBOY: "How has she taught you?"

LENNON: "When Don Juan said ...when Don Ono said, 'Get out! Because
you're not getting it,' well, it was like being sent into the desert.
And the reason she wouldn't let me back in was because I wasn't ready
to come back in. I had to settle things within myself. When I was
ready to come back in, she let me back in. And that's what I'm living
with."

PLAYBOY: "You're talking about your separation."

LENNON: "Yes. We were separated in the early Seventies. She kicked me
out. Suddenly, I was on a raft alone in the middle of the universe."

PLAYBOY: "What happened?"

LENNON: "Well, at first, I thought, Whoopee, whoopee! You know,
bachelor life! Whoopee! And then I woke up one day and I thought, What
is this? I want to go home! But she wouldn't let me come home. That's
why it was 18 months apart instead of six months. We were talking all
the time on the phone and I would say, 'I don't like this, I'm getting
in trouble and I'd like to come home, please.' And she would say,
'You're not ready to come home.' So what do you say? OK, back to the
bottle."

PLAYBOY: "What did she mean, you weren't ready?"

LENNON: "She has her ways. Whether they be mystical or practical. When
she said it's not ready, it ain't ready."

PLAYBOY: "Back to the bottle?"

LENNON: "I was just trying to hide what I felt in the bottle. I was
just insane. It was the lost weekend that lasted 18 months. I've never
drunk so much in my life. I tried to drown myself in the bottle and I
was with the heaviest drinkers in the business."

PLAYBOY: "Such as?"

LENNON: "Such as Harry Nilsson, Bobby Keyes, Keith Moon. We couldn't
pull ourselves out. We were trying to kill ourselves. I think Harry
might still be trying, poor bugger... God bless you, Harry, wherever
you are... but, Jesus, you know, I had to get away from that, because
somebody was going to die. Well, Keith did. It was like, who's going
to die first? Unfortunately, Keith was the one."

PLAYBOY: "Why the self-destruction?"

LENNON: "For me, it was because of being apart. I couldn't stand it.
They had their own reasons, and it was, Let's all drown ourselves
together. From where I was sitting, it looked like that. Let's kill
ourselves but do it like Errol Flynn, you know, the macho, male way.
It's embarrassing for me to think about that period, because I made a
big fool of myself... but maybe it was a good lesson for me. I wrote
'Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out' during that time. That's
how I felt. It exactly expresses the whole period. For some reason, I
always imagined Sinatra singing that one. I don't know why. It's kind
of a Sinatraesque song, really. He would do a perfect job with it. Are
you listening, Frank? You need a song that isn't a piece of nothing.
Here's the one for you, the horn arrangement and everything's made for
you. But don't ask me to produce it."

PLAYBOY: "That must have been the time the papers came out with
reports about Lennon running around town with a Tampax on his head."

LENNON: "The stories were all so exaggerated, but... We were all in a
restaurant, drinking, not eating, as usual at those gatherings, and I
happened to go take a pee and there was a brand-new fresh Kotex, not
Tampax, on the toilet. You know the old trick where you put a penny on
your forehead and it sticks? I was a little high and I just picked it
up and slapped it on and it stayed, you see. I walked out of the
bathroom and I had a Kotex on my head. Big deal. Everybody went
'Ha-ha-ha' and it fell off, but the press blew it up."

PLAYBOY: "Why did you kick John out, Yoko?"

ONO: "There were many things. I'm what I call a 'moving on' kind of
girl; there's a song on our new album about it. Rather than deal with
problems in relationships, I've always moved on. That's why I'm one of
the very few survivors as a woman, you know. Women tend to be more
into men usually, but I wasn't..."

LENNON: "Yoko looks upon men as assistants... Of varying degrees of
intimacy, but basically assistants. And this one's going to take a
pee." (he exits)

ONO: "I have no comment on that. But when I met John, women to him
were basically people around who were serving him. He had to open
himself up and face me... and I had to see what he was going through.
But I thought I had to move on again, because I was suffering being
with John."

PLAYBOY: "Why?"

ONO: "The pressure from the public, being the one who broke up the
Beatles and who made it impossible for them to get back together. My
artwork suffered, too. I thought I wanted to be free from being Mrs.
Lennon, so I thought it would be a good idea for him to go to L.A. and
leave me alone for a while. I had put up with it for many years. Even
early on, when John was a Beatle, we stayed in a room and John and I
were in bed and the door was closed and all that, but we didn't lock
the door and one of the Beatle assistants just walked in and talked to
him as if I weren't there. It was mind-blowing. I was invisible. The
people around John saw me as a terrible threat. I mean, I heard there
were plans to kill me. Not the Beatles but the people around them."

PLAYBOY: "How did that news affect you?"

ONO: "The society doesn't understand that the woman can be castrated,
too. I felt castrated. Before, I was doing all right, thank you. My
work might not have been selling much, I might have been poorer, but I
had my pride. But the most humiliating thing is to be looked at as a
parasite."

(Lennon rejoins the conversation)

LENNON: "When Yoko and I started doing stuff together, we would hold
press conferences and announce our whatevers... we're going to wear
bags or whatever. And before this one press conference, one Beatle
assistant in the upper echelon of Beatle assistants leaned over to
Yoko and said, You know, you don't have to work. You've got enough
money, now that you're Mrs. Lennon.' And when she complained to me
about it, I couldn't understand what she was talking about. 'But this
guy,' I'd say, 'He's just good old Charley, or whatever. He's been
with us 20 years...' The same kind of thing happened in the studio.
She would say to an engineer, 'I'd like a little more treble, a little
more bass,' or 'There's too much of whatever you're putting on,' and
they'd look at me and say, 'What did you say, John?' Those days I
didn't even notice it myself. Now I know what she's talking about. In
Japan, when I ask for a cup of tea in Japanese, they look at Yoko and
ask, 'He wants a cup of tea?' in Japanese."

ONO: "So a good few years of that kind of thing emasculates you. I had
always been more macho than most guys I was with, in a sense. I had
always been the breadwinner, because I always wanted to have the
freedom and the control. Suddenly, I'm with somebody I can't possibly
compete with on a level of earnings. Finally, I couldn't take it... or
I decided not to take it any longer. I would have had the same
difficulty even if I hadn't gotten involved with, ah...."

LENNON: "John-- John is the name."

ONO: "With John. But John wasn't just John. He was also his group and
the people around them. When I say John, it's not just John..."

LENNON: "That's John. J-O-H-N. From Johan, I believe."

PLAYBOY: "So you made him leave?"

ONO: "Yes."

LENNON: She don't suffer fools gladly, even if she's married to him."

PLAYBOY: "How did you finally get back together?"

ONO: "It slowly started to dawn on me that John was not the trouble at
all. John was a fine person. It was society that had become too much.
We laugh about it now, but we started dating again. I wanted to be
sure. I'm thankful to John's intelligence..."

LENNON: "Now, get that, editors... you got that word?"

ONO: "...that he was intelligent enough to know this was the only way
that we could save our marriage, not because we didn't love each other
but because it was getting too much for me. Nothing would have changed
if I had come back as Mrs. Lennon again."

PLAYBOY: "What did change?"

ONO: "It was good for me to do the business and regain my pride about
what I could do. And it was good to know what he needed, the role
reversal that was so good for him."

LENNON: "And we learned that it's better for the family if we are both
working for the family, she doing the business and me playing mother
and wife. We reordered our priorities. The number-one priority is her
and the family. Everything else revolves around that."

ONO: "It's a hard realization. These days, the society prefers single
people. The encouragements are to divorce or separate or be single or
gay... whatever. Corporations want singles-- they work harder if they
don't have family ties. They don't have to worry about being home in
the evenings or on the weekends. There's not much room for emotions
about family or personal relationships. You know, the whole thing they
say to women approaching 30 that if you don't have a baby in the next
few years, you're going to be in trouble, you'll never be a mother, so
you'll never be fulfilled in that way and..."

LENNON: "Only Yoko was 73 when she had Sean."

(laughter)

ONO: "So instead of the society discouraging children, since they are
important for society, it should encourage them. It's the
responsibility of everybody. But it is hard. A woman has to deny what
she has, her womb, if she wants to make it. It seems that only the
privileged classes can have families. Nowadays, maybe it's only the
McCartneys and the Lennons or something."

LENNON: "Everybody else becomes a worker/consumer."

ONO: "And then Big Brother will decide. I hate to use the term Big
Brother..."

LENNON: "Too late. They've got it on tape." (laughs)

ONO: "But, finally, the society..."

LENNON: "Big Sister-- wait till she comes!"

ONO: "The society will do away with the roles of men and women. Babies
will be born in test tubes and incubators..."

LENNON: "Then it's Aldous Huxley."

ONO: "But we don't have to go that way. We don't have to deny any of
our organs, you know."

LENNON: "Some of my best friends are organs."

ONO: "The new album..."

LENNON: "Back to the album, very good."

ONO: "The album fights these things. The messages are sort of
old-fashioned. Family, relationships, children."

PLAYBOY: "The album obviously reflects your new priorities. How have
things gone for you since you made that decision?"

LENNON: "We got back together, decided this was our life, that having
a baby was important to us and that anything else was subsidiary to
that. We worked hard for that child. We went through all hell trying
to have a baby, through many miscarriages and other problems. He is
what they call a love child in truth. Doctors told us we could never
have a child. We almost gave up. 'Well, that's it, then, we can't have
one.' We were told something was wrong with my sperm, that I abused
myself so much in my youth that there was no chance. Yoko was 43, and
so they said, no way. She has had too many miscarriages and when she
was a young girl, there were no pills, so there were lots of abortions
and miscarriages; her stomach must be like Kew Gardens in London. No
way. But this Chinese acupuncturist in San Francisco said, 'You behave
yourself. No drugs, eat well, no drink. You have child in 18 months.'
And we said, 'But the English doctors said...' He said, 'Forget what
they said. You have child.' We had Sean and sent the acupuncturist a
Polaroid of him just before he died, God rest his soul."

PLAYBOY: "Were there any problems because of Yoko's age?"

LENNON: "Not because of her age but because of a screw-up in the
hospital and the fucking price of fame. Somebody had made a
transfusion of the wrong blood type into Yoko. I was there when it
happened, and she starts to go rigid, and then shake, from the pain
and the trauma. I run up to this nurse and say, 'Go get the doctor!'
I'm holding on tight to Yoko while this guy gets to the hospital room.
He walks in, hardly notices that Yoko is going through fucking
convulsions, goes straight for me, smiles, shakes my hand and says,
'I've always wanted to meet you, Mr. Lennon, I always enjoyed your
music.' I start screaming: 'My wife's dying and you wanna talk about
my music!' Christ!"

PLAYBOY: "Now that Sean is almost five, is he conscious of the fact
that his father was a Beatle or have you protected him from your
fame?"

LENNON: "I haven't said anything. Beatles were never mentioned to him.
There was no reason to mention it; we never played Beatle records
around the house, unlike the story that went around that I was sitting
in the kitchen for the past five years, playing Beatle records and
reliving my past like some kind of Howard Hughes. He did see 'Yellow
Submarine' at a friend's, so I had to explain what a cartoon of me was
doing in a movie."

PLAYBOY: "Does he have an awareness of the Beatles?"

LENNON: "He doesn't differentiate between the Beatles and Daddy and
Mommy. He thinks Yoko was a Beatle, too. I don't have Beatle records
on the jukebox he listens to. He's more exposed to early rock 'n roll.
He's into 'Hound Dog.' He thinks it's about hunting. Sean's not going
to public school, by the way. We feel he can learn the three Rs when
he wants to... or when the law says he has to, I suppose. I'm not
going to fight it. Otherwise, there's no reason for him to be learning
to sit still. I can't see any reason for it. Sean now has plenty of
child companionship, which everybody says is important, but he also is
with adults a lot. He's adjusted to both. The reason why kids are
crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them
up. Everybody's too scared to deal with children all the time, so we
reject them and send them away and torture them. The ones who survive
are the conformists. Their bodies are cut to the size of the suits...
the ones we label good. The ones who don't fit the suits either are
put in mental homes or become artists."

PLAYBOY: "Your son, Julian, from your first marriage must be in his
teens. Have you seen him over the years?"

LENNON: "Well, Cyn got possession, or whatever you call it. I got
rights to see him on his holidays and all that business, and at least
there's an open line still going. It's not the best relationship
between father and son, but it is there. He's 17 now. Julian and I
will have a relationship in the future. Over the years, he's been able
to see through the Beatle image and to see through the image that his
mother will have given him, subconsciously or consciously. He's
interested in girls and autobikes now. I'm just sort of a figure in
the sky, but he's obliged to communicate with me, even when he
probably doesn't want to."

PLAYBOY: "You're being very honest about your feelings toward him to
the point of saying that Sean is your first child. Are you concerned
about hurting him?"

LENNON: "I'm not going to lie to Julian. Ninety percent of the people
on this planet, especially in the West, were born out of a bottle of
whiskey on a Saturday night, and there was no intent to have children.
So 90 percent of us... that includes everybody... were accidents. I
don't know anybody who was a planned child. All of us were
Saturday-night specials. Julian is in the majority, along with me and
everybody else. Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the
difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my
son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't
have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me and he always
will."

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, your relationship with your daughter has been much
rockier."

ONO: "I lost Kyoko when she was about five. I was sort of an offbeat
mother, but we had very good communication. I wasn't particularly
taking care of her, but she was always with me... onstage or at
gallery shows, whatever. When she was not even a year old, I took her
onstage as an instrument-- an uncontrollable instrument, you know. My
communication with her was on the level of sharing conversation and
doing things. She was closer to my ex-husband because of that."

PLAYBOY: "What happened when she was five?"

ONO: "John and I got together and I separated from my ex-husband."
(Tony Cox) "He took Kyoko away. It became a case of parent kidnapping
and we tried to get her back."

LENNON: "It was a classic case of men being macho. It turned into me
and Allen Klein trying to dominate Tony Cox. Tony's attitude was, 'You
got my wife, but you won't get my child.' In this battle, Yoko and the
child were absolutely forgotten. I've always felt bad about it. It
became a case of the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral: Cox fled to the
hills and hid out and the sheriff and I tracked him down. First we won
custody in court. Yoko didn't want to go to court, but the men, Klein
and I, did it anyway."

ONO: "Allen called up one day, saying I won the court case. He gave me
a piece of paper. I said, 'What is this piece of paper? Is this what I
won? I don't have my child.' I knew that taking them to court would
frighten them and, of course, it did frighten them. So Tony vanished.
He was very strong, thinking that the capitalists, with their money
and lawyers and detectives, were pursuing him. It made him stronger."

LENNON: "We chased him all over the world. God knows where he went. So
if you're reading this, Tony, let's grow up about it. It's gone. We
don't want to chase you anymore, because we've done enough damage."

ONO: "We also had private detectives chasing Kyoko, which I thought
was a bad trip, too. One guy came to report, 'It was great! We almost
had them. We were just behind them in a car, but they sped up and got
away.' I went hysterical. 'What do you mean you almost got them? We
are talking about my child!'"

LENNON: "It was like we were after an escaped convict."

PLAYBOY: "Were you so persistent because you felt you were better for
Kyoko?"

LENNON: "Yoko got steamed into a guilt thing that if she wasn't
attacking them with detectives and police and the FBI, then she wasn't
a good mother looking for her baby. She kept saying, 'Leave them
alone, leave them alone,' but they said you can't do that."

ONO: "For me, it was like they just disappeared from my life. Part of
me left with them."

PLAYBOY: "How old is she now?"

ONO: "Seventeen, the same as John's son."

PLAYBOY: "Perhaps when she gets older, she'll seek you out."

ONO: "She is totally frightened. There was a time in Spain when a
lawyer and John thought that we should kidnap her."

LENNON: (sighing) "I was just going to commit hara-kiri first."

ONO: "And we did kidnap her and went to court. The court did a very
sensible thing... the judge took her into a room and asked her which
one of us she wanted to go with. Of course, she said Tony. We had
scared her to death. So now she must be afraid that if she comes to
see me, she'll never see her father again."

LENNON: "When she gets to be in her 20's, she'll understand that we
were idiots and we know we were idiots. She might give us a chance."

ONO: "I probably would have lost Kyoko even if it wasn't for John. If
I had separated from Tony, there would have been some difficulty."

LENNON: "I'll just half-kill myself."

ONO: (to John) "Part of the reason things got so bad was because with
Kyoko, it was you and Tony dealing. Men. With your son Julian, it was
women... there was more understanding between me and Cyn."

PLAYBOY: "Can you explain that?"

ONO: "For example, there was a birthday party that Kyoko had and we
were both invited, but John felt very uptight about it and he didn't
go. He wouldn't deal with Tony. But we were both invited to Julian's
party and we both went."

LENNON: "Oh, God, it's all coming out."

ONO: "Or like when I was invited to Tony's place alone, I couldn't go;
but when John was invited to Cyn's, he did go."

LENNON: "One rule for the men, one for the women."

ONO: "So it was easier for Julian, because I was allowing it to
happen."

LENNON: "But I've said a million Hail Marys. What the hell else can I
do?"

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, after this experience, how do you feel about leaving
Sean's rearing to John?"

ONO: "I am very clear about my emotions in that area. I don't feel
guilty. I am doing it in my own way. It may not be the same as other
mothers, but I'm doing it the way I can do it. In general, mothers
have a very strong resentment toward their children, even though
there's this whole adulation about motherhood and how mothers really
think about their children and how they really love them. I mean, they
do, but it is not humanly possible to retain emotion that mothers are
supposed to have within this society. Women are just too stretched out
in different directions to retain that emotion. Too much is required
of them. So I say to John..."

LENNON: "I am her favorite husband..."

ONO: "'I am carrying the baby nine months and that is enough, so you
take care of it afterward.' It did sound like a crude remark, but I
really believe that children belong to the society. If a mother
carries the child and a father raises it, the responsibility is
shared."

PLAYBOY: "Did you resent having to take so much responsibility, John?"

LENNON: "Well, sometimes, you know, she'd come home and say, 'I'm
tired.' I'd say, only partly tongue in cheek, What the fuck do you
think I am? I'm 24 hours with the baby! Do you think that's easy?' I'd
say, 'You're going to take some more interest in the child.' I don't
care whether it's a father or a mother. When I'm going on about
pimples and bones and which TV shows to let him watch, I would say,
'Listen, this is important. I don't want to hear about your
$20,000,000 deal tonight!' (to Yoko) I would like both parents to take
care of the children, but 'how' is a different matter."

ONO: "Society should be more supportive and understanding."

LENNON: "It's true. The saying 'You've come a long way, baby' applies
more to me than to her. As Harry Nilsson says, 'Everything is the
opposite of what it is, isn't it?' It's men who've come a long way
from even contemplating the idea of equality. But although there is
this thing called the women's movement, society just took a laxative
and they've just farted. They haven't really had a good shit yet. The
seed was planted sometime in the late Sixties, right? But the real
changes are coming. I am the one who has come a long way. I was the
pig. And it is a relief not to be a pig. The pressures of being a pig
were enormous. I don't have any hankering to be looked upon as a sex
object, a male, macho rock 'n roll singer. I got over that a long time
ago. I'm not even interested in projecting that. So I like it to be
known that, yes, I looked after the baby and I made bread and I was a
househusband and I am proud of it. It's the wave of the future and I'm
glad to be in on the forefront of that, too."

ONO: "So maybe both of us learned a lot about how men and women suffer
because of the social structure. And the only way to change it is to
be aware of it. It sounds simple, but important things are simple."

PLAYBOY: "John, does it take actually reversing roles with women to
understand?"

LENNON: "It did for this man. But don't forget, I'm the one who
benefited the most from doing it. Now I can step back and say Sean is
going to be five years old and I was able to spend his first five
years with him and I am very proud of that. And come to think of it,
it looks like I'm going to be 40 and life begins at 40-- so they
promise. And I believe it, too. I feel fine and I'm very excited. It's
like, you know, hitting 21, like, 'Wow, what's going to happen next?'
Only this time we're together.

ONO: "If two are gathered together, there's nothing you can't do."

PLAYBOY: "What does the title of your new album, 'Double Fantasy,'
mean?"

LENNON: "It's a flower, a type of freesia, but what it means to us is
that if two people picture the same image at the same time, that is
the secret. You can be together but projecting two different images
and either whoever's the stronger at the time will get his or her
fantasy fulfilled or you will get nothing but mishmash."

PLAYBOY: "You saw the news item that said you were putting your sex
fantasies out as an album."

LENNON: "Oh, yeah. That is like when we did the bed-in in Toronto in
1969. They all came charging through the door, thinking we were going
to be screwing in bed. Of course, we were just sitting there with
peace signs."

PLAYBOY: "What was that famous bed-in all about?"

LENNON: "Our life is our art. That's what the bed-ins were. When we
got married, we knew our honeymoon was going to be public, anyway, so
we decided to use it to make a statement. We sat in bed and talked to
reporters for seven days. It was hilarious. In effect, we were doing a
commercial for peace on the front page of the papers instead of a
commercial for war."

PLAYBOY: "You stayed in bed and talked about peace?"

LENNON: "Yes. We answered questions. One guy kept going over the point
about Hitler: 'What do you do about Fascists? How can you have peace
when you've got a Hitler?' Yoko said, 'I would have gone to bed with
him.' She said she'd have needed only ten days with him. People loved
that one."

ONO: "I said it facetiously, of course. But the point is, you're not
going to change the world by fighting. Maybe I was naive about the ten
days with Hitler. After all, it took 13 years with John Lennon." (she
giggles)

PLAYBOY: "What were the reports about your making love in a bag?"

ONO: "We never made love in a bag. People probably imagined that we
were making love. It was just, all of us are in a bag, you know. The
point was the outline of the bag, you know, the movement of the bag,
how much we see of a person, you know. But, inside, there might be a
lot going on. Or maybe nothing's going on."

PLAYBOY: "Briefly, what about the statement on the new album?"

LENNON: "Very briefly, it's about very ordinary things between two
people. The lyrics are direct. Simple and straight. I went through my
Dylanesque period a long time ago with songs like 'I am the Walrus'
...the trick of never saying what you mean but giving the impression
of something more. Where more or less can be read into it. It's a good
game."

PLAYBOY: "What are your musical preferences these days?"

LENNON: "Well, I like all music, depending on what time of day it is.
I don't like styles of music or people per se. I can't say I enjoy the
Pretenders, but I like their hit record. I enjoy the B-52s, because I
heard them doing Yoko. It's great. If Yoko ever goes back to her old
sound, they'll be saying, 'Yeah, she's copying the B-52s.'"

ONO: "We were doing a lot of the punk stuff a long time ago."

PLAYBOY: "Lennon and Ono, the original punks."

ONO: "You're right."

PLAYBOY: "John, what's your opinion of the newer waves?"

LENNON: "I love all this punky stuff. It's pure. I'm not, however,
crazy about the people who destroy themselves."

PLAYBOY: "You disagree with Neil Young's lyric in 'Rust Never
Sleeps'-- 'It's better to burn out than to fade away....'"

LENNON: "I hate it. It's better to fade away like an old soldier than
to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead
James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid
Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison ...it's garbage to me. I worship the
people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They're saying John
Wayne conquered cancer... he whipped it like a man. You know, I'm
sorry that he died and all that. I'm sorry for his family, but he
didn't whip cancer. It whipped him. I don't want Sean worshiping John
Wayne or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid
Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it's garbage,
you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he
do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times,
like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy."

PLAYBOY: "Do you listen to the radio?"

LENNON: "Muzak or classical. I don't purchase records. I do enjoy
listening to things like Japanese folk music or Indian music. My
tastes are very broad. When I was a housewife, I just had Muzak on,
background music, 'cuz it relaxes you."

PLAYBOY: "Yoko?"

ONO: "No."

PLAYBOY: "Do you go out and buy records?"

ONO: "Or read the newspaper or magazines or watch TV? No."

PLAYBOY: "The inevitable question, John. Do you listen to your
records?"

LENNON: "Least of all my own."

PLAYBOY: "Even your classics?"

LENNON: "Are you kidding? For pleasure, I would never listen to them.
When I hear them, I just think of the session. It's like an actor
watching himself in an old movie. When I hear a song, I remember the
Abbey Road studio, the session, who fought with whom, where I was
sitting, banging the tambourine in the corner..."

ONO: "In fact, we really don't enjoy listening to other people's work
much. We sort of analyze everything we hear."

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, were you a Beatles fan?"

ONO: "No. Now I notice the songs, of course. In a restaurant, John
will point out, 'Ahh, they're playing George' or something."

PLAYBOY: "John, do you ever go out to hear music?"

LENNON: "No, I'm not interested. I'm not a fan, you see. I might like
Jerry Lee Lewis singing 'A Whole Lot a Shakin' on the record, but I'm
not interested in seeing him perform it."

PLAYBOY: "Your songs are performed more than most other songwriters.
How does that feel?"

LENNON: "I'm always proud and pleased when people do my songs. It
gives me pleasure that they even attempt them, because a lot of my
songs aren't that doable. I go to restaurants and the groups always
play 'Yesterday.' I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he
played us 'Yesterday.' He couldn't understand that I didn't write the
song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing 'I
am the Walrus.'"

PLAYBOY: "How does it feel to have influenced so many people?"

LENNON: "It wasn't really me or us. It was the times. It happened to
me when I heard rock 'n roll in the Fifties. I had no idea about doing
music as a way of life until rock 'n' roll hit me."

PLAYBOY: "Do you recall what specifically hit you?"

LENNON: "It was 'Rock Around the Clock,' I think. I enjoyed Bill
Haley, but I wasn't overwhelmed by him. It wasn't until 'Heartbreak
Hotel' that I really got into it."

ONO: "I am sure there are people whose lives were affected because
they heard Indian music or Mozart or Bach. More than anything, it was
the time and the place when the Beatles came up. Something did happen
there. It was a kind of chemical. It was as if several people gathered
around a table and a ghost appeared. It was that kind of
communication. So they were like mediums, in a way. It's not something
you can force. It was the people, the time, their youth and
enthusiasm."

PLAYBOY: "For the sake of argument, we'll maintain that no other
contemporary artist or group of artists moved as many people in such a
profound way as the Beatles."

LENNON: "But what moved the Beatles?"

PLAYBOY: "You tell us."

LENNON: "Alright. Whatever wind was blowing at the time moved the
Beatles, too. I'm not saying we weren't flags on the top of a ship;
but the whole boat was moving. Maybe the Beatles were in the
crow's-nest, shouting, 'Land ho,' or something like that, but we were
all in the same damn boat."

ONO: "The Beatles themselves were a social phenomenon not that aware
of what they were doing. In a way..."

LENNON: (under his breath) "This Beatles talk bores me to death. Turn
to page 196."

ONO: "As I said, they were like mediums. They weren't conscious of all
they were saying, but it was coming through them."

PLAYBOY: "Why?"

LENNON: "We tuned in to the message. That's all. I don't mean to
belittle the Beatles when I say they weren't this, they weren't that.
I'm just trying not to overblow their importance as separate from
society. And I don't think they were more important than Glenn Miller
or Woody Herman or Bessie Smith. It was our generation, that's all. It
was Sixties music."
PLAYBOY: "What do you say to those who insist that all rock
since the Beatles has been the Beatles redone?"

LENNON: "All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just
variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were
screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just the Beatles
redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees. They do a damn good
job. There was nothing else going on then."

PLAYBOY: "Wasn't alot of the Beatles' music at least more
intelligent?"

LENNON: "The Beatles were more intellectual, so they appealed on that
level, too. But the basic appeal of the Beatles was not their
intelligence. It was their music. It was only after some guy in the
'London Times' said there were Aeolian cadences in 'It Won't Be Long'
that the middle classes started listening to it... because somebody
put a tag on it."

PLAYBOY: "Did you put Aeolian cadences in 'It Won't Be Long?'"

LENNON: "To this day, I don't have any idea what they are. They sound
like exotic birds."

PLAYBOY: "How did you react to the misinterpretations of your songs?"

LENNON: "For instance?"

PLAYBOY: "The most obvious is the 'Paul is dead' fiasco. You already
explained the line in 'Glass Onion.' What about the line in 'I am the
Walrus'... (correction: Strawberry Fields Forever) ...'I buried
Paul'?"

LENNON: "I said 'Cranberry sauce.' That's all I said. Some people like
ping-pong, other people like digging over graves. Some people will do
anything rather than be here now."

PLAYBOY: "What about the chant at the end of the song: Smoke pot,
smoke pot, everybody smoke pot'?"

LENNON: "No, no, no. I had this whole choir saying, 'Everybody's got
one, everybody's got one.' But when you get 30 people, male and
female, on top of 30 cellos and on top of the Beatles' rock 'n roll
rhythm section, you can't hear what they're saying."

PLAYBOY: "What does 'everybody got'?"

LENNON: "Anything. You name it. One penis, one vagina, one asshole--
you name it."

PLAYBOY: "Did it trouble you when the interpretations of your songs
were destructive, such as when Charles Manson claimed that your lyrics
were messages to him?"

LENNON: "No. It has nothing to do with me. It's like that guy, Son of
Sam, who was having these talks with the dog. Manson was just an
extreme version of the people who came up with the 'Paul is dead'
thing or who figured out that the initials to 'Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds' were LSD and concluded I was writing about acid."

PLAYBOY: "Where did 'Lucy in the Sky' come from?"

LENNON: "My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about
a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in
the sky and called it 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' Simple."

PLAYBOY: "The other images in the song weren't drug-inspired?"

LENNON: "The images were from 'Alice in Wonderland.' It was Alice in
the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The
woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they
are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.
There was also the image of the female who would someday come save
me... a 'girl with kaleidoscope eyes' who would come out of the sky.
It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met Yoko yet. So maybe it
should be 'Yoko in the Sky with Diamonds.'"

PLAYBOY: "Do you have any interest in the pop historians analyzing the
Beatles as a cultural phenomenon?"

LENNON: "It's all equally irrelevant. Mine is to do and other people's
is to record, I suppose. Does it matter how many drugs were in Elvis'
body? I mean, Brian Epstein's sex life will make a nice 'Hollywood
Babylon' someday, but it is irrelevant."

PLAYBOY: "What started the rumors about you and Epstein?"

LENNON: "I went on holiday to Spain with Brian... which started all
the rumors that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was
almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But we
did have a pretty intense relationship. And it was my first experience
with someone I knew was a homosexual. He admitted it to me. We had
this holiday together because Cyn was pregnant and we left her with
the baby and went to Spain. Lots of funny stories, you know. We used
to sit in cafs and Brian would look at all the boys and I would ask,
'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' It was just the
combination of our closeness and the trip that started the rumors."

PLAYBOY: "It's interesting to hear you talk about your old songs such
as 'Lucy in the Sky' and 'Glass Onion.' Will you give some brief
thoughts on some of our favorites?"

LENNON: "Right."

PLAYBOY: "Let's start with 'In My Life.'"

LENNON: "It was the first song I wrote that was consciously about my
life. (sings) 'There are places I'll remember/ all my life though some
have changed...' Before, we were just writing songs a la Everly
Brothers, Buddy Holly-- pop songs with no more thought to them than
that. The words were almost irrelevant. 'In My Life' started out as a
bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning
all the places I could recall. I wrote it all down and it was boring.
So I forgot about it and laid back and these lyrics started coming to
me about friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the
middle-eight."

PLAYBOY: "'Yesterday.'"

LENNON: "Well, we all know about 'Yesterday.' I have had so much
accolade for 'Yesterday.' That is Paul's song, of course, and Paul's
baby. Well done. Beautiful-- and I never wished I had written it."

PLAYBOY: "'With a Little Help from My Friends.'"

LENNON: "This is Paul, with a little help from me. 'What do you see
when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you, but I know it's
mine...' is mine."

PLAYBOY: "'I am the Walrus.'"

LENNON: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The
second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it
was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare
Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen
Ginsberg in particular. The reference to 'Element'ry penguin' is the
elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, 'Hare Krishna,'
or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a
la Dylan, in those days."

PLAYBOY: "The song is very complicated, musically."

LENNON: "It actually was fantastic in stereo, but you never hear it
all. There was too much to get on. It was too messy a mix. One track
was live BBC Radio-- Shakespeare or something-- I just fed in whatever
lines came in."

PLAYBOY: "What about the walrus itself?"

LENNON: "It's from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' 'Alice in
Wonderland.' To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me
that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system.
I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are
doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and
realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the
carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong
guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have
been the same, would it? (singing) 'I am the carpenter....'"

PLAYBOY: "How about 'She Came in Through the Bathroom Window'?"

LENNON: "That was written by Paul when we were in New York forming
Apple, and he first met Linda. Maybe she's the one who came in the
window. She must have. I don't know. Somebody came in the window."

PLAYBOY: "'I Feel Fine.'"

LENNON: "That's me, including the guitar lick with the first feedback
ever recorded. I defy anybody to find an earlier record... unless it
is some old blues record from the Twenties... with feedback on it."

PLAYBOY: "'When I'm Sixty-Four.'"

LENNON: "Paul completely. I would never even dream of writing a song
like that. There are some areas I never think about and that is one of
them."

PLAYBOY: "'A Day in the Life.'"

LENNON: "Just as it sounds: I was reading the paper one day and I
noticed two stories. One was the Guinness heir who killed himself in a
car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car
crash. On the next page was a story about 4000 holes in Blackburn,
Lancashire. In the streets, that is. They were going to fill them all.
Paul's contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song 'I'd
love to turn you on.' I had the bulk of the song and the words, but he
contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he
couldn't use for anything. I thought it was a damn good piece of
work."

PLAYBOY: "May we continue with some of the ones that seem more
personal and see what reminiscences they inspire?"

LENNON: "Reminisce away."

PLAYBOY: "For no reason whatsoever, let's start with 'I Wanna Be Your
Man.'"

LENNON: "Paul and I finished that one off for the Stones. We were
taken down by Brian to meet them at the club where they were playing
in Richmond. They wanted a song and we went to see what kind of stuff
they did. Paul had this bit of a song and we played it roughly for
them and they said, 'Yeah, OK, that's our style.' But it was only
really a lick, so Paul and I went off in the corner of the room and
finished the song off while they were all sitting there, talking. We
came back and Mick and Keith said, 'Jesus, look at that. They just
went over there and wrote it.' You know, right in front of their eyes.
We gave it to them. It was a throwaway. Ringo sang it for us and the
Stones did their version. It shows how much importance we put on them.
We weren't going to give them anything great, right? That was the
Stones' first record. Anyway, Mick and Keith said, 'If they can write
a song so easily, we should try it.' They say it inspired them to
start writing together."

PLAYBOY: "How about 'Strawberry Fields Forever'?"

LENNON: "Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at
Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a
nice semidetached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers
and that ilk living around... not the poor slummy kind of image that
was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was
about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in
government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden.
They didn't have anything like that. Near that home was Strawberry
Fields, a house near a boys' reformatory where I used to go to garden
parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete. We would go there and
hang out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at
Strawberry Fields. So that's where I got the name. But I used it as an
image. Strawberry Fields forever."

PLAYBOY: "And the lyrics, for instance: 'Living is easy...'"

LENNON: (singing) "'...with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you
see.' It still goes, doesn't it? Aren't I saying exactly the same
thing now? The awareness apparently trying to be expressed is-- let's
say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was
different from the others. I was different all my life. The second
verse goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and
self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying.
Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius-- 'I mean it must be high or
low,' the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought,
because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I thought I
was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people
didn't see. As a child, I would say, 'But this is going on!' and
everybody would look at me as if I was crazy. I always was so psychic
or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was
always seeing things in a hallucinatory way. It was scary as a child,
because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my
friends nor anybody could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary
and the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde or a Dylan
Thomas or a Vincent van Gogh-- all those books that my auntie had that
talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what
they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what
they were. I saw loneliness."

PLAYBOY: "Were you able to find others to share your visions with?"

LENNON: "Only dead people in books. Lewis Carroll, certain paintings.
Surrealism had a great effect on me, because then I realized that my
imagery and my mind wasn't insanity; that if it was insane, I belong
in an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms. Surrealism to
me is reality. Psychic vision to me is reality. Even as a child. When
I looked at myself in the mirror or when I was 12, 13, I used to
literally trance out into alpha. I didn't know what it was called
then. I found out years later there is a name for those conditions.
But I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face
changing and becoming cosmic and complete. It caused me to always be a
rebel. This thing gave me a chip on the shoulder; but, on the other
hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted. Part of me would like to be
accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic
musician. But I cannot be what I am not. Because of my attitude, all
the other boys' parents, including Paul's father, would say, 'Keep
away from him.' The parents instinctively recognized what I was, which
was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence
their kids, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home
I had. Partly, maybe, it was out of envy that I didn't have this
so-called home. But I really did. I had an auntie and an uncle and a
nice suburban home, thank you very much. Hear this, Auntie. She was
hurt by a remark Paul made recently that the reason I am staying home
with Sean now is because I never had a family life. It's absolute
rubbish. There were five women who were my family. Five strong,
intelligent women. Five sisters. One happened to be my mother. My
mother was the youngest. She just couldn't deal with life. She had a
husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope
with me, and when I was four and a half, I ended up living with her
elder sister. Now, those women were fantastic. One day I might do a
kind of 'Forsyte Saga' just about them. That was my first feminist
education. Anyway, that knowledge and the fact that I wasn't with my
parents made me see that parents are not gods. I would infiltrate the
other boys' minds. Paul's parents were terrified of me and my
influence, simply because I was free from the parents' strangle hold.
That was the gift I got for not having parents. I cried a lot about
not having them and it was torture, but it also gave me an awareness
early. I wasn't an orphan, though. My mother was alive and lived a
15-minute walk away from me all my life. I saw her off and on. I just
didn't live with her."

PLAYBOY: "Is she alive?"

LENNON: "No, she got killed by an off-duty cop who was drunk after
visiting my auntie's house where I lived. I wasn't there at the time.
She was just at a bus stop. I was 16. That was another big trauma for
me. I lost her twice. When I was five and I moved in with my auntie,
and then when she physically died. That made me more bitter; the chip
on my shoulder I had as a youth got really big then. I was just really
re-establishing the relationship with her and she was killed."

PLAYBOY: "Her name was Julia, wasn't it? Is she the Julia of your song
of that name on 'The White Album?'"

LENNON: "The song is for her... and for Yoko."

PLAYBOY: "What kind of relationship did you have with your father, who
went away to sea? Did you ever see him again?"

LENNON: "I never saw him again until I made a lot of money and he came
back."

PLAYBOY: "How old were you?"

LENNON: "24 or 25. I opened the 'Daily Express' and there he was,
washing dishes in a small hotel or something very near where I was
living in the Stockbroker belt outside London. He had been writing to
me to try to get in contact. I didn't want to see him. I was too upset
about what he'd done to me and to my mother and that he would turn up
when I was rich and famous and not bother turning up before. So I
wasn't going to see him at all, but he sort of blackmailed me in the
press by saying all this about being a poor man washing dishes while I
was living in luxury. I fell for it and saw him and we had some kind
of relationship. He died a few years later of cancer. But at 65, he
married a secretary who had been working for the Beatles, age 22, and
they had a child, which I thought was hopeful for a man who had lived
his life as a drunk and almost a Bowery bum."

PLAYBOY: "We'll never listen to 'Strawberry Fields Forever' the same
way again. What memories are jogged by the song 'Help'?"

LENNON: "When 'Help' came out in '65, I was actually crying out for
help. Most people think it's just a fast rock 'n roll song. I didn't
realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was
commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was
crying out for help. It was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: He
-- I -- is very fat, very insecure, and he's completely lost himself.
And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest,
looking back at how easy it was. Now I may be very positive... yes,
yes... but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to
jump out the window, you know. It becomes easier to deal with as I get
older; I don't know whether you learn control or, when you grow up,
you calm down a little. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was
crying out for help. In those days, when the Beatles were depressed,
we had this little chant. I would yell out, 'Where are we going,
fellows?' They would say, 'To the top, Johnny,' in pseudo-American
voices. And I would say, 'Where is that, fellows?' And they would say,
'To the toppermost of the poppermost.' It was some dumb expression
from a cheap movie, a la 'Blackboard Jungle,' about Liverpool. Johnny
was the leader of the gang."

PLAYBOY: "What were you depressed about during the 'Help' period?"

LENNON: "The Beatles thing had just gone beyond comprehension. We were
smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and
nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed
eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world. That was the song,
'Help.' I think everything that comes out of a song-- even Paul's
songs now, which are apparently about nothing-- shows something about
yourself."

PLAYBOY: "Was 'I'm a Loser' a similarly personal statement?"

LENNON: "Part of me suspects that I'm a loser and the other part of me
thinks I'm God Almighty."

PLAYBOY: "How about 'Cold Turkey?'"

LENNON: "The song is self-explanatory. The song got banned, even
though it's antidrug. They're so stupid about drugs, you know. They're
not looking at the cause of the drug problem: Why do people take
drugs? To escape from what? Is life so terrible? Are we living in such
a terrible situation that we can't do anything without reinforcement
of alcohol, tobacco? Aspirins, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, never
mind the heroin and cocaine-- they're just the outer fringes of
Librium and speed."

PLAYBOY: "Do you use any drugs now?"

LENNON: "Not really. If somebody gives me a joint, I might smoke it,
but I don't go after it."

PLAYBOY: "Cocaine?"

LENNON: "I've had cocaine, but I don't like it. The Beatles had lots
of it in their day, but it's a dumb drug, because you have to have
another one 20 minutes later. Your whole concentration goes on getting
the next fix. Really, I find caffeine is easier to deal with."

PLAYBOY: "Acid?"

LENNON: "Not in years. A little mushroom or peyote is not beyond my
scope, you know, maybe twice a year or something. You don't hear about
it anymore, but people are still visiting the cosmos. We must always
remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people
forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn't it, Harry? So
get out the bottle, boy... and relax. They invented LSD to control
people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in
mysterious ways its wonders to perform. If you look in the Government
reports on acid, the ones who jumped out the window or killed
themselves because of it, I think even with Art Linkletter's daughter,
it happened to her years later. So, let's face it, she wasn't really
on acid when she jumped out the window. And I've never met anybody
who's had a flashback on acid. I've never had a flashback in my life
and I took millions of trips in the Sixties."

PLAYBOY: "What does your diet include besides sashimi and sushi,
Hershey bars and cappuccinos?"

LENNON: "We're mostly macrobiotic, but sometimes I take the family out
for a pizza."

ONO: "Intuition tells you what to eat. It's dangerous to try to unify
things. Everybody has different needs. We went through vegetarianism
and macrobiotic, but now, because we're in the studio, we do eat some
junk food. We're trying to stick to macrobiotic: fish and rice, whole
grains. You balance foods and eat foods indigenous to the area. Corn
is the grain from this area."

PLAYBOY: "And you both smoke up a storm."

LENNON: "Macrobiotic people don't believe in the big C. Whether you
take that as a rationalization or not, macrobiotics don't believe that
smoking is bad for you. Of course, if we die, we're wrong."

PLAYBOY: "Let's go back to jogging your memory with songs. How about
Paul's song 'Hey Jude'?"

LENNON: "He said it was written about Julian. He knew I was splitting
with Cyn and leaving Julian then. He was driving to see Julian to say
hello. He had been like an uncle. And he came up with 'Hey Jude.' But
I always heard it as a song to me. Now I'm sounding like one of those
fans reading things into it... Think about it: Yoko had just come into
the picture. He is saying. 'Hey, Jude'-- 'Hey, John.' Subconsciously,
he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't
want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, 'Bless you.' The
devil in him didn't like it at all, because he didn't want to lose his
partner."

PLAYBOY: "What about 'Because'?"

LENNON: "I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play
Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano. Suddenly, I said, 'Can
you play those chords backward?' She did, and I wrote 'Because' around
them. The song sounds like 'Moonlight Sonata,' too. The lyrics are
clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references."

PLAYBOY: "'Give Peace a Chance.'"

LENNON: "All we were saying was give peace a chance."

PLAYBOY: "Was it really a Lennon-McCartney composition?"

LENNON: "No, I don't even know why his name was on it. It's there
because I kind of felt guilty because I'd made the separate single--
the first-- and I was really breaking away from the Beatles."

PLAYBOY: Why were the compositions you and Paul did separately
attributed to Lennon-McCartney?"

LENNON: "Paul and I made a deal when we were 15. There was never a
legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write
together that we put both our names on it, no matter what."

PLAYBOY: "How about 'Do You Want to Know a Secret?'"

LENNON: "The idea came from this thing my mother used to sing to me
when I was one or two years old, when she was still living with me. It
was from a Disney movie: 'Do you want to know a secret? Promise not to
tell? You are standing by a wishing well.' So, with that in my head, I
wrote the song and just gave it to George to sing. I thought it would
be a good vehicle for him, because it had only three notes and he
wasn't the best singer in the world. He has improved a lot since then;
but in those days, his ability was very poor. I gave it to him just to
give him a piece of the action. That's another reason why I was hurt
by his book. I even went to the trouble of making sure he got the B
side of a Beatles single, because he hadn't had a B side of one until
'Do You Want to Know a Secret.' 'Something' was the first time he ever
got an A side, because Paul and I always wrote both sides. That wasn't
because we were keeping him out but simply because his material was
not up to scratch. I made sure he got the B side of 'Something,' too,
so he got the cash. Those little things he doesn't remember. I always
felt bad that George and Ringo didn't get a piece of the publishing.
When the opportunity came to give them five percent each of Maclen, it
was because of me they got it. It was not because of Klein and not
because of Paul but because of me. When I said they should get it,
Paul couldn't say no. I don't get a piece of any of George's songs or
Ringo's. I never asked for anything for the contributions I made to
George's songs like 'Taxman.' Not even the recognition. And that is
why I might have sounded resentful about George and Ringo, because it
was after all those things that the attitude of 'John has forsaken us'
and 'John is tricking us' came out... which is not true."

PLAYBOY: "'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.'"

LENNON: "No, it's not about heroin. A gun magazine was sitting there
with a smoking gun on the cover and an article that I never read
inside called 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' I took it right from there. I
took it as the terrible idea of just having shot some animal."

PLAYBOY: "What about the sexual puns: 'When you feel my finger on your
trigger'?"

LENNON: "Well, it was at the beginning of my relationship with Yoko
and I was very sexually oriented then. When we weren't in the studio,
we were in bed."

PLAYBOY: "What was the allusion to 'Mother Superior jumps the gun'?"

LENNON: "I call Yoko Mother or Madam just in an offhand way. The rest
doesn't mean anything. It's just images of her."

PLAYBOY: "'Across the Universe.'"

LENNON: "The Beatles didn't make a good record of 'Across the
Universe.' I think subconsciously we... I thought Paul subconsciously
tried to destroy my great songs. We would play experimental games with
my great pieces, like 'Strawberry Fields,' which I always felt was
badly recorded. It worked, but it wasn't what it could have been. I
allowed it, though. We would spend hours doing little, detailed
cleaning up on Paul's songs, but when it came to mine... especially a
great song like 'Strawberry Fields' or 'Across the Universe'
...somehow an atmosphere of looseness and experimentation would come
up."

PLAYBOY: "Sabotage?"

LENNON: "Subconscious sabotage. I was too hurt... Paul will deny it,
because he has a bland face and will say this doesn't exist. This is
the kind of thing I'm talking about where I was always seeing what was
going on and began to think, Well, maybe I'm paranoid. But it is not
paranoid. It is the absolute truth. The same thing happened to 'Across
the Universe.' The song was never done properly. The words stand,
luckily."

PLAYBOY: "'Getting Better.'"

LENNON: "It is a diary form of writing. All that 'I used to be cruel
to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she
loved' was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically... any
woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought
men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see.
It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's
the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a
violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his
violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public
how I treated women as a youngster."

PLAYBOY: "'Revolution.'"

LENNON: "We recorded the song twice. The Beatles were getting really
tense with one another. I did the slow version and I wanted it out as
a single: as a statement of the Beatles' position on Vietnam and the
Beatles' position on revolution. For years, on the Beatle tours,
Epstein had stopped us from saying anything about Vietnam or the war.
And he wouldn't allow questions about it. But on one tour, I said, 'I
am going to answer about the war. We can't ignore it.' I absolutely
wanted the Beatles to say something. The first take of 'Revolution'
...well, George and Paul were resentful and said it wasn't fast
enough. Now, if you go into details of what a hit record is and
isn't... maybe. But the Beatles could have afforded to put out the
slow, understandable version of 'Revolution' as a single. Whether it
was a gold record or a wooden record. But because they were so upset
about the Yoko period and the fact that I was again becoming as
creative and dominating as I had been in the early days, after lying
fallow for a couple of years, it upset the apple cart. I was awake
again and they couldn't stand it?"

PLAYBOY: "Was it Yoko's inspiration?"

LENNON: "She inspired all this creation in me. It wasn't that she
inspired the songs; she inspired me. The statement in 'Revolution' was
mine. The lyrics stand today. It's still my feeling about politics. I
want to see the plan. That is what I used to say to Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin. Count me out if it is for violence. Don't expect me to be
on the barricades unless it is with flowers."

PLAYBOY: "What do you think of Hoffman's turning himself in?"

LENNON: "Well he got what he wanted. Which is to be sort of an
underground hero for anybody who still worships any manifestation of
the underground. I don't feel that much about it anymore. Nixon,
Hoffman, it's the same. They are all from the same period. It was kind
of surprising to see Abbie on TV, but it was also surprising to see
Nixon on TV. Maybe people get the feeling when they see me or us. I
feel, What are they doing there? Is this an old newsreel?"

PLAYBOY: "On a new album, you close with 'Hard Times Are Over (For a
While).' Why?"

LENNON: "It's not a new message: 'Give Peace a Chance'-- we're not
being unreasonable, just saying, 'Give it a chance.' With 'Imagine,'
we're saying, 'Can you imagine a world without countries or
religions?' It's the same message over and over. And it's positive."

PLAYBOY: "How does it feel to have people anticipate your new record
because they feel you are a prophet of sorts? When you returned to the
studio to make 'Double Fantasy,' some of your fans were saying things
like, 'Just as Lennon defined the Sixties and the Seventies, he'll be
defining the Eighties.'"

LENNON: "It's very sad. Anyway, we're not saying anything new. A) we
have already said it and, B) 100,000,000 other people have said it,
too."

PLAYBOY: "But your songs do have messages."

LENNON: "All we are saying is, 'This is what is happening to us.' We
are sending postcards. I don't let it become 'I am the awakened; you
are sheep that will be shown the way.' That is the danger of saying
anything, you know."

PLAYBOY: "Especially for you."

LENNON: "Listen, there's nothing wrong with following examples. We can
have figure heads and people we admire, but we don't need leaders.
'Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters.'"

PLAYBOY: "You're quoting one of your peers, of sorts. Is it
distressing to you that Dylan is a born-again Christian?"

LENNON: "I don't like to comment on it. For whatever reason he's doing
it, it is personal for him and he needs to do it. But the whole
religion business suffers from the 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' bit.
There's too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I'm
not pushing Buddhism, because I'm no more a Buddhist than I am a
Christian, but there's one thing I admire about the religion: There's
no proselytizing."

PLAYBOY: "Were you a Dylan fan?"

LENNON: "No, I stopped listening to Dylan with both ears after
'Highway 64' [sic] and 'Blonde on Blonde,' and even then it was
because George would sit me down and make me listen."

PLAYBOY: "Like Dylan, weren't you also looking for some kind of leader
when you did primal-scream therapy with Arthur Janov?"

ONO: "I think Janov was a daddy for John. I think he has this father
complex and he's always searching for a daddy."

LENNON: "Had, dear. I had a father complex."

PLAYBOY: "Would you explain?"

ONO: "I had a daddy, a real daddy, sort of a big and strong father
like a Billy Graham, but growing up, I saw his weak side. I saw the
hypocrisy. So whenever I see something that is supposed to be so big
and wonderful, a guru or primal scream, I'm very cynical."

LENNON: "She fought with Janov all the time. He couldn't deal with
it."

ONO: "I'm not searching for the big daddy. I look for something else
in men... something that is tender and weak and I feel like I want to
help."

LENNON: "And I was the lucky cripple she chose!"

ONO: "I have this mother instinct, or whatever. But I was not hung up
on finding a father, because I had one who disillusioned me. John
never had a chance to get disillusioned about his father, since his
father wasn't around, so he never thought of him as that big man."

PLAYBOY: "Do you agree with that assessment, John?"

LENNON: "Alot of us are looking for fathers. Mine was physically not
there. Most people's are not there mentally and physically, like
always at the office or busy with other things. So all these leaders,
parking meters, are all substitute fathers, whether they be religious
or political... All this bit about electing a President. We pick our
own daddy out of a dog pound of daddies. This is the daddy that looks
like the daddy in the commercials. He's got the nice gray hair and the
right teeth and the parting's on the right side. OK? This is the daddy
we choose. The dog pound of daddies, which is the political arena,
gives us a President, then we put him on a platform and start
punishing him and screaming at him because Daddy can't do miracles.
Daddy doesn't heal us."

PLAYBOY: "So Janov was a daddy for you. Who else?"

ONO: "Before, there was Maharishi."

LENNON: "Maharishi was a father figure, Elvis Presley might have been
a father figure. I don't know. Robert Mitchum. Any male image is a
father figure. There's nothing wrong with it until you give them the
right to give you sort of a recipe for your life. What happens is
somebody comes along with a good piece of truth. Instead of the
truth's being looked at, the person who brought it is looked at. The
messenger is worshiped, instead of the message. So there would be
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Marxism, Maoism--
everything-- it is always about a person and never about what he
says."

ONO: "All the 'isms' are daddies. It's sad that society is structured
in such a way that people cannot really open up to each other, and
therefore they need a certain theater to go to to cry or something
like that."

LENNON: "Well, you went to est."

ONO: "Yes, I wanted to check it out."

LENNON: "We went to Janov for the same reason."

ONO: "But est people are given a reminder..."

LENNON: "Yeah, but I wouldn't go and sit in a room and not pee."

ONO: "Well, you did in primal scream."

LENNON: "Oh, but I had you with me."

ONO: "Anyway, when I went to est, I saw Werner Erhardt, the same
thing. He's a nice showman and he's got a nice gig there. I felt the
same thing when we went to Sai Baba in India. In India, you have to be
a guru instead of a pop star. Guru is the pop star of India and pop
star is the guru here."

LENNON: "But nobody's perfect, etc., etc. Whether it's Janov or
Erhardt or Maharishi or a Beatle. That doesn't take away from their
message. It's like learning how to swim. The swimming is fine. But
forget about the teacher. If the Beatles had a message, it was that.
With the Beatles, the records are the point, not the Beatles as
individuals. You don't need the package, just as you don't need the
Christian package or the Marxist package to get the message. People
always got the image I was an anti-Christ or antireligion. I'm not.
I'm a most religious fellow. I was brought up a Christian and I only
now understand some of the things that Christ was saying in those
parables. Because people got hooked on the teacher and missed the
message."

PLAYBOY: "And the Beatles taught people how to swim?"

LENNON: "If the Beatles or the Sixties had a message, it was to learn
to swim. Period. And once you learn to swim, swim. The people who are
hung up on the Beatles' and the Sixties' dream missed the whole point
when the Beatles' and the Sixties' dream became the point. Carrying
the Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like
carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to
say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or the Beatles, but to live in that
dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion."

PLAYBOY: "Yoko, the single you and John released from your album seems
to be looking toward the future."

ONO: "Yes, 'Starting Over' is a song that makes me feel like crying.
John has talked about the Sixties and how it gave us a taste for
freedom... sexual and otherwise. It was like an orgy. Then, after that
big come that we had together, men and women somehow lost track of
each other and a lot of families and relationships split apart. I
really think that what happened in the Seventies can be compared to
what happened under Nazism with Jewish families. Only the force that
split them came from the inside, not from the outside. We tried to
rationalize it as the price we were paying for our freedom. And John
is saying in his song, OK, we had the energy in the Sixties, in the
Seventies we separated, but let's start over in the Eighties. He's
reaching out to me, the woman. Reaching out after all that's happened,
over the battlefield of dead families, is more difficult this time
around. On the other side of the record is my song, 'Kiss Kiss Kiss,'
which is the other side of the same question. There is the sound of a
woman coming to a climax on it, and she is crying out to be held, to
be touched. It will be controversial, because people still feel it's
less natural to hear the sounds of a woman's lovemaking than, say, the
sound of a Concorde, killing the atmosphere and polluting nature.
Altogether, both sides are a prayer to change the Eighties."

PLAYBOY: "What is the Eighties' dream to you, John?"

LENNON: Well, you make your own dream. That's the Beatles' story,
isn't it? That's Yoko's story. That's what I'm saying now. Produce
your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite
possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the
parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John
Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for
you. You have to do it yourself. That's what the great masters and
mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the
way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are
now called holy and worshiped for the cover of the book and not for
what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have
always been and always will be. There's nothing new under the sun. All
the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't
wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you."

PLAYBOY: "What is it that keeps people from accepting that message?"

LENNON: "It's fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to
be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing
dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that... it's all
illusion. Unknown is what what it is. Accept that it's unknown and
it's plain sailing. Everything is unknown... then you're ahead of the
game. That's what it is. Right?"