Playboy Interview 1980
Page 1
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?
John: I've been baking bread and looking after the baby.
Playboy: With what secret projects going on in the basement?
John: 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?
John: 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.
Yoko: 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.
John: 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.
Yoko: Just to prove that you can go on dishing out things.
Playboy: You're talking about records, of course.
John: 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?
John: 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?
John: Most people don't live with Yoko Ono.
Playboy: Which means?
John: 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?
John: 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?
Yoko: 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.
John: 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.
Yoko: I handled the business: old business - Apple, Maclen [the Beatles' record
company and publishing company, respectively] and new investments.
John: 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?