Playboy Interview 1980
Page 21
Playboy: Cocaine?
John: 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?
John: 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?
John: We're mostly macrobiotic, but sometimes I take the family out for a pizza.
Yoko: 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.
John: 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?"
John: 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?"
John: 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."
John: All we were saying was give peace a chance.
Playboy: Was it really a Lennon-McCartney composition?
John: 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?
John: 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?"
John: 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."