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RIP THE GREAT JEAN TURNBOW 09-30-1932 TO 06-02-2015. A MOM’S MOM!

Posted on September 8, 2017 by ericturnbow


RIP THE GREAT JEAN TURNBOW 09-30-1932 TO 06-02-2015. A MOM’S MOM!

So, part of My grieving process involves a walk down memory lane and mass
amounts of “Archiving”. May Her memory live on for all eternity. She was a very
wise women that taught me a whole lot about life. I can hardly believe I cannot
pick up the phone or drive out and speak to her. It is kind like a “Nightmare”
that will pass in time. I love the Family I was born into but we definitely took
a big hit this year. She promised to haunt me in My dreams, and yes, she has
come through! I always wake up with a smile on My face when this happens.

Jean Turnbow, 82, passed away June 2, 2015 in Olympia, WA, her home for the last
57 years.� She was born September 30, 1932 to John and Wilna Janzan in New York,
NY.� A graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha, Jean was a teacher,
homemaker, poet, artist and actress.� She married A.W. Turnbow in 1953 in Omaha.
Over the years, she also lived in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

Jean was intrigued and delighted with life.� Friends and family were foremost
with her.� She is greatly loved and will be greatly missed.

She is survived by her partner, Mark Hopkins; sons, Jon Strongbow, Marc Turnbow,
Tom Turnbow and Eric Turnbow; daughters, Katherine Peil Kauffman and Marilyn
Turnbow; eight grandchildren; and six great grandchildren.

Baby Eric with His Mom Jean in 1961

Posted in (RIP) Jean Turnbow (My Mom)


PAUL MCCARTNEY ROCKS SAFECO FIELD IN SEATTLE 07-19-2013

Posted on July 24, 2013 by ericturnbow

The Entity Eric Turnbow was born on May 18, 1961 @ 7:19pm @ Saint Peters
Hospital in Olympia Wasington, USA, Planet Earth, in the� Milky Way Galaxy
system!� His Mother is Jean Janzen Turnbow, and His Father is Avaton Winston
Turnbow. Doctor Fredrick Balls was the attending physician. (You cannot make
this stuff up)!



(Concert Review) Paul McCartney Rocks Safeco Field in Seattle 07-19-2013� The
POP Music Journal of Eric Turnbow

Are You kidding Me? Three full hours of rocking Paul McCartney Music, and a
total of 39 classic songs! It was fantastic and killer at Safeco field on
07-19-2013 in Seattle. Special appearance by the surviving members of “Nirvana”
(Dave Grohl, Kris Novoselic, and Pat Smear). Amazing night! This is a picture
from the actual concert in Seattle right at the beginning!

Here He is in the first few minutes of the 3 hour long show!

So I took My Step Mom Vicki Turnbow to the show. we left Olympia around 4pm
thinking that 4 hours before show-time would be plenty. But we got stuck in
traffic for 2 and a half hours. we arrived at “The Renaissance Hotel” to
rendezvous with friends Rene and Carol.� Not much time to “Hang” we jumped on
the train for just $2 and it took Us right to “Safeco Field”, the home of The
Mariners Baseball team.

They started the slide show just after 8pm that had remixed versions of Wings
and Paul McCartney tunes with cool images from His career. This went on for up
to 45 minutes so I went and got My souvenirs! (A T-shirt, back stage pass, and 3
Tour key chains)!

Here is an "Example" of the cool artifacts I got at the show, I spent like $80!

Paul hit the stage at 8:45 for a powerful 3 hour set filled with 39 songs and a
“Nirvana” reunion with Dave Grohl, Novoselic, and Pat Smear. i counted a total
of 9 encores that night! Absolutely phenomenal. Paul did great for a 71 year old
legend. He totally held His own and then some way off the charts. There is
always a few “Surprises” for me, since this was the 6th time I got the pleasure
of seeing Him live in concert. This was no exception as He played some cool
Beatles songs that have never been played live before such as “Your Mother
should Know”, “All Together Now”, Lovely Rita”, and “Being for the benefit of
Mr. Kite” a John Lennon composition! But I think My favourite Beatles track of
the night for Me has to be “The Golden Slumbers Medley”. I love that song and
hold� sentimental place in My heart for it.

 




Paul McCartney Set List @ Safeco Field 07-29-2013

Eight Days a Week(The Beatles song)
Junior’s Farm (Wings song)
All My Loving (The Beatles song)
Listen to What the Man Said (Wings song)
Let Me Roll It (Wings song)
Paperback Writer (The Beatles song) (Foxy Lady snippet)
My Valentine
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five (Wings song)
The Long and Winding Road (The Beatles song)
Maybe I’m Amazed
I’ve Just Seen a Face (The Beatles song)
We Can Work It Out (The Beatles song)
Another Day (Wings Song)
And I Love Her (The Beatles song)
Blackbird (The Beatles song)���� Here Today (John Lennon Tribute)
Your Mother Should Know (The Beatles song)
Lady Madonna (The Beatles song)
All Together Now (The Beatles song)
Lovely Rita (The Beatles song)
Mrs. Vandebilt (Wings song)
Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles song)
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! (The Beatles song)
Something (The Beatles song) A Ukulele tribute to George Harrison
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-D (The Beatles song)
Band on the Run (Wings song)
Back in the USSR (The Beatles song)
Let It Be (The Beatles song)
Live and Let Die (Wings song)
Hey Jude (The Beatles song)
Encore:
Day Tripper (The Beatles song)
Cut Me Some Slack (With Dave Grohl, and Nirvana)
Long Tall Sally (Little Richard cover) (With Dave Grohl, and Nirvana)
Get Back (The Beatles song) (With Dave Grohl, and Nirvana)
Encore 2:
Yesterday (The Beatles song)
Helter Skelter (The Beatles song) (With Dave Grohl, and Nirvana)
Golden Slumbers (The Beatles song) (With Dave and Nirvana)
Carry That Weight (The Beatles song) (With Dave and Nirvana)
The End (The Beatles song) (With Dave Grohl, and Nirvana)

Outstanding tribute for "Sir Paul" on The Mariners score board!

The show ruled! It was off the charts and then some. He did more “Wings” tracks
than ever before, and a bunch of those tunes came form the “Band on The Run
Album”. I loved this show! By far the best “Wings” song of the night had to be
“Live and Let Die” with it’s fireworks and amazing pyrotechnics. It blew Us all
right out of our seat!�



 * Note: Professor Turnbow may be reached at:

�������������������� (360) 943-7039��� Email:� etcosmic2000@yahoo.com

“A Splendid time was guaranteed for all”…. “And in the end, the love you make,
is equal to the love…. You make!”�� AMEN!

I got home at 2 am! What a night of terrific music from a true Living Legend!

Posted in Sir Paul McCartney


(CONCERT REVIEW) MERLE HAGGARD ” WORKING IN TENNESSEE TOUR “LIVE @ THE
“SNOQUALME CASINO” 06-03-2012

Posted on June 4, 2012 by ericturnbow


� � � � � �� �� � � �� THE POP MUSIC JOURNAL OF ERIC TURNBOW



(This is the actual Ticket I� bought @ The Show 06-03-2012)!

I always love to see Merle Haggard Live! Today was no exception! This was My
first trip to The Snoqualme Casino. My friend Robert Small� decided to ride a
long and keep me company. So I left Olympia at 4:45. (Note to self. Next time I
split for Snoqualme leave @ 4pm instead)!� It was a long 67 mile haul and I
missed the exit and wasted a lot of time back tracking and asking directions.
But in the end I had about 15 minutes to spare and never missed a single song!
It was an adventure, so I would have it no other way!
������� (Here is the Casino in Snoqualme…. Here we come Hag)!
I stopped and sprung for a $30 black Concert T-shirt and a small sticker that
says “Merle Haggard Drive”. Hustled in side to catch the Opening Act, Merle Lee
Haggard Jr. sang about 4 songs. He is Merle’s oldest son. He used the same all
pro Nashville band that His Dad uses “The Strangers”. This was the last concert
of this “Tennessee Tour”. Merle’s band,� had His Youngest son on Lead Guitar,
His daughter and His wife on back up vocals. It was a family affair. They had
altogether a drummer, bass player, Fiddle Player, Hot piano Player, acoustic
guitarist, Two Family� singers think I counted an 8 pieces all together. His
young Son on Lead Guitar, and Merle Himself.� This band has won “Best Touring
Band”� from The Academy of Country Music for 9 years in a row!

(This is a killer cd! I got My copy for $10, but they were $20 @ The show)

I was wondering what he would open with, and what songs he would play. I found
out soon enough. Unfortunately� there was Huge Giant Man already about 6 foot 5,
with a black Stetson hat that made him well over 7 feet tall sitting right in
front of Me! I had to sort of cock my neck and peer around that Dude all damn
night! Oh well, Merle still was fantastic, and how could He not be? Here is the
set. I wrote them all down on my ticket envelope!

� � � � (I am wearing My cool concert T-shirt and showing my sticker)!

Merle Haggard ” Working� in Tennessee Tour”:� Live @ The “Snoqualme Casino”
06-03-2012

� � � � � (Here is Merle and Friend,� on a recent stop from this very tour)!

SET LIST:� Live @ The “Snoqualme Casino” 06-03-2012
Merle’s Opener: “Ramblin’ Fever”
Mama Tried
White Lightening
Silver Wings
I think I’ll Just stay Here and Drink
Are The Good times Really over for Good?
Rainbow Stew
If I could Only Fly
Big City (Fiddle tune)
Sing My Back Home (For all Ex-Cons)
Pancho and Lefty
I wish I was 30 Again
Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down
Fighting Side of Me (For Military Personnel)
Today I Started Loving You Again
Working in Tennessee (Title song to the new record)
Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star
Oakie From Muskokee (Written for His dad of Oklahoma)
������� (They gave Him His Own street! Local Boy Made Good)!
Merle famously never gives any encores.� The show was a short Hour and 15
minutes of Merle. Total Hour and and Half!� But here is the evidence that he
does no curtain call, These are the lyrics to the great song Footlights, but He
did not sing it tonight. He did last October when He played in Selton though.�
It was a lot better than this show, because it was closer and it had Kris
Kristofferson in the band!
Footlights� Merle Haggard Key of C

I live a kind of life
Most men only dream of
I make my living writing songs
And singin� them

I�m a whole lot older now
And there�s still no place to go when it�s over
So I�ll hide my age and make the stage
And try to kick the footlights out again

I throw my old guitar across the stage
And watch my bass man takes the ball
And the crowd goes nearly wild
To see my guitar nearly fall

After twenty years of pickin�
We�re still alive and kickin� down the wall
Tonight we�ll kick the footlights out
Walk away without a curtain call

Tonight we�ll kick the footlights out again
And try to hide the mood we�re really in
Might not put on our old instamatic grins
Tonight we�ll kick the footlights out again, kick �em out

I live a kind of life
Most men only dream of
And I make my living writing songs
And singin� them
****************************************

����������������� � � � � � � Note: Eric Turnbow may be reached at:
(360) 943-7039��� Email:� etcosmic2000@yahoo.com

����������������������

I have one word for today! That is MERLE! Yes the country legend is playing in
Tacoma @ The Emerald Queen Casino @ 8:30pm. For 3 Decades now Merle has been my
al time favouritism country music performer! This will be at least My 8th time
to see Him, but feels more like 9! I did research it though! By far the best
show was in Shelton @ The Casino with Kris Kristofferson, but He Never
disappoints. Go Merle! I am ready to enjoy another night of killer tunes!
10-28-1998 @ Tacoma Dome Fire-fighters Fund raiser
03-08-2005 @ The Paramount Seattle (Blew away Dylan, the Head-Liner)
02-11-2008 @ Paramount Seattle (Niko opened the show)
04-03-2009 @ Paramount Seattle (Acoustic show co-headlining Kristofferson)
04-30-2010 @ Emerald Queen Casino (Son opened with another Country band)
09-24-2011 @ Shelton’s Lucky Eagle Casino (Full show w/ Kris Kristofferson)
BEST!
06-03-2012 @ Snoqualmie Casino (Son Merle Lee Haggard Opener)
04-04-2013 @ Emerald Queen Casino (Youngest Son Opens the show)

Eric TurnbowMerle’s Set List 04-05-2013 Emerald Queen Casino in Tacoma : Big
City, Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star, Silver Wings, If I could Fly, Great Afternoon,
That’s the Way Love Goes, Lonesome Fugitive, Sing Me Back Home, Runaway Mama,
Are The Good times Really Over for Good, if We Make It Through December, Blues
song, Mama Tried, Working Man’s Blues, fighting Side of Me, Working in
Tennessee, Take Me Back to Tulsa, Oakie From Muskokee, Happy Birthday Merle 76
Years Young 04-06-2013!

The actual ticket from the actual show! Very cool. Even Elvis digs it!



Posted in Concert Reviews, Merle Haggard!


(CONCERT REVIEW) RODGER WATERS “THE WALL RECONSTRUCTED TOUR” 05-24-2012 IN
SEATTLE WA.

Posted on May 26, 2012 by ericturnbow


� � � � � �� �� THE POP MUSIC JOURNAL OF ERIC TURNBOW

�������� � � �� (The actual ticket from the actual show of course)!

(Concert Review) Rodger Waters “The Wall Reconstructed Tour” ����� 05-24-2012� @
The Key Arena in Seattle WA.

Rodger Waters brought his amazing “The Wall Reconstructed Tour” to the Key Arena
is Seattle WA. on 05-24-2012. This was one of the best Rock and Roll Theater
Spectacles I have seen in a long time! Seriously!

����������������

(I left for the show with my ticket, phone, and a lunch that included some
“Chicken Florentine”)

I left @ 5:25, and it ended up being a mistake. (Note to self. Leave at 4pm next
time)!� I was on traffic literally for 2 full hours. From Olympia to Seattle.� I
made 2 more mistakes. Coming in by the EMP Rock Museum there was an empty lot
for a $5 fee but� wanted to check our normal spot just off “Denny Way”.� I got
there and there is a new sign that says “No Parking” to the corner where we
usually park. So I kept driving making my way through the back streets we
usually walk. I passed another lot I should have stopped at for $7. But time was
ticking away. It was already 7:20 I had been on the road for just about 2 hours.
So right there where they park all the buses and stuff I ended up parking in a
garage and paying $20! I was out of time and frustrated that I had not taken
that first stall for $5. But this was just mere blocks from the venue, Right
around and the corner. I had no choice if I was to be on time.

��������������������� � � � � � (Coming out of the tunnel from I5 exit 167)

No time for cocktails. I basically went in and went to my seat. But it was a
GREAT SEAT! So much better than Tacoma. It was actually better and closer than
Rene and Carol’s, who were also at this show, but they were strait on behind the
sound board where is where I wanted to be. I had to turn my neck all night, When
the pig came floating by I was only abut 20 feet away from it! This particular
performance of “The Wall” was really tweaked, and rehearsed.�������

������������������

(Early in the show Rodger is joined by a local choir)!

The lead guitarist was G.E. Smith who played with Hall and Oates in the 80′s and
was the Band Leader on Saturday Night live for many years. He is awesome at
that. And this show had so many visuals and theatrical triumphs. It was
absolutely stunning. And the sound was just perfect! You could actually feel the
thunder of the helicopters and the stereophonic surround sound of the bullets in
the machine guns. Totally cool!

���������������������

(This is the actual ticket from The Tacoma Show on -12-11-2010)

I was lucky enough to have seen this show already on 12-11-2010. The show had
totally evolved and gotten way better! My seats were better, as reflected by the
price, but Rodger had tweaked this show to perfection. This performance was
substantially better sounding and visually uplifting. It just worked perfect in
every aspect! His band was amazing as well! Consisting of� Dave Kilminster
(guitar), GE Smith (guitar, bass), Jon Carin (keyboards), Harry Waters (Hammond
organ), Graham Broad (drums), Robbie Wyckoff (vocals), Jon Joyce, Pat Lennon,
Mark Lennon, and Kipp Lennon. They were tight and right on the money!

� (A shot of the show in Portland just a few days before the Seattle show)!


SET LIST

The Wall album is played in its entirety, as well as two songs not in the
original release�”What Shall We Do Now?” and “The Last Few Bricks“[26]�both of
which were also played at every concert during The Wall Tour in 1980�1981, and
documented on the album Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980�81,
released in 2000. “One of My Turns“, “Don’t Leave Me Now” and “Run Like Hell”
are all transposed one key down to accommodate Waters’ vocal range.


SET ONE

 1.  “In the Flesh?“
 2.  “The Thin Ice“
 3.  “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)“
 4.  “The Happiest Days of Our Lives“
 5.  “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)“
 6.  “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) Reprise” The Ballad Of Jean Charles de
     Menezes.
 7.  “Mother“
 8.  “Goodbye Blue Sky“
 9.  “Empty Spaces“
 10. “What Shall We Do Now?“
 11. “Young Lust“
 12. “One of My Turns“
 13. “Don’t Leave Me Now“
 14. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)“
 15. “The Last Few Bricks“
 16. “Goodbye Cruel World“


SET TWO

 1.  “Hey You“
 2.  “Is There Anybody Out There?“
 3.  “Nobody Home“
 4.  “Vera“
 5.  “Bring the Boys Back Home“
 6.  “Comfortably Numb“
 7.  “The Show Must Go On“
 8.  “In the Flesh“
 9.  “Run Like Hell“
 10. “Waiting for the Worms“
 11. “Stop“
 12. “The Trial“
 13. “Outside the Wall“


�


(A SHOT OF THE SHOW IN PORTLAND JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE SEATTLE SHOW)!

During the show the road crew literally builds an entire wall right before your
eyes. Pretty soon the band is totally blockaded from site and all you see it
this huge projection. Rodger Waters stays in the limelight for all but 2 songs I
would say. I was especially touched when He spoke about our Brutal Police state
and the death of� Brazilian�Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot in the head
seven times at Stockwell Road Tube station in London. They also displayed photos
of dead soldiers from� war conflicts during the��The Thin Ice� and intermission.

�������������� (What an amazing spectacle of a killer show this was)!

I sat next to a European Dude named Alex who is a web site designer. We made
friends and even went for a beer together at the 25 minute intermission. But the
line was too long and I had to skip it. After the show, My new friend Alex and I
went to the souvenir shop together where I bought a key chain and a� button
pack. I gave him my info and I hope He sends me and email.� Alex paid the same
as I did for His ticket, and He got it early, so it seems that I paid the right
price for this seat, which was a very good location for this killer show!

(Beautiful shot of the “Space Needle” as I was coming into town. Note the
reflection of my camera lens on the left)!

After the concert, and the purchase of my souvenirs, I ended up going out the
wrong door and was on the other side of the Arena. But this happened to Me once
before and I remembered and was able simply walk around the huge building and
find the trucks. I was parked just across the street from these trucks. It was
an easy find. But I was unable to drive down to “Alaska Way” and had to go a
mile the wrong way, and then finally turn around. There was train blasting by at
the “Spaghetti Factory”, so I went down a few miles before I finally waited for
the train. But when I got on the right road, I hot a detour sign. So I followed
the detours and finally got to Seahawks and Mariners land. I got on the free-way
where we always do.

(Here we are, with� Rene and Carol after the show singing a Karaoke track from
the concert “Another Brick in the wall”). That’s fitting!

I ended up meeting up with Rene and Carol at The Viking Lounge in Lacey WA.� for
an after show rendezvous!� I am happy to say they never waited on me there so I
spent no money! I also got to sing “Another Brick in The Wall” appropriately,
with bragging rights, since I had just come from this Monumental show I might
add! So that was fun. I spent only $40 on the trip for parking and buttons, plus
gas I guess. But I get 33 MPG so that was kind of minimal maybe? Especially for
such a mind blowing and amazing experience that I will never forget!

I

(These are the souvenirs I bought @ The show)

(When Rodger sings “Mother” early in the show they project video from Him
singing it @ Earl’s Court in London 1980. Synced up!)


SO THAT’S THE POOP. THE SHOW WAS BRILLIANT! I THINK ANYONE WOULD HAVE LOVED IT!
IN FACT I WILL PLACE IT IN THE TOP 5 SHOWS OFF ALL TIME THAT I HAVE ATTENDED. UP
THERE WITH PAUL MCCARTNEY 2005, SIMON AND GARFUNKLE REUNION IN 2003, NEIL YOUNG
UNPLUGGED “SILVER AND GOLD TOUR” IN 1999, AND OF COURSE THE RODGER WATERS “DARK
SIDE OF THE MOON” TOUR IN 2008. AND I HAVE SEEN HUNDREDS OF GREAT SHOWS, SO THIS
MEANS A LOT FOR ME TO MAKE SUCH A STATEMENT!� IT WAS JUST TOO GOOD TO DESCRIBE!
LIVE IS BEST! FOR SURE. THIS WAS A SWEET BIRTHDAY GIFT!

������������ (This was a visually stunning part in the show)! Wow!

Note: Professor Turnbow may be reached at:
(360) 943-7039��� Email:� etcosmic2000@yahoo.com



Posted in Concert Reviews


RESUME FOR ERIC TURNBOW (WANT TO HIRE HIM?)

Posted on April 16, 2012 by ericturnbow

Resume for Eric Turnbow� (Want to hire him?)

OBJECTIVE

* To allow perspective Employers to see my abilities to work with them in�� a
professional environment. I am looking for a perspective job. They can also
check out References of people I know and have worked for to see how I may best
“Fit” their Organization.

SKILLS
* Communicator /Marketer/
* Master Of Ceremony
* Entertainer Singer Songwriter and Performer
* Musician (guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals)
* Mobile Digital D.J. plus Karaoke
* Small Business Owner
* Investor / Home Owner with a Mortgage Paid if Full
* Computer skills
* Journalism / Web Development
* Collating, bulk mailings
* Delivery
* Sales
* Telemarketing
* Mentor
* Manager
* Writer
* 12 Years State Worker Experience

EXPERIENCE (Most Recent)
E.T.�s Cosmic Karaoke and Digital D.J.

Owner and Manager, March 1993 to Present

Phone (Since 1983)� 360 943 7039

email (Since 2000)� etcosmic2000@yahoo.com

Legacy Website:� http://www.ericturnbow.com/

* Manage Sub Contracting Workers
* Contract D.J. Events
* Set Up Digital D.J. Systems and host the show
* Purchase and maintain high technical music gear
* Organize digital Files
* Perform at: Weddings, Dances, Private parties, Corporate events.
* Expert at Sound Mixing and All Pro Digital Disc Jockey

Most Recent House gig starting July 3, 2014

Westgate bar & Grill: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 9pm to 1 am

(Digital Disc Jockey & Karaoke Host)

 * Phones
   (253) 756-7072
 * Email
   janine.zaspel.5@facebook.com
 * Ask for Westgate’s email
 * Address
    * 5928 N. 26th st.
    * Tacoma, WA, United States 98407

 * Website
   http://westgatebarandgrill.com

Past House Job:� started 01-2013 @ “Farrelli’s Woodfire Pizza” Dupont� (Moved on
in March 2014)�� EVERY SATURDAY 9pm to 1AM

Manager� “Tammy (Farellis Dupont Manager)” <tammy@farrellispizza.com

 * 1590 Wilmington Dr.
 * DuPont, Washington 98327

Phone (253) 912-5200 Email jen@farrellispizza.com Website
http://www.farrellispizza.com





Karaoke and Digital Disc Jockey HISTORY:

Digital D.J. & Karaoke Host, June 2010 to November 2012
*Karaoke Host and Digital Disc Jockey on� Friday and Saturday Nights @ “Heroes
Lounge” Sports Lounge corner of Bitar and Division in the Cascade Community
Center Fort Lewis� Bldg 2400, Bitar and Dvision, Fort Lewis, WA 98433
General manager Lori Howdeshell

Contact: 1 253 964 0331

Email:� lori.howdeshell@us.army.com

__________________________________

Digital D.J. & Karaoke Host, October� 2011 to May 2012

Souty Bay Pub and Eatery

Address
3323 South Bay Rd. NE, Olympia, WA 98506 � Get directions
Phone Contact
1 360.456.0809

General manager
Eric & Suvantha Dickerson / Keith Lampard & Mark Christensen (owners)




TIM SMIEDALA,� PUB MANAGER

Owners Keith Lampard and Eric Dickerson

Previous Employer:
Viking Lounge, 6318 Martin Way Lacey, WA 98516
Contact Keith Milligan, The Owner : 360-456-1555
Digital D.J. & Karaoke Host, May 2006 to May 2009
* Sub-contractor for The Viking Lounge.� 7 Days a week, I was
the Host and M.C. and ran fair Karaoke Rotations. Maintained
the equipment; managed; subcontracted employees for the� service. Provided
Costumer service; purchased advertising; built business sales by bringing in
customers. This was a 7 day a week job for my company.
___________________________________________________

 * It is our 20 Year Anniversary this month! E.T.’s Cosmic Karaoke started out
   in March 1993. Our first gig was at Nickelby’s back in the day with the
   original owners. Aside from all the great weddings, dances private parties we
   have performed, it is nice to thank and acknowledge the Clubs and Lounges
   that provided regular full time work every week! Farrelli’s Pizza in Dupont
   2006, and 2012 and 2013, The Keg 1998 through 2008 (now defunct), Puerta
   Vallarta in Yelm and Eatonville, 2000 through 2004, The Viking Lounge 2006
   through 2009, Heroe’s Sportsbar @ Fort Lewis 2010 through 2012, Magoo’s Pizza
   in Chehalis 1993 through 1995, South Pacific 2005, plus 2012, and 2013, and
   so many more including Mehfils, O’Malley’s West Side Lanes, Sail Inn Tavern
   Shelton, Moore’s Restraunt in Shelton, Ruthies Pub in Winlock,� Cedar Inn,
   South Bay Pub, The Pig Bar, Malaki Das Mexican, Urban Onion, Baily’s, Diamond
   Jim’s and Cheers West in Tacoma 1993 and 1994), Short Stop and Cross Keys in
   Longview 1994, Castlerock Eagles, Olympia Eagles, Lacey Moose lodge, Pacific
   Bar and Grill, Nisqually Pub, Tumwater Inn, Roadside Family Pub in Shelton,
   JR’s Pub in Shelton, fircone tavern in Shelton, Pioneer Restaurant in
   Montesano, D & D’s Dew Drop Inn in Shelton, Norton Moose Lodge, Powder Keg in
   Tenino, Tenino Eagles, Chehalis Eagles, Cross Keys, The Shortstop in
   Longview, The Hungry Bear in Shelton,� Lumberyard Inn in Shelton, The golden
   Pheasant, Sail Inn Tavern, Frosy’s in Napavine. Paul Bunyan in Onalaska,
   Riverboat Inn, Ruby Tuesday’s on Grahm, Capital Bar and Grill, The ruptured
   Duck in Pouslbo, Dianond Jims Tacoma, Cheers West Tacoma, Lake Nawatzel
   Shelton, Hoodsport Inn, Red Barn, Fatso’s Tavern, and the list goes on and
   on. So thanks! 20 years! Wow!
   7 March at 17:14 � Like
 * Cosmic Karaoke and Digital D.J. – Karaoke In Olympia,Tacoma,Shelton “The Only
   Tavern” in Oakville was the second Gig! I had to use a home stereo system for
   the PA at first, and it was just terrible. So I made a trip to Music 6000 and
   bought a pile of sound gear!
 * ********************************************************

State of WA. Department of Printing, 7580 New Market Street
SW, Tumwater, WA 98501 (360) 570-5555
(Title) Book Binder Three,� January 1980 to November 1992

* Bindery work
* Drilling
* Stitcher Trimmer (Assembly Line)
* Perfect Binder (Assembly Line)
* Assistant on Three Knife
* Padding Machine
* Fork Lift/Pallet Jack Operator
* Box Merchandise off the cutters
* Shrink wrap
* Recycling
* Shipping and Receiving
* Stocking
* Collating
* Special Mailings
* Warehousing

C.A. Communications, Box 115, Olympia, WA 98507
Office Worker, January 1975 to January 1980

* Collating
* Delivery
* Warehousing
* Shipping and Receiving
* Bulk Mailings
* Janitor
* Errand Runner

EDUCATION
Capital High School, 2707 Conger Ave NW Olympia, WA� 98502-4590
High school Diploma, June 1979

HOBBIES
* Internet Surfing (My-space and Facebook, You Tube, and Beyond!)
* Music
* Motorcycle Riding
* Attending Concerts
* Guitar Playing
* Song-writing
* Karate
* Photography

RECOGNITION

I appeared in Michael Moore�s 2007 Academy Award Nominated Documentary called
�Sicko�. I had 72 seconds of screen time and this movie went on to be the second
highest grossing National documentary film of all time. I attended the Seattle
film premier and met the producers of the film including the director Michael
Moore. This project created a lot of internet buzz, and I was featured in many
articles and videos, and radio spots all around the world. This greatly raised
my profile. It can be researched at� http://www.ericturnbow.com

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

* Feature Editor for High School Newspaper �The Capital Outlook�. I was involved
in the writing, editing, layout, and printing. I got straight A�s in the
subject of Journalism.

* I was on the Newspaper staff at all three of my schools: Boston Harbor
Elementary, Reeves Junior High, and Capital High School graduate in 1979 (GPA
3.6).

websites:

*https://www.facebook.com/eric.turnbow

*http://www.digitaldiscjockeynorthwest.com

*https://www.facebook.com/Digitaldiscjockey

*� http://www.cosmickaraoke.com

* http://www.ericturnbow.com

*http://www.myspace.com/ericturnbow

* http://www.myspace.com/cosmickaraoke

*https://www.facebook.com/CosmicKaraokeandDigitalDJ

* http://www.myspace.com/galacticnebula







Posted in Resume for Eric Turnbow


FRIENDS OF ERIC’S & ERIC’S FRIENDS

Posted on April 10, 2012 by ericturnbow

 

��������������������� ��������

 

� � � � � �� (Eric and Friend “Nisquali Pauli” @ Lakefair� 07-17-2019)

���������������

(My Facebook friends from 2010!)



(My Sister Katherine’s Facebook Friends in 2010)!

����� (Even More Facebook Friends, this is the Evan Ogden Collection)

������������������ (Eric and Josh went to Kiss on 11-15-2009)

���������� (This is the late Ro Helke, who was my best friend of a life time)!

����������������������������

(RIP Great friend and Music Mentor Rick Riley)!

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � (The Great Chuck West)…..

���������������

(Cayce Rodgers was in several bands with Me starting 1983)!



(Eric and his Friend Chris Ward @ The South Bay Pub in march 2012)!



(Class of Capital High School 1979 Reunion in 1999)! Many Friends!

(Old Friends since Kindergarten! Lance Campbell and Bruce Bassett)!



(Dale Shipman has been a cool friend since 2000)!

������������� (Beautiful school mate Julie in 2004 @ The Office Tavern)

(There is Bill Darkow @ The Office Tavern in 2004, Friends since the 70′s)

(Some great friends from the old days! Eric with Lynn Oleachea-ayala, Cayce
Rodgers, and� the Late Rick Riley @ The Olympia Eagles on 12-31-1983). The
Raging River Band!

���������������� (Classic late 70′s Stephan Aubuan and Dave Broyes)

�� (Friends Lucky Loren and Frank Black in Packwood 1991 with “Sage”)



(Friends Rick Masters &The Late Rodger Lawson with “Midnight Riders” )

(Friends Clyde Landsaw in 1986 The Band leader of “Midnight Riders” )


(TALENTED SINGER WANDA WEST IN 1986 LEAD SINGER: “MIDNIGHT RIDERS” )

(My friend Brett McCarron with “Local Hero Band” in 1983 @ 4th Ave Tav)

(My friends Rick Dousette, and Dave Knowblock with “Local Hero Band” in 1983 @
4th Ave Tavern)…..

(Classic “London”� Band with friends Evan Ogden, Dave Broyes, and David Sylverio
in 1979)!

(“Feedback Band” with friends,� The late Jerry Rosenberg, Kerry Martin, and the
great guitarist� Bill Garrick @ West Side Lanes in 1987)!

�� (My Friend Matt Powell and I ran a “The Dynamic Duo” back in 1995)

(Friends and Band Mates Lynn Oleachea-ayala, Cayce Rodgers, chill out @ The
Olympia Eagles on 12-31-1983). The Raging River Band!

���� (Shanalee was lead singer with Me in “Hard Rain” Pictured in 1991)

����������������� � � � � � � (Alan Benner…. Friends since 1987)

�������� � (Bill Endersby…. We met in 1980, and He is great guitarist)!

������������ (The great Bo Witmer, Friends and Musicians for Decades!)

���������� (Chris Ward and His Band. Friends for over 2 Decades)!

����������� (Doug Bremner…. Friends since 5th Grade @ Boston Harbour)

������ (This is John Trendal from England. We call Him “Doogle”)!

���� (Long Time Friends Maia Glover and Doreen Smith from 1978!)

(Beau Brennon, pictured left at a “Buddy Guy and George Thourougood concert back
on 07-24-2008 @ The Tuallup Amphitheatre).

(Pictured Here with awesome Jamie Klontz @ Heroes lounge in 2011)!

������ (Pictured here in the late 70′s with Kelda Gillis and Sue Mann)!

(Pictured with Friend Miriam Gash @ Ocean Shores summer of 2008)

��������������� (Playing music with Rene Edmont in Spring 2011)

(My first Seattle concert (Bad Company and Kansas) with Robley Gillis in 1976).
We were at the top of the Space Needle!

(Pictured Here in 1978 @ Capital High School with Vern Morgus, the shop teacher,
scuba diver instructor, and great Harmonica Man)!

(Donna and Evan Ogden, Friends since Reeves Middle school in1974)!

������������������������������ (Evan Ogden, Olympia Friendly)!

������������������������� (My Fantastic Facebook Friends of 2011)!

(The great Web-master and Friend Frank Davies Known since 2000)!

���������������������������� (More Facebook friends from 2010)!

��������� (Fellow Karaoke Hosts Gator and Julie! Since 1993)!

���� � � � � � � � �� (Elvis Impersonator and Friend George Lahew)!

������������������������������������������ (Glen the Gardener)!

(Friends Glen, Vic Horton, and the late Dewey Reed in the Fishtrap 70′s)

���������� (The great Gretchen Christopher of “The Fleetwoods”)

����� (Here I am in 2000 with Friend Lori Phillips @ The Coors Brewery)!

������ (Backing My friend Lary Glen Anderson @ The Tyee Mid 90′s)

������������������������ (Amazing Kids, Jamie and Joshua Dobbs)!

(This would be my great friend Jim Austin back in 2004)! Lets sing “For what
It’s Worth” or maybe “Ballad of John and Yoko”)?

������������������������� (This is Friend Robert Small in August of 2004)

��������������� (Friend and Musical Colleague Heather Jane Ristow)

������ (Ruby Jean Roberts is one special Friend I have known since 1993)!

���������� (Here is Tim Prellwitz, Computer Engineer and Friend)!

���������������

(Greg Ernst Taught Me Jazz Theory and lots of cool tricks on the guitar)!

 

 

(Eric on the phone is pictured with friends Rene and Carole Edmont, Josh Dobbs,
and Miriam Gash @ Lakefair 07-16-2011)!

������������������������ (Adam, Jamie, and Garrick Klontz in Seattle 2011)!

(Lovely Jess Mena, Daughter of the Late Rick Riley in summer of 2011)

���������������������������� (Friend Janis Smith in the Summer of 2007)

������������������������������� (Johnny Lewis and His Swing Band)

���������� (Here’s my friend Julie Evers feeding the ducks in 1994)!

������������������������������������� (Guitarist Johnny Lewis)

�������������������� (Computer genius Frank Davies in 2001)

����������������������������������� (The great Lawyer So-Kiem)

����������������������������� (T. Lee Holmes and wife Kathleen)!

������������������������������������� (Bob Zilk with Merlin in 2007)

���������� (Wedding bells for Lee and Lori Phillips is September 2001)!

��������������������������� (The great Randy Linder and Band)!

������������������������� (The Great Turnbow friend Mady Lund)…..

����������������� (Turnbow friends Marc and Mady Lund in 1994)

��������������������������������� (My Friend Marcella in 2012)!

��������������������������������������������� (Maia Glover and Son)

��������������������� (Merle and Bev Thompson, friends since 1980)!

������������������������������������� (My Friend Mike McDuff)!

���������������� (Jamming @ South Bay Pub with Mitch Sloan in 2011)

������������������������������ (The Great Vern Morgus in 1982)!

��������������������������� (This is My friend Lorinda Lassich)

��������������������������������� (The great Nisquali Pauli Braget)!

������������������ (Charles “Ollie” Oliver. Karaoke Kind and wizz Kid)!

�����������������

(Tim Prellwitz, friend and computer programmer)!

������������������������������������� (Teno Martinez in 1987)!

��������������������������������������� (Paul Thompson in 1981)!

�������������� (The Great Randy Linder and Bo Witmer)! Jam on Boys!

���������������������������� (Extraordinary Musician Phil Barnett)!

���������� (Beautiful Rebecca Cruise. Grade school Girl friend crush)!

���������������� � � � �� (The Great Rene and Carole Edmondt in 2012)

��������������������� (The Great Bob Zilk)! Bud light anyone????

��������� (Lori and Jim Howdeshell with Shirley and the Gang in 2007)!

����������������������������� (The Great Tim S. @ South Bay Pub)

������������������ (Local Musician Vicki Martinez with B/B. King)!

������������������������������������������ (Here is Tiffany in 2008)!

������������� � � � � � � � � � � � � �� (The Thompson Family)

������ (Jamming @ Bailey’s with the� Great Steve Mendoza (RIP) in 1994)!

�� (Fellow Boston Harbor Studens Teddy Mills and Karl Crabs in 2004)!

���������������� (Lots of Friends at Various Karaoke Gigs over the Years)!

��������������������������������

(Spiffy Lopez, Former Band Manger)

��������� (Eric jamming with The Great Gretchen Christopher 12-2011)

���������������������������������������� (The Reverend Lee Phillips)

���������������������������� (Fantastic Guitarist Rolf Johnson)!

(This is my best Friend of all time Ro Helke (RIP)…. The good days)!

�������������� �� (Here is “Guy” my friend and fellow� Karaoke Host)

�������������������� (Friend Miriam Gash Mirror Image from 2010)

������������������� ���������������� � � � � � (Eric with friend Marc Simon in
Israel 1981)

� (Deb and Paul Thompson in September 2011 @ Eric’s 8th Annual Party). I met
Paul @ Living Water Church in 1980!

�������������� (The Late “P.A. Bill, from Music 6000) we all miss Him!

��� � �� � (Sleepy Nisqualli Paulie 09-2011 @ The Annual Yard Party)������
������ (Friend Tom Debuque and His sister in law Janet Debuque
09-2011)��������������������������� (My Friend Young Josh Dobbs in 2009)

�� (Billy Brewster has been a friend of the Turnbow’s since the early60′s)!

(This is My friend John Z. McCauley, and his wife @ Heroes Lounge)

�� (This is My Friend Jeremy Dale Baker and Fianc�’ @ Heroes Lounge)

(This would be my Friend Daniel Arbogast Leading the charge @ Heroes Lounge Fort
Lewis)

(Denise Cobb (third Girl) and Friend Cherie Deckert (5th Girl) @ The Whiskey in
Olympia)!

����� (4th of July Jam on Black Lake 2011 with Rene Edmondt and Eric)

��� (Chris Ward Fans (or Groupies?) Denise Cobb and Cheri Deckert)!

������������������������������� (The great Lori Leonard Phillips)!

(Lori Number One Howdeshell and Eric jam @ Heroes Lounge 03-2012)

(In 1977 Eric, Evan Ogden, and Dave Broyles were the Band “London”)

������������������������������������ (Friends and Family 04-01-2012)

������������������������������ (Friends Ashlyn and Denise Cobb)

���� (Some of My friends from South Bay Pub Thursday Karaoke @ 7pm)

������������������� (My Friends Liana and Jamie from “Heroes Lounge”)

��������� �� (My Group of cool friends @ “Heroes Lounge 03-17-2012)

(Marci, Ashlyn, Denise, Cheri, Tim S., Chris Ward and more friends from South
Bay Pub Thursday Karaoke @ 7pm)!

���� (My friend, Guitarist Louis Van Camp Jamming @ South Bay Pub)

������������ (Singing @ South Bay Pub with Friend Denise Cobb)!

(My Friend Boyd from the Band “Good Wood” Live� @ Charlie’s2011)

���� (Mark Hopkins has known Me since I was 13! What a great Friend!)

��������������������� (Friend and Nephew Jesse Peil in 2004)

���������������� (My all Time Best Friend Ro Helke (RIP) in 2004 )

����������������������������� (Janis Smith in Shelton 06-08-2005)

�������������� (Friends Jim and Lori Howdeshell @ The Red Barn 2004)

��������������������� (With Friend Don Wood in 2007 @ The Viking)

������������� (Greg Crawford @ Ro’s Memorial on Oct. 12, 2009)

����������� (Beth and Jeff Glander @ Ro’s Memorial on Oct. 12, 2009)

��������������������� (Elvis crooner John Swales with His wife Linda)

���������������������������� (This is My friend Ray Gillespie in 2010)

������������������ (Here is My boating Friend, The great Terry P. Lee)

�� (Eric with Manager Lori Howdeshell @ The Heroes Lounge in 2010)

������������������������������� (Chillin’ with Bo Witmer in 2010)

��������������������������������������� (It’s a pile of Face Friends)!

��������������������������������� (My stylish Friend Roxanne)!

��������� (This is April Small. She is My friend and sometimes Neighbour)

(Ann Ogden Chapell, The Late Jeff Thompte, and Maia Glover in 1978)!

����� (Vintage Bremner Family, Friends to The Turnbows for 5 Decades)!

(Steve Bremner pictured with Jean Turnbow and Marc Hiopkins @ beautiful�
Fishtrap)!

��������� (Chuck West and Eric Performing at Cedars Inn in 2008)!

������������ (Eric and Handyman Friend� Bill Wake @ Black Lake 2008)

�������������� (My friend Brittany, pictured here @ The Viking on 10-2007)

������� � � (My friend, singer Carole Kapeliela, pictured here in 2008)

������������������������������������������������ (This is Diana)

���������� (This is a crazy group of Karaoke Viking Friends from 2007)

��������� (My friend Dr. Hipp did surgery on me in 1997 that saved My Life)!

 

��������� (Friend Dr. Carole Bucker, diagnosed Me and saved my life in 1997)

�������� (Classic shot of Eric and Lori Number One in 2007 @ The Viking)

����������������������������� (This is my Friend “Female Joey”)!

���������������������������������� (My friend Helen is a cool chick)!



(James is an awesome Dude)!



(Friend Larry, pictured with My Brother Tom)

���������������������� (Kris Lockrem is a great friend and Sound man)!

����������������������� (Jack is a talented entertainer and a lot of fun)!

�������������������������������� (Kendall is a good friend to have)!

��������������������������������� (Melissa is a talented and fun girl)!

�������������������������������������� (Kim is an Interesting Lady)



(Ruth Osberg was a lot of fun. Pictured Here with Vikki T. and E.T. in 1984)

�� (I have known Randy Sloan since the 70′s and my High school days)

����� (Robert Ayers and Family were friends of The Turnbow’s for Years)!

����������� (I have always had a lot of respect for Guitarist Rolf Johnson)!

(Marc Morris has been a Family friend for Decades! Pictured here in the 70′s
with the late Sam Miller, and Brother Marc Turnbow)!

����������������������� (DJ Scott Davis is a friend and colleague)

��� (Beautiful Sheila Hendricks Roy was My sisters best friend, and mine)!

������������ (Shirley Driggers is a cool broad and great friend to have)!

����������������������������� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � (Tammi Westby is a
good egg)

������������� (Tim Prezzwitz and Eric in the cowboy mode in 2009)

���������� (Tom Wasnock is one cool dude!� Fun duet partner as well)!

���������������������� (I have know Tanya Hird since the late 80′s)

(This is “Turner’ but his friends call Him “Moses”). One cool Dude!

��������� (My Friend Wendy from Yelm can really sing a song or two)!

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Friends of Eric's & Eric's Friends


IN MEMORY OF AUNT VIRGINIA DEMARIS (RIP 02-2008)

Posted on April 8, 2012 by ericturnbow

Here is a Eulogy from My Sister Katherine Peil about the Lovely Aunt Virginia
DeMaris!

�����������������������������
�(Aunt Virginia Demaris Pictured with Her Husband Carl, and Son Brian)




Dear friends and family,I deeply regret that I cannot be there, in the flesh, to
honor the life of this great lady.

If I had some magic pixie dust to eliminate the 3000 miles and 300 academic
commitments, I would be standing before you with a slide show of at least 3000
photos taken of or inspired by the lovely spirit Virginia Demaris. Instead, I am
challenged offer to my respects in 500 words or less.

On the other hand, I doubt that there is any way I could truly demonstrate in
words or actions the quantity and quality of love that I will forever feel for
this woman, for ours was a relationship that evolved over the course of 50
years.

(This is the Memorial Brochure)….

She was my Aunt Virginia, and from my earliest memories stood as a beacon of
matriarchal wisdom, generational family solidarity, and spiritual integrity.

In the early days, she helped tame the tree-climbing tomboy in me with
cookie-baking sessions, delicate lacy garments, and the secrets of social grace.
In those days, I held her in awe, as the world she represented was so far afield
from my free and blissful Utopian and Bohemian existence out on the Fish Trap.
Yet she managed her many challenges and responsibilities with a quiet strength
and dignity, and these were qualities that earned my utmost respect and became
standards for my own evolving identity. Still, at times I worried that her
polite reserve might mean that she was not as happy as she deserved to be. So in
moments when that familiar wicked twinkle would begin to shine in her eyes and
she would burst forth with some outrageously humorous comment, I found
reassurance that all was right in the universe.



� � � � � � � � � � � � � � �� (This is the Memorial Brochure)….

Then later, as my life unfolded, I would discover many more facets of my lovely
Aunt Virginia. For example, in my twenties we ended up working together at the
Washington State Department of Transportation. By then I was a mother myself,
providing the lion’s share of economic support for my young family and
experiencing the full-on disenchantment of real world life challenges,
limitations and injustices. It began to dawn on me that this amazing woman had
also been working full time, in various professional capacities throughout my
childhood, and yet still managed to produce all those fabulous goodies, throw
her amazing parties, host out-of-town relatives, enjoy a wide social circle,
volunteer for her church, stump for her political party AND find time to take me
to Lake Fair every year. My respect and admiration grew all the more, and while
she had set the bar quite high, I aspired to live up to my genetic legacy. So
when I would find myself sniveling about this or that, I would simply think of
my Aunt Virginia and tap the reservoir of her strength, character, and faith.But
perhaps the best part of our relationship began about 15 years ago, when I moved
back to Olympia for a 4-year period following some devastating personal and
family misfortunes.� Around that time she had not only lost her husband (my dear
Uncle Carl), but had also been confronted with some life threatening health
issues, most specifically congestive heart failure. In fact, she was reliant
upon oxygen for quite some time, and I worried � most selfishly � about losing
her. But she had come face to face with death, not only exhibiting her customary
level of courage and faith, but the encounter also brought about a sort of
spiritual transformation. I can only describe this as an emotional liberation of
sorts, one that somehow brought us onto the same page.What I mean by that is
that is up until then, we had been coming at spirituality from different
directions.� As a result, there had been a reserve between us, most likely based
upon my recalcitrant pattern of following my heart whenever I felt that social
convention was unduly burdensome to the trajectory of my soul. But something
about our particular life challenges at that time brought us into a level of
resonance, mutual respect, and unconditional love that would continue to
increase right up until our last visit at Panorama City.When I reflect on that
transformation now, I think that she fully embraced the goodness of human
autonomy as I fully embraced the goodness of human interdependence, the free
spirited libertine within me becoming one with the group soul of humanity that
she had always embodied. But whatever the case may be, the alchemy and timing
was just right, for from that point on we enjoyed each other on a whole new
level. While I had finally come to appreciate her sense of duty and social
conscience, she had stared death in the face and in true Christian faith saw
only love. Carrying that love within her, she then let her hair down a bit. I
saw that wicked twinkle far more often and it was almost as if she had finally
embraced the skin-kneed tom-boy in me and we were fully alive atop my favourite
tree laughing in the wind.

���������������������������

������������� (Aunt Virginia in 2002 @ Dad’s 75th Birthday Party)

With apologies for blowing my 500 word limit, I must share one particular moment
that stands out in time, back in the year 2000, I think. It was a particularly
sunny day and my plans had shifted such that I had nearly the whole day to
myself. On a whim, I decided that if she was up to it, I’d spring my Aunt
Virginia from Panorama and we’d run off to Westport for the day. Westport had
always been a sacred space for us, as our families had met there for annual
camping trips beginning when I was around 4 or 5 years old. The ocean had always
seemed to bring out the free spirited libertine in both of us. Feeling
completely safe, at home, and in unison with God As Nature, we’d both slip into
that familiar state of divine quietude against the rhythmic sound of the
pounding surf, offering ourselves up to the cleansing and revitalization
delivered by the powerful ocean winds. Then we would begin performing the ritual
of roaming the shore in search of natural treasures, sharing our discoveries
with childlike delight and challenging one another to find things evermore
beautiful than the last.� Although my lovely Aunt was coming to the end of her
time in the mortal coil, her attention less focused, her words less fluid, and
her limbs less strong and sturdy, she came alive that day. We slipped right into
our zone of quietude and spent several splendid sun-drenched hours simply
rolling with the wind and collecting agates in the surf. The turgid breezes kept
the heat at bay, and seemed to offer extra doses of vitality as she surprised me
with stamina comparable to my own. To my utter delight, her competitive spirit
was kindled as well and she put me to shame — yet again — with her masterful
agate-hunting skills, all the while insisting in her customary generosity that I
take home the spoils.

������������������� (Brother and Sister! Virginia and Avaton in 2002)!

But perhaps my favorite moment, was a comment she made as we neared the end of
our trek. We were on our way back to my car, strolling arm in arm, and at times
shoulder to shoulder trudging together up through the sand dunes and crab grass.
It was actually quite a ways, slow-going and difficult. We were both tired after
a day of full exuberance and she was, after all, now quite delicate. But we both
still basked in the bliss of the day.� The sun was sinking behind us casting
those long, lovely afternoon shadows that often marked the end of the most
savoury summer adventures. Up until that moment we had been reverently silent,
simply being with one another, and enjoying the mutual support � hers in the
quiet trust of my steady hand and physical balance, and mine deriving from the
entire legacy of this dear woman now fully living within me.

������������������������������

And then, as the car came within view and the real world beckoned, there must
have been a wicked gleam in her eye that I missed due to my intense focus upon
navigating the safest path for my precious cargo. For at that moment, she
pointed down to our long limbed afternoon shadows that sprawled before us
shoulder to shoulder, shadows that were topped by two wildly wind-whipped heads
looking something like a pair of gigantic dandelions having gone to seed, and
she quipped “Lovely hairdo my dear!” sending us both into peals of laughter.

(75th Birthday Celebration for My Father brought us together 06-20-2002!)

Well, I suppose you had be there to fully enjoy that special moment, but I’m
certainly glad I was. And as it turned out, that would be her last visit to the
ocean while in the mortal coil.

Now that she is gone, I hope her spirit can soar wherever it may be. I do know,
however, that I carry part of it within me, as I would not be the person I am
today without having known the truly lovely and amazing Virginia Demaris. And as
part of her legacy, I aspire to embody the transformation and unconditional love
we shared, to approach each relationship and live each day as if it might be my
last � with all the spiritual spontaneity, honour, and integrity that that
implies.

Thank you for listening.

Katherine Peil�� (February 2008)



������������������ (Classic Aunt Virginia with Her Beloved Husband Uncle Carl)


And Eric says: I remember this Memorial. It was very fitting as it was done at
Her favourite church that she had attended for Decades. This is the same church
that Uncle Carl was hired as a carpenter to hoist the cross all the way up to
the top! Dangerous work, but Uncle Carl did a great job! It was nice to catch up
with My cousins Curt and Brian Demaris that evening. We all loved Aunt Virginia
a lot!

My sister,� Marilyn Turnbow, faithful niece of Virginia,� got up with Her guitar
and played some beautiful and stunning pieces, which included so some Joan Baez
as I recall. She sang like a bird, and spoke a bit as well in tribute.

There were several Turnbow’s in the audience, including My Father, the Late
Avaton Winston Turnbow. He is Her proud Brother of course, and it was moving
when He got up on the stage in His best Sunday suit and� told a moving story
about Virginia as a young girl in Medford Oregon and the spirit of her kitty cat
that stayed around for many years after the cat had moved on. It liked to sleep
with her at night and keep her company. This was a very moving and sweet speech.

After singing some spiritual hymns, and a few more eulogies, we all headed to
the back of the church for some coffee and refreshments.

(Pictured in 1958. Son Brian and Husband Carl DeMaris @ Fishtrap)

************************************************************

Here is a comment we received about Virginia DeMaris:

Mr. Peters…I received your comment about my Aunt Virginia that I posted on my
website.:
http://www.ericturnbow.comYou said …. 24.19.97.111��� I worked with Virginia at
WSDOT. Knew her for many years. So many of her generation at WSDOT have passed
on. Sorry to hear she�s gone. Very fine lady.
Bob PetersI just wanted to let you know your comments were well received. The
Turnbow family loves and admires Virginia DeMaris a lot, and are very glad that
people like you treasure her memory as well!


Posted in (RIP) Aunt Virginia Demaris


E.T.’S MUSIC APPRECIATION LIST: TOP 25 FOR NOW….

Posted on April 6, 2012 by ericturnbow

********************************************************************

Eric Turnbow <etcosmic2000@yahoo.com> wrote:

So who are your top 25 artists? That is a tricky question. There are just so
many. But we could take a stab at it perhaps!



Wow, This is great idea. As an all pro DJ it is all about having the right cut
for the right occasion such as a wedding or toga party. This will be a very
useful tool for me. Thank you, and what a great idea. I rather enjoyed Marilyn
and Marc Lund’s lists, and have a lot of music in common with them. That is also
a lot of hard work and time consumption. Job well done! I like so much stuff
that a top 100 list would be a tough duty. I would have to pick almost all of
the Beatles albums for one thing! So I am going to do this my own way. I prefer
to mention Bands and not albums, but touch on my favourite work within the
artist catalogue. Thanks again for this idea and opportunity. I love music! It
makes my world go ’round. I also enjoy being online. Quite the hobby for me I
must say.

E.T.’s Music Appreciation list:
Top 25 for now……. (March 22nd, 2006)

01. The Beatles:


I think my favourite song has to be “A Day in he Life”, followed by “Across The
Universe”. I love the “golden Slumbers medley” from Abbey Road, “Julia”, and
“The Long and Winding Road”. and if I had to pick a favourite album I may
surprise you when I choose “Magical Mystery Tour”. I love that one, but I love
ALL of them baby! I am into the art and poetic lyrics. I love to know what
inspired the song, such as “Martha” was Paul’s sheep-dog, and the back ups on
“Girl” were all about the female anatomy “tit tit tit tit tit”. Paul has
confirmed this on the Anthology dvd’s. I know al ot more but this is just item
number one!

02. Paul McCartney:


I have to say his solo work is some of my all time favourite stuff. I own EVERY
cd, even the classical stuff. I really dig the early Wings stuff like
“McCartney”, “Ram”, and “Red rose Speedway”. An overlooked gem, for me anyway is
1997′s “Flaming Pie”. I dig that album. I really miss Linda a whole lot. A great
track that comes to mind for me is “Venus and Mars are all-right tonight”. My
least favourite Paul song is “Silly Love Songs”. He did not need to go there.
But Paul is definitely my favourite Beatles. 51% Paul to 49% John. Just my
opinion,

03. Bob Dylan:


His song-writing is almost UN-matched. His body of work is terrifying, and still
growing. I like it all. My favourite album though is still “Blood on The
Tracks”, followed by “Desire” and then maybe “Highway 61″. I am in awe of his
talent for creating words and music. Some of my all time favourites are “Forever
Young”, one of my theme songs, and “I’ll be your baby tonight”, “Just like a
Woman”, “Ride Me High”, and “Tonight I’ll be staying here with you”. Bob is just
so great. I wish he still had his melody together when he plays live though. The
records sound a lot better. I love it all.

04. Neil Young:
I have to go with “Harvest Moon”, “Comes a Time” and “Unplugged” as 3 of my
favourites. It’s all good. Innovative and great. I like the country acoustic
sounding Neil way more than grunge Crazy Horse Neil. Speaks to me a lot more. My
favourite tour was Neil Solo all the way talking to the audience and playing his
classic Martin and Gibson guitars. That is Neil in his best form, for me anyway.
Let me just mention Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young here as well! Or even just
CSN as a three some. Fantastic! Great stuff!

05. Eric Clapton:


I learned all his guitar licks when I was in high school. I dig the blues, and a
really special record for me was “E.C. Was Here”. The one with the female boobs
on it. I copied all those licks and learned the guitar that way. “We’re all the
Way” is a sentimental song, and his unplugged album if just great. Won 6
grammy’s in fact. The record “Slow hand” is also a favourite of mine.

06. Pink Floyd


Wow they are way at the top, in the top five. I just overlooked them! “Dark Side
of The Moon” is a masterpiece. Their spacey experimental music is just my cup of
tea. It was nice to see them reunite for “Live 8″ last summer,. Sentimental and
touching. Concept albums and great music. “Brain Damage” is a song that comes to
mind. Wow. That cd “Echoes’, with the greatest hits all run together is one of
my favourites. Great group.

07. Led Zeppelin


Also in my top five. My favourite cd is “Houses of the Holy” and I like
“Physical Graphitti a lot as well. The acoustic stuff like “That’s the Way”, and
“Going To California” are stand outs. That was one hell of a band! They still
hold up today. Long live Led!

08. Tom Petty:


Petty all night. What a great writer and Rock Icon. I like everything he did.
“Echoes” was one of his best for me. The song “Room at The Top of The World” is
a really great tune. I love his attitude. Of course “Full Moon Fever” has to be
mentioned. Incredible work.

09. Elvis Presley


Especially the later Vegas Elvis with James Burton on Guitar. What a band! Awe
inspiring. I like the album “Moody Blue” a lot, and the “Aloha From Hawaii”
ranks up there in live performances for me. I like the Mac Davis penned “Don’t
Cry Daddy”. and his version of “Pledging my Love”. Elvis was way cool. His bass
player Jerry Sheff was a monster, and Ronnie Tutt the drummers drummer. Quite a
catalogue.

10. Moody Blues


I am a huge fan! I must single out “Days of Future Past” and “In Search of The
Lost Chord”. I have sentimental memories attached to these albums. One stand out
track for me is ” I never Thought I’de live To Be a hundred”, and another is
“Are you sitting Comfortably”. Great band.

11. Fleetwood Mac:


Stand out albums “Rumours”, and the first album with the females together.
“Landslide” is one of my favourite songs ever. I love Stevie Nicks. She is my
favourite female rocker. This chemistry in this group works
well.

12. Rolling Stones.
Bone turned me onto “Beggars Banquet”, and some of that old stuff really rocks.
Especially the acoustic guitars. “Sticky Fingers” is a must for any collection.
A stand out song for me is “Salt of the Earth”. They nailed it with Paul Shaffer
Band on the New York 911 Tribute. “No expectations” is a stand out cut for me as
well.

13. The Eagles


I love the harmony in this group. “7 Bridges Road” is a great song to learn
harmony on. They are classics. I love the “Desperado” cd. It is like a concept
album. Another stand out for me is “The Last Resort” from Hotel California.
There is a lot of great tracks. Too many to list.

14. The Allman Brothers Blues Band

That Duane Allman and his slide guitar! I am hooked. The live album “Live at The
Fillmore” still ranks as one of my top ten cd’s of all time. “Dreams I’ll Never
See”, and “One Way Out”, Fabulous. That Southern music has a rocking kick and
influenced my bass and guitar playing tremendously.

15. Merle Haggard


I know he is old and country, but man, Merle is my favourite good old boy. Just
great. “That’s the Way Love Goes’, is a stand out track for me, as well as
“Heaven is a drink of wine” and “Silver Wings”. He has lived his music and as
far as country goes, he is the best for me.

16. Lynyrd Skynrd


Man I love the classic band before the plane crash. “Simple Man”, is one of my
theme songs, and you can’t go wrong with “Free bird” as a rock anthem. I grew up
with that group, and still listen to the street survivors to this day. They just
made the hall of fame last week! About time!

17. Aerosmith


Americas Rolling Stones, but way hotter, live at least. They rock. My favourite
record of theirs is “Pumped” with stand out tracks like “Other side” and “What
it Takes”. Classic stuff is good and holding up well like “Seasons of Wither”.
They are real comrades of rock.

18. Simon and Garfunkle


Wow. The songs are right on. “The Only Living Boy In New York” is a great track.
I love that “Sounds of Silence” album. The chemistry and song writing was really
spot on. No doubt. Terrific! “Kathy’s Song” another great one. All their music
was fantastic come to think of it.

19. The Who


“Tommy” is still one the best concept albums to date. I love it. Great rocking
band. Great songs. “Behind Blue Eyes” is a stand out song. “Guadrophenia”
another great piece of work. Sad to say 2 are dead now. Their music will live on
for eons.

20. Grateful Dead


“American Beauty” is my favourite record of theirs. I love “Ripple” and all the
stuff that Robert Hunter wrote. Great jam band, and great music catalog.

21. Kansas


I have always been a huge fan. I guess “Left overture” and “Point of no Return”
are stand outs for me. They are unusual and just great. “Magnum Opus” was a song
I always liked.

22. Nora Jones


I gotta get a girlie here. “Come Away With Me” is a fine record. I just love it.
Ravi Shankar is her dad so she has a Beatles connection as well. “Don’t Know
way” is a stand out cut for me.

23. Billy Joel


Love the Piano Man. He has such a great volume of work that stands out. One of
my favourite records of his is “Innocent Man’. The lyrics on “We didn’t Start
the fire” are clever and really good. Great songs.

24. Elton John

“No Sacrifice” is one of my favourite songs. “Your Song” is another stand out.
His partnering with Bernie Taupen came close to Lennon and McCartney and their
work is just great. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” is a classic and who does not
like “Crocodile Rock”. Sir Elton. Go dude.

25. Shawn Mullins


A lot of people do not know him well, but he speaks to me. His album “Souls
Core” is one of the best. Nice acoustic and mellow songs. His deep voice singing
straight from the heart. “Gulf of Mexico” is a real stand out song for me. Check
that album out.

This is just the tip of the ice berg, Top 25 for now.
There is much much more. I assure you. Look at (CCR,
John Mellencamp, The Doors, Hendrix, Stevie Ray
Vaughn, Gordon Lightfoot, Crosby Stills and Nash, Joan
Baez, Leonard Cohen, Bad Company,) and so many more to
come! Wow. This is fun. Thanks for indulging me.

Eric Turnbow
Music Lover…………..

 

The Great Marc Lund Responded to this cool list of Music Favourites!

Eric,

Great list!� Obviously we have a lot of the same faves, but lots of differences,
too.� Through your first 5, I’d say my only difference of note would be that I
love Neil with Crazy Horse, in addition to the acoustic Neil.� I still think
“Everybody Knows this is Nowhere” is a masterpiece that has easily stood the
test of time.� Saw Neil at Farm Aid last fall.� He did a great version of Fats
Domino’s “Walkin’ To New Orleans.”

Your Dylan picks are mine as well, along with the Bootleg Series cds I put on my
list.

With Clapton, you didn’t mention Derek and the Dominos, but since you love Duane
Allman’s slide (as do I, but only because he was JUST FUCKING GREAT!), you gotta
love the Layla album.

In your next 5 we begin to go our separate ways a bit.� I like the Moodys, and
specifically the 2 albums you mention.� I still love the “dinosaur” stereo
effects on “In Search of the Lost Chord.”� Play that back to back with Joe
Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” for good laughs and good music.

I always thought Zep was a “good” band — until I heard the cd “How the West Was
Won” — and then I realized they were one of the greatest bands ever.� I don’t
know if you have their dvd “DVD,” but it’s spectacular and amazing.

Elvis???�� Haven’t really listened to much of the King.� I first heard him do
“Mystery Train”�about 45�years ago.� I was impressed then, and I’ve never
changed my mind about it.� I also have a Dylan cover album with Elvis doing
“Tomorrow Is A Long Time” and it is a stunner!� So maybe you could point me
towards listening to some particular album???

Artists 10-15��� I’m with you all the way on the Allman Bros.� Their box set
“Dreams” is a great one.� I like their early covers of Cream, Yardbirds, Jeff
Airplane, etc.� Love their demo version of “Dreams” with wah-wah guitar thrown
in.� I do admit to finding it impossible to explain how they continued to make
great albums forever after Duane died, but they did.

Haven’t ever really heard any Merle other than “Okie from Muskogie.”� Fleetwood
Mac is okay.� I know some think Stevie bleats rather than sings, but I always
feel her tongue in my ear when I listen to her.

I guess I consider the Eagles somewhat of a guilty pleasure, but they put out a
lot of good music that I really like.� As for the Stones, those geezers can
still rock.� I love all their early covers, especially Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King
Bee.”� If you listen to Slim and then Mick & the boys, then you can see they
copied him note for note –don’t care–I love it.

Your next 5….Lynyrd Skynrd and Aerosmith have never been bands I’ve listened to
much, tho’ I love Lynyrd Skynrd’s song “That Smell.”

I’ve already written you tons about Simon and Garfunkel, so I’m with you
there…and I will admit that their album “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is growing
on me.

I love the Who.� I od’d on Tommy a long time ago, but I can never get enough of
“Who’s Next.”� Some Grateful Dead puts me to sleep, but some of it is just
incredible.� “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead” are great records.� Not
sure which of their jam stuff I would say is their best.� Lord knows there is
thousands of hours of that stuff available.� Don’t know if you saw the movie
“Festival Express,” but the Dead were just fucking great in the movie, as were
Janis Joplin, the Band, the Flying Burrito Bros., Buddy Guy, etc.� If you
haven’t seen that movie, drop everything.� Is is just wonderful.

Your last 5 I gotta go a separate way.� I really like Elton’s “Tumble weed
Connection” album, and to a lesser extent, “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,” but
most of the rest of his stuff I can easily do without.

The other 4 are pretty much unknowns to me.� Other than the few FM hits Kansas
had, I’ve never really tuned into them.� Don’t know that I’ve ever heard any
Nora Jones, tho’ the name rings a bell.� I think the only Billy Joel song I ever
liked was “Allentown.”…and I’ve never heard of Shawn Mullen.

Here’s my 25 artists off the top of my head and in no particular order:

 1.  Bob Dylan
 2.  Richard Thompson/Sandy Denny/Fairport Convention
 3.  Neil Young
 4.  Van Morrison
 5.  Beatles
 6.  Stones
 7.  Who
 8.  Simon & Garfunkel
 9.  Van Morrison
 10. Frank Zappa and the Mothers
 11. Allman Bros
 12. Jimi Hendrix
 13. Janis Joplin (especially when with Big Bro)
 14. The Band
 15. Santana
 16. Rod Stewart
 17. Doors
 18. Camper Van Beethoven
 19. Credence
 20. Talking Heads
 21. John Lennon
 22. Steely Dan
 23. Joe Cocker
 24. Tom Petty
 25. Delaney and Bonnie

I know I snuck in a couple extras by putting RT, Sandy Denny and Fairport on one
line, but I couldn’t help myself,� Bad enough to have to leave the Eagles,
Byrds. Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello and the Police off the list…. I just
couldn’t bear leaving off Tom Petty and Delaney and Bonnie….

Keep on Rockin’


Marc

Posted in Music Appreciation


JOHN LENNON: (MY COOL DREAM) & DEFINITIVE INTERVIEWS

Posted on April 6, 2012 by ericturnbow
 * �
 * So before I get into the definitive Interviews, I would like to share a way
   cool dream that I had on 01-19-2006 that was way cool and very real and
   vivid! John Lennon alive? He sure was this day in my dream!In this exciting
   black and white dream vision I was lucky to run into John in down town
   Olympia for one of our “Lake-fair” celebrations. There he was just off 5th
   avenue playing a white piano just like the one from the “Imagine” movie, and
   singing all his hits as the cars drove by and the Locals gawked!� It was
   surreal.
 * 
 * 
 * 

So there I was just hanging out with Mick Jagger of all people watching John
perform, as plain as day. After the show we all got together for a “Pow Wow” and
the rest of Beatles were all there with us! They said they were going to tour
the States soon, but John was a wee bit rusty and wanted to go out alone first
to get His chops back!



John walked up to us at the bar, and aid that He really did not want to go on
tour and that Mick could very well just take His place! I protested and said
that the Billing� was not “Ringo, Paul, George, and Mick”! So we all have a a
laugh and John said “I really wouldn’t miss it for the world! I miss hanging
with The Boys”!� Way to to Johhny!� I loved this dream!�� (By Eric Turnbow)

So now it on to some of My Most Favourite and Definitive John Lennon interviews!
Lets enjoy!



 * 
 * 1980 Playboy Interview
   With John Lennon And Yoko Ono
   
   
   
   by David Sheff
   September 8-28, 1980
   Published January 1981
   
   
   
   A candid conversation with the reclusive couple about their years together
   and their surprisingly frank views on life with and without the Beatles.
   
   To describe the turbulent history of the Beatles, or the musical and cultural
   mileposts charted by John Lennon, would be an exercise in the obvious. Much
   of the world knows that Lennon was the guiding spirit of the Beatles, who
   were themselves among the most popular and profound influences of the
   Sixties, before breaking up bitterly in 1970. Some fans blamed the breakup on
   Yoko Ono, Lennon’s Japanese-born second wife, who was said to have wielded a
   disproportionate influence over Lennon, and with whom he has collaborated
   throughout the Seventies.
   
   In 1975, the Lennons became unavailable to the press, and though much
   speculation has been printed, they emerged to dispel the rumors — and to cut
   a new album — only a couple of months ago. The Lennons decided to speak with
   Playboy in the longest interview they have ever granted. Free-lance writer
   David Sheff was tapped for the assignment, and when he and a Playboy editor
   met with Ono to discuss ground rules, she came on strong: Responding to a
   reference to other notables who had been interviewed in Playboy, Ono said,
   “People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the
   world.” But by the time the interview was concluded several weeks later, Ono
   had joined the project with enthusiasm. Here is Sheff’s report:
   
   There was an excellent chance this interview would never take place. When my
   contacts with the Lennon-Ono organization began, one of Ono’s assistants
   called me, asking, seriously, “What’s your sign?” The interview apparently
   depended on Yoko’s interpretation of my horoscope, just as many of the
   Lennons’ business decisions are reportedly guided by the stars. I could
   imagine explaining to my Playboy editor, “Sorry, but my moon is in Scorpio —
   the interview’s off.” It was clearly out of my hands. I supplied the info:
   December 23, three P.M., Boston.
   
   Thank my lucky stars. The call came in and the interview was tentatively on.
   And I soon found myself in New York, passing through the ominous gates and
   numerous security check points at the Lennons’ headquarters, the famed Dakota
   apartment building on Central Park West, where the couple dwells and where
   Yoko Ono holds court beginning at eight o’clock every morning.
   
   Ono is one of the most misunderstood women in the public eye. Her mysterious
   image is based on some accurate and some warped accounts of her philosophies
   and her art statements, and on the fact that she never smiles. It is also
   based — perhaps unfairly — on resentment of her as the sorceress/Svengali who
   controls the very existence of John Lennon. That image has remained through
   the years since she and John met, primarily because she hasn’t chosen to
   correct it — nor has she chosen to smile. So as I removed my shoes before
   treading on her fragile carpet — those were the instructions — I wondered
   what the next test might be.
   
   Between interruptions from her two male assistants busy screening the
   constant flow of phone calls, Yoko gave me the once-over. She finally
   explained that the stars had, indeed, said it was right — very right, in
   fact. Who was I to argue? So the next day, I found myself sitting across a
   couple of cups of cappuccino from John Lennon.
   
   Lennon, still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and scruffy from lack of shave,
   waited for the coffee to take hold of a system otherwise used to operating on
   sushi and sashimi — “dead fish,” as he calls them — French cigarettes and
   Hershey bars with almonds.
   
   Within the first hour of the interview, Lennon put every one of my
   preconceived ideas about him to rest. He was far more open and candid and
   witty than I had any right to expect. He was prepared, once Yoko had given
   the initial go-ahead, to frankly talk about everything. Explode was more like
   it. If his sessions in primal-scream therapy were his emotional and
   intellectual release ten years ago, this interview was his more recent vent.
   After a week of conversations with Lennon and Ono separately as well as
   together, we had apparently established some sort of rapport, which was
   confirmed early one morning.
   
   “John wants to know how fast you can meet him at the apartment,” announced
   the by-then-familiar voice of a Lennon-Ono assistant. It was a short cab ride
   away and he briefed me quickly: “A guy’s trying to serve me a subpoena and I
   just don’t want to deal with it today. Will you help me out?” We sneaked into
   his limousine and streaked toward the recording studio three hours before
   Lennon was due to arrive.
   
   Lennon told his driver to slow to a crawl as we approached the studio and
   instructed me to lead the way inside, after making sure the path was safe.
   “If anybody comes up with papers, knock them down,” he said. “As long as they
   don’t touch me, it’s OK.” Before I left the car, Lennon pointed to a sleeping
   wino leaning against the studio wall. “That could be him,” Lennon warned.
   “They’re masters of disguise.” Lennon high-tailed it into the elevator,
   dragging me along with him. When the elevator doors finally closed, he let
   out a nervous sigh and somehow the ludicrousness of the morning dawned on
   him. He broke out laughing. “I feel like I’m back in ‘Hard Day’s Night’ or
   ‘Help!’” he said.
   
   As the interview progressed, the complicated and misunderstood relationship
   between Lennon and Ono emerged as the primary factor in both of their lives.
   “Why don’t people believe us when we say we’re simply in love?” John pleaded.
   The enigma called Yoko Ono became accessible as the hard exterior broke down
   — such as the morning when she let out a hiccup right in the middle of a
   heavy discourse on capitalism. Nonplused by her hiccup, Ono giggled. With
   that giggle, she became vulnerable and cute and shy — not at all the creature
   that came from the Orient to brainwash John Lennon.
   
   Ono was born in 1933 in Tokyo, where her parents were bankers and socialites.
   In 1951, her family moved to Scarsdale, New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence
   College. In 1957, Yoko was married for the first time, to Toshi Ichiyanagi, a
   musician. They were divorced in 1964 and later that year, she married Tony
   Cox, who fathered her daughter, Kyoko. She and Cox were divorced in 1967, two
   years before she married Lennon.
   
   The Lennon half of the couple was born in October 1940. His father left home
   before John was born to become a seaman and his mother, incapable of caring
   for the boy, turned John over to his aunt and uncle when he was four and a
   half. They lived several blocks away from his mother in Liverpool, England.
   Lennon, who attended Liverpool private schools, met a kid named Paul
   McCartney in 1956 at the Woolton Parish Church Festival in Liverpool. The
   following year, the two formed their first band, the Nurk Twins. In 1958,
   John formed the Quarrymen, named after his high school. He asked Paul to join
   the band and agreed to audition a friend of Paul’s, George Harrison.
   
   In 1959, the Quarrymen disbanded but later regrouped as Johnny and the
   Moondogs and then the Silver Beatles. They played in clubs, backing
   strippers, and they got their foot in the door of Liverpool’s showcase Cavern
   Club. Pete Best was signed on as drummer and the Silver Beatles left England
   for Hamburg, where they played eight hours a night at the Indra Club. The
   Silver Beatles became the Beatles and, by 1960, when they returned to
   England, the band had become the talk of Liverpool. In 1962, John married
   Cynthia Powell and they had a son, Julian. John and Cynthia were divorced in
   1968. Later in 1962, Richard Starkey — or Ringo Starr — replaced Best as the
   Beatles’ drummer and the rest — as Lennon often says sarcastically — is pop
   history.
   
   
   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 are 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: All right, 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 l-o-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 Star-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 caca.
   
   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 though 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 kidnaping 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 20s, 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 — ’cause 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: All right. 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.
   
   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 a lot 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” — “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 cafes 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: Twenty-four 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 not 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: A lot 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?

 * *********************************

 * 1980 Rolling Stone Interview
   With John Lennon
   
   
   
   by Jonathan Cott
   December 5, 1980
   Published January 22, 1981
   
   Two Other Rolling Stone Interviews
   With John Lennon
   
   1975 Rolling Stone Interview
   With John Lennon
   by Pete Hamill
   
   
   1968 Rolling Stone Interview
   With John Lennon
   by Jonathan Cott

 * 
   
   
   
   “Welcome to the inner sanctum!” says John Lennon, greeting me with
   high-spirited, mock ceremoniousness in Yoko Ono’s beautiful cloud-ceilinged
   office in their Dakota apartment. It’s Friday evening, December 5, and Yoko
   has been telling me how their collaborative new album, Double Fantasy, came
   about: Last spring, John and their son, Sean, were vacationing in Bermuda
   while Yoko stayed home “sorting out business,” as she puts it. She and John
   spoke on the phone every day and sang each other the songs they had composed
   in between calls.
   
   “I was at a dance club one night in Bermuda,” John interrupts as he sits down
   on a couch and Yoko gets up to bring coffee. “Upstairs, they were playing
   disco, and downstairs, I suddenly heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52′s for the
   first time. Do you know it? It sounds just like Yoko’s music, so I said to
   meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old axe and wake the wife up!’ We wrote
   about twenty-five songs during those three weeks, and we’ve recorded enough
   for another album.”
   
   “I’ve been playing side two of Double Fantasy over and over,” I say, getting
   ready to ply him with a question. John looks at me with a time and
   interview-stopping smile. “How are you?” he asks. “It’s been like a reunion
   for us these last few weeks. We’ve seen Ethan Russell, who’s doing a
   videotape of a couple of the new songs, and Annie Leibovitz was here. She
   took my first Rolling Stone cover photo. It’s been fun seeing everyone we
   used to know and doing it all again – we’ve all survived. When did we first
   meet?”
   
   “I met you and Yoko on September 17, 1968,” I say, remembering the first of
   our several meetings. I was just a lucky guy, at the right place at the right
   time. John had decided to become more “public” and to demystify his Beatles
   persona. He and Yoko, whom he’d met in November 1966, were preparing for the
   Amsterdam and Montreal bed-ins for peace and were soon to release Two
   Virgins, the first of their experimental record collaborations. The album
   cover – the infamous frontal nude portrait of them – was to grace the pages
   of Rolling Stone’s first anniversary issue. John had just discovered the
   then-impoverished, San Francisco-based magazine, and he’d agreed to give
   Rolling Stone the first of his “coming-out” interviews. As “European editor,”
   I was asked to visit John and Yoko and to take along a photographer (Ethan
   Russell, who later took the photos for the Let It Be book that accompanied
   the album). So, nervous and excited, we met John and Yoko at their temporary
   basement flat in London.
   
   First impressions are usually the most accurate, and John was graceful,
   gracious, charming, exuberant, direct, witty and playful; I remember noticing
   how he wrote little reminders to himself in the wonderfully absorbed way that
   a child paints the sun. He was due at a recording session in a half-hour to
   work on the White Album, so we agreed to meet the next day to do the
   interview, after which John and Yoko invited Ethan and me to attend the
   session for “Back in the U.S.S.R.” at Abbey Road Studios. Only a performance
   of Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre might have made me feel as ecstatic and
   fortunate as I did at that moment.
   
   Every new encounter with John brought a new perspective. Once, I ran into
   John and Yoko in 1971. A friend and I had gone to see Carnal Knowledge, and
   afterward we bumped into the Lennons in the lobby. Accompanied by Jerry Rubin
   and a friend of his, they invited us to drive down with them to Ratner’s
   delicatessen in the East Village for blintzes, whereupon a beatific,
   long-haired young man approached our table and wordlessly handed John a card
   inscribed with a pithy saying of the inscrutable Meher Baba. Rubin drew a
   swastika on the back of the card, got up and gave it back to the man. When he
   returned, John admonished him gently, saying that that wasn’t the way to
   change someone’s consciousness. Acerbic and skeptical as he could often be,
   John Lennon never lost his sense of compassion.
   
   Almost ten years later, I am again talking to John, and he is as gracious and
   witty as the first time I met him. “I guess I should describe to the readers
   what you’re wearing, John,” I say. “Let me help you out,” he offers, then
   intones wryly: “You can see the glasses he’s wearing. They’re normal plastic
   blue-frame glasses. Nothing like the famous wire-rimmed Lennon glasses that
   he stopped using in 1973. He’s wearing needle-cord pants, the same black
   cowboy boots he’d had made in Nudie’s in 1973, a Calvin Klein sweater and a
   torn Mick Jagger T-shirt that he got when the Stones toured in 1970 or so.
   And around his neck is a small, three-part diamond heart necklace that he
   bought as a make-up present after an argument with Yoko many years ago and
   that she later gave back to him in a kind of ritual. Will that do?
   
   “I know you’ve got a Monday deadline,” he adds,” he adds, “but Yoko and I
   have to go to the Record Plant now to remix a few of Yoko’s songs for a
   possible disco record. So why don’t you come along and we’ll talk in the
   studio.”
   
   “You’re not putting any of your songs on this record?” I ask as we get into
   the waiting car. “No, because I don’t make that stuff.” He laughs and we
   drive off. “I’ve heard that in England some people are appreciating Yoko’s
   songs on the new album and are asking why I was doing that ‘straight old
   Beatles stuff,’ and I didn’t know about punk and what’s going on – ‘You were
   great then; “Walrus” was hip, but this isn’t hip, John!’ I’m really pleased
   for Yoko. She deserves the praise. It’s been a long haul. I’d love her to
   have the A side of a hit record and me the B side. I’d settle for it any
   day.”
   
   “It’s interesting,” I say, “that no rock & roll star I can think of has made
   a record with his wife or whomever and given her fifty percent of the disc.”
   
   “It’s the first time we’ve done it this way,” John says. “It’s a dialogue,
   and we have resurrected ourselves, in a way, as John and Yoko – not as John
   ex-Beatle and Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band. It’s just the two of us, and our
   position was that, if the record didn’t sell, it meant people didn’t want to
   know about John and Yoko – either they didn’t want John anymore or they
   didn’t want John with Yoko or maybe they just wanted Yoko, whatever. But if
   they didn’t want the two of us, we weren’t interested. Throughout my career,
   I’ve selected to work with – for more than a one-night stand, say, with David
   Bowie or Elton John – only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I brought
   Paul into the original group, the Quarrymen; he brought George in and George
   brought Ringo in. And the second person who interested me as an artist and
   somebody I could work with was Yoko Ono. That ain’t bad picking.”
   
   When we arrive at the studio, the engineers being playing tapes of Yoko’s
   “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him” (both from Double
   Fantasy) and a powerful new disco song (not on the album) called “Walking on
   Thin Ice,” which features a growling guitar lick by Lennon, based on Sanford
   Clark’s 1956 song, “The Fool.”
   
   Which way could I come back into this game?” John asks as we settle down. “I
   came back from the place I know best – as unpretentiously as possible – not
   to prove anything but just to enjoy it.”
   
   “I’ve heard that you’ve had a guitar on the wall behind your bed for the past
   five or six years, and that you’ve only taken it down and played it for
   Double Fantasy. Is that true?”
   
   “I bought this beautiful electric guitar, round about the period I got back
   with Yoko and had the baby,” John explains. “It’s not a normal guitar; it
   doesn’t have a body; it’s just an arm and this tubelike, toboggan-looking
   thing, and you can lengthen the top for the balance of it if you’re sitting
   or standing up. I played it a little, then just hung it up behind the bed,
   but I’d look at it every now and then, because it had never done a
   professional thing, it had never really been played. I didn’t want to hide it
   the way one would hide an instrument because it was too painful to look at –
   like, Artie Shaw went through a big thing and never played again. But I used
   to look at it and think, ‘Will I ever pull it down?’
   
   “Next to it on the wall I’d placed the number 9 and a dagger Yoko had given
   me – a dagger made out of a bread knife from the American Civil War to cut
   away the bad vibes, to cut away the past symbolically. It was just like a
   picture that hangs there but you never really see, and then recently I
   realized, ‘Oh, goody! I can finally find out what this guitar is all about,’
   and I took it down and used it in making Double Fantasy.
   
   “All through the taping of ‘Starting Over,’ I was calling what I was doing
   ‘Elvis Orbison’: ‘I want you I need only the lonely.’ I’m a born-again
   rocker, I feel that refreshed, and I’m going right back to my roots. It’s
   like Dylan doing Nashville Skyline, except I don’t have any Nashville, you
   know, being from Liverpool. So I go back to the records I know – Elvis and
   Roy Orbison and Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. I occasionally get ripped
   off into ‘Walruses’ or ‘Revolution 9,’ but my far-out side has been
   completely encompassed by Yoko.
   
   “The first show we did together was at Cambridge University in 1968 or ’69,
   when she had been booked to do a concert with some jazz musicians. That was
   the first time I had appeared un-Beatled. I just hung around and played
   feedback, and people got very upset because they recognized me: ‘What’s he
   doing here?’ It’s always: ‘Stay in your bag.’ So, when she tried to rock,
   they said, ‘What’s she doing here?’ And when I went with her and tried to be
   the instrument and not project – to just be her band, like a sort of like
   Turner to her Tina, only her Tina was a different, avant-garde Tina – well,
   even some of the jazz guys got upset.
   
   “Everybody has pictures they want you to live up to. But that’s the same as
   living up to your parents’ expectations, or to society’s expectations, or to
   so-called critics who are just guys with a typewriter in a little room,
   smoking and drinking beer and having their dreams and nightmares, too, but
   somehow pretending that they’re living in a different, separate world. That’s
   all right. But there are people who break out of their bags.”
   
   “I remember years ago,” I say, “when you and Yoko appeared in bags at a
   Vienna press conference.”
   
   “Right. We sang a Japanese folk song in the bags. ‘Das ist really you, John?
   John Lennon in zee bag?’ Yeah, it’s me. ‘But how do we know ist you?’ Because
   I’m telling you. ‘Vy don’t you come out from this bag?’ Because I don’t want
   to come out of the bag. ‘Don’t you realize this is the Hapsburg palace?’ I
   thought it was a hotel. ‘Vell, it is now a hotel.’ They had great chocolate
   cake in that Viennese hotel, I remember that. Anyway, who wants to be locked
   in a bag? You have to break out of your bag to keep alive.”
   
   “In ‘Beautiful Boys,’ ” I add, “Yoko sings: ‘Please never be afraid to cry .
   . . / Don’t ever be afraid to fly . . . / Don’t be afraid to be afraid.’ “
   
   “Yes, it’s beautiful. I’m often afraid, and I’m not afraid to be afraid,
   though it’s always scary. But it’s more painful to try not to be yourself.
   People spend a lot of time trying to be somebody else, and I think it leads
   to terrible diseases. Maybe you get cancer or something. A lot of tough guys
   die of cancer, have you noticed? Wayne, McQueen. I think it has something to
   do – I don’t know, I’m not an expert – with constantly living or getting
   trapped in an image or an illusion of themselves, suppressing some part of
   themselves, whether it’s the feminine side or the fearful side.
   
   “I’m well aware of that, because I come from the macho school of pretense. I
   was never really a street kid or a tough guy. I used to dress like a Teddy
   boy and identify with Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, but I was never really
   in any street fights or down-home gangs. I was just a suburban kid, imitating
   the rockers. But it was a big part of one’s life to look tough. I spent the
   whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me
   glasses off because glasses were sissy, and walking in complete fear, but
   with the toughest-looking little face you’ve ever seen. I’d get into trouble
   just because of the way I looked; I wanted to be this tough James Dean all
   the time. It took a lot of wrestling to stop doing that. I still fall into it
   when I get insecure. I still drop into that I’m-a-street-kid stance, but I
   have to keep remembering that I never really was one.”
   
   “Carl Jung once suggested that people are made up of a thinking side, a
   feeling side, an intuitive side and a sensual side,” I mention. “Most people
   never really develop their weaker sides and concentrate on the stronger ones,
   but you seem to have done the former.”
   
   “I think that’s what feminism is all about,” John replies. “That’s what Yoko
   has taught me. I couldn’t have done it alone; it had to be a female to teach
   me. That’s it. Yoko has been telling me all the time, ‘It’s all right, it’s
   all right.’ I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being
   Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet – the Oscar Wilde part of me with
   the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting
   for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead.”
   
   “On Double Fantasy,” I say, “your song ‘Woman’ sounds a bit like a troubadour
   poem written to a medieval lady.”
   
   ” ‘Woman’ came about because, one sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly hit
   me. I saw what women do for us. Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I
   was thinking in those personal terms. Any truth is universal. If we’d made
   our album in the third person and called it Freda and Ada or Tommy and had
   dressed up in clown suits with lipstick and created characters other than us,
   maybe a Ziggy Stardust, would it be more acceptable? It’s not our style of
   art; our life is our art. . . . Anyway, in Bermuda, what suddenly dawned on
   me was everything I was taking for granted. Women really are the other half
   of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song. And it just sort of
   hit me like a flood, and it came out like that. The song reminds me of a
   Beatles track, but I wasn’t trying to make it sound like that. I did it as I
   did ‘Girl’ many years ago. So this is the grown-up version of ‘Girl.’
   
   “People are always judging you, or criticizing what you’re trying to say on
   one little album, on one little song, but to me it’s a lifetime’s work. From
   the boyhood paintings and poetry to when I die – it’s all part of one big
   production. And I don’t have to announce that this album is part of a larger
   work; if it isn’t obvious, then forget it. But I did put a little clue on the
   beginning of the record – the bells . . . the bells on ‘Starting Over.’ The
   head of the album, if anybody is interested, is a wishing bell of Yoko’s. And
   it’s like the beginning of ‘Mother’ on the Plastic Ono album, which had a
   very slow death bell. So it’s taken a long time to get from a slow church
   death bell to this sweet little wishing bell. And that’s the connection. To
   me, my work is one piece.”
   
   “All the way through your work, John, there’s this incredibly strong notion
   about inspiring people to be themselves and to come together and try to
   change things. I’m thinking here, obviously, of songs like ‘Give Peace a
   Chance,’ ‘Power to the People’ and ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over).’ “
   
   “It’s still there,” John replies. “If you look on the vinyl around the new
   album’s [the twelve-inch single "(Just Like) Starting Over"] logo – which all
   the kids have done already all over the world from Brazil to Australia to
   Poland, anywhere that gets the record – inside is written: ONE WORLD, ONE
   PEOPLE. So we continue.
   
   “I get truly affected by letters from Brazil or Poland or Austria – places
   I’m not conscious of all the time – just to know somebody is there,
   listening. One kid living up in Yorkshire wrote this heartfelt letter about
   being both Oriental and English and identifying with John and Yoko. The odd
   kid in the class. There are a lot of those kids who identify with us. They
   don’t need the history of rock & roll. They identify with us as a couple, a
   biracial couple, who stand for love, peace, feminism and the positive things
   of the world.
   
   “You know, give peace a chance, not shoot people for peace. All we need is
   love. I believe it. It’s damn hard, but I absolutely believe it. We’re not
   the first to say, ‘Imagine no countries’ or ‘Give peace a chance,’ but we’re
   carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it from hand to hand, to
   each other, to each country, to each generation. That’s our job. We have to
   conceive of an idea before we can do it.
   
   “I’ve never claimed divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never
   claimed to have the answer to life. I only put out songs and answer questions
   as honestly as I can, but only as honestly as I can – no more, no less. I
   cannot live up to other people’s expectations of me because they’re
   illusionary. And the people who want more than I am, or than Bob Dylan is, or
   than Mick Jagger is. . . .
   
   “Take Mick, for instance. Mick’s put out consistently good work for twenty
   years, and will they give him a break? Will they ever say, ‘Look at him, he’s
   Number One, he’s thirty-six and he’s put out a beautiful song, “Emotional
   Rescue,” it’s up there.’ I enjoyed it, lots of people enjoyed it. So it goes
   up and down, up and down. God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no
   longer God. I haven’t seen him – I’m not a great ‘in’-person watcher – but
   I’ve heard such good things about him. Right now, his fans are happy. He’s
   told them about being drunk and chasing girls and cars and everything, and
   that’s about the level they enjoy. But when he gets down to facing his own
   success and growing older and having to produce it again and again, they’ll
   turn on him, and I hope he survives it. All he has to do is look at me and
   Mick. . . . I cannot be a punk in Hamburg and Liverpool anymore. I’m older
   now. I see the world through different eyes. I still believe in love, peace
   and understanding, as Elvis Costello said, and what’s so funny about love,
   peace and understanding?”
   
   “There’s another aspect of your work, which has to do with the way you
   continuously question what’s real and what’s illusory, such as in ‘Look at
   Me,’ your beautiful new ‘Watching the Wheels’ – what are those wheels, by the
   way? – and, of course, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ in which you sing:
   ‘Nothing is real.’ “
   
   “Watching the wheels?” John asks. “The whole universe is a wheel, right?
   Wheels go round and round. They’re my own wheels, mainly. But, you know,
   watching meself is like watching everybody else. And I watch meself through
   my child, too. Then, in a way, nothing is real, if you break the word down.
   As the Hindus or Buddhists say, it’s an illusion, meaning all matter is
   floating atoms, right? It’s Rashomon. We all see it, but the agreed-upon
   illusion is what we live in. And the hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s
   easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at
   yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when
   you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.
   
   “I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owed me
   something, and that either the conservatives or the socialists or the
   fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews were doing something
   to me; and when you’re a teenybopper, that’s what you think. I’m forty now. I
   don’t think that anymore, ’cause I found out it doesn’t fucking work! The
   thing goes on anyway, and all you’re doing is jacking off, screaming about
   what your mommy or daddy or society did, but one has to go through that. For
   the people who even bother to go through that – most assholes just accept
   what is and get on with it, right? – but for the few of us who did question
   what was going on. . . . I have found out personally – not for the whole
   world! – that I am responsible for it, as well as them. I am part of them.
   There’s no separation; we’re all one, so in that respect, I look at it all
   and think, ‘Ah, well, I have to deal with me again in that way. What is real?
   What is the illusion I’m living or not living?’ And I have to deal with it
   every day. The layers of the onion. But that is what it’s all about.
   
   “The last album I did before Double Fantasy was Rock ‘n’ Roll, with a cover
   picture of me in Hamburg in a leather jacket. At the end of making that
   record, I was finishing up a track that Phil Spector had made me sing called
   ‘Just Because,’ which I really didn’t know – all the rest I’d done as a
   teenager, so I knew them backward – and I couldn’t get the hang of it. At the
   end of that record – I was mixing it just next door to this very studio – I
   started spieling and saying, ‘And so we say farewell from the Record Plant,’
   and a little thing in the back of my mind said, ‘Are you really saying
   farewell?’ I hadn’t thought of it then. I was still separated from Yoko and
   still hadn’t had the baby, but somewhere in the back was a voice that was
   saying, ‘Are you saying farewell to the whole game?’
   
   “It just flashed by like that – like a premonition. I didn’t think of it
   until a few years later, when I realized that I had actually stopped
   recording. I came across the cover photo – the original picture of me in my
   leather jacket, leaning against the wall in Hamburg in 1962 – and I thought,
   ‘Is this it? Do I start where I came in, with “Be-Bop-A-Lula”?’ The day I met
   Paul I was singing that song for the first time onstage. There’s a photo in
   all the Beatles books – a picture of me with a checked shirt on, holding a
   little acoustic guitar – and I am singing ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’ just as I did on
   that album, and there’s a picture in Hamburg and I’m saying goodbye from the
   Record Plant.
   
   “Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality
   and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a
   fork in the road and are there two preordained paths that are equally
   preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or
   that way – there’s a choice and it’s very strange sometimes. . . . And that’s
   a good ending for our interview.”
   
   Jack Douglas, coproducer of Double Fantasy, has arrived and is overseeing the
   mix of Yoko’s songs. It’s 2:30 in the morning, but John and I continue to
   talk until four as Yoko naps on a studio couch. John speaks of his plans for
   touring with Yoko and the band that plays on Double Fantasy; of his
   enthusiasm for making more albums; of his happiness about living in New York
   City, where, unlike England or Japan, he can raise his son without racial
   prejudice; of his memory of the first rock & roll song he ever wrote (a
   takeoff on the Dell Vikings’ “Come Go with Me,” in which he changed the lines
   to: “Come come come come / Come and go with me / To the peni-tentiary”); of
   the things he has learned on his many trips around the world during the past
   five years. As he walks me to the elevator, I tell him how exhilarating it is
   to see Yoko and him looking and sounding so well. “I love her, and we’re
   together,” he says. “Goodbye, till next time.”
   
   “After all is really said and done / The two of us are really one,” John
   Lennon sings in “Dear Yoko,” a song inspired by Buddy Holly, who himself knew
   something about true love’s ways. “People asking questions lost in confusion
   / Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions,” sings John in
   “Watching the Wheels,” a song about getting off the merry-go-round, about
   letting it go.
   
   In the tarot, the Fool is distinguished from other cards because it is not
   numbered, suggesting that the Fool is outside movement and change. And as it
   has been written, the Fool and the clown play the part of scapegoats in the
   ritual sacrifice of humans. John and Yoko have never given up being Holy
   Fools. In a recent Playboy interview, Yoko, responding to a reference to
   other notables who had been interviewed in that magazine, said: “People like
   Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world.” I am
   sure many readers must have snickered. But three nights after our
   conversation, the death of John Lennon revealed Yoko’s statement to be
   astonishingly true. “Come together over me,” John had sung, and people
   everywhere in the world came together.

 * ****************************************************************
 * So �.ONE quick dream. I wanted to post this anyway.This dream took place,
   well lets say late January 19th, 2006 to be specific according to my notes.
   It was really cool. All black and white for starters. John Lennon, one of my
   personal big heroes that I look up to and desperately admire, was alive and
   performing a live solo concert at a small venue like a local park or lake
   fair kind of thing. Very intimate and personal. John was very much alive
   still, and He
   was performing on the famous white piano he played �Imagine� on in the movie
   of the same name. You know the one. Famous and white. I have the poster
   sitting right here above me computer now as I type this.
 * ������������������������������ (There they are! So humble!)
 * 
 * Now get this. I was hanging out at the show with Mick Jagger! He was wearing
   a white tuxedo, or suit, similar to the one he wore on Saturday night live
   appearance from the 70�s, which I had actually watched on dvd the night I
   before this dream happened. We were strutting around the park with me, E.T.,
   and only about 200 people were there, or even less. Then, to my joy and utter
   amazement Paul
   McCartney, and George Harrison, and Ring Starr all approached us. They were
   polite and said John was really sounding good. I was especially pleased to be
   hanging with George again since in reality he had tragically passed on a few
   years back from cancer. And the other miracle, John being alive after 26
   years have passed since his senseless encounter with a psycho had ended his
   life. Sigh! One big happy family, and no sign of Yoko! I was in heaven just
   speaking and being close to Paul. What a thrill. They actually told Me that
   they had an upcoming tour within the next couple of months, and they recorded
   a new album even! John was just touring small venues for fun to keep his
   chops up!
 * 
 * ������������� (Maybe John would look a little like this today)?
 * 
 * So we all went to the after hours party together and the whole bit. One dream
   fantasy, all in black and white, that was as true as it was not blue. I am
   was really there! I know that is as close as I will ever
   to get to my heroes living or otherwise, and I am happy to savor that moment
   for one dream cycle in ecstacy. Mick was o kay to hang with. He checked his
   ego at the door that day! John was robust, talkative and never sounded
   better. He told me that he wanted Mick to take his place on the upcoming
   Beatles tour, that he was just tired. I protested and insisted he go! �It
   would the NEVER be the same without you Johhny boy,� I said, so he agreed to
   go on tour! Paul was simply humble Paul, and Just as I would expect him to
   be. SIGH! But I had to wake up and start the dawn of a new day. (Okay, you
   got me, it was more like dawn of a new afternoon!) Either way�� This was a
   vivid and classic, killer dream. For me, it was one for the ages. Fabulous,
   just like our Fab Four indeed. I am happy I put it into the history books so
   it will not be forgotten. It is a tribute and dedication to that fabulous
   band we know as �THE BEATLES�. Plus!
 * ����� (John Lennon was a part of The Best Band in The Land)!Eric Turnbow
   Public Dream Journal: Entry #01 Composed on 02/13/05
   Notes to refer to written the day of the dream�
   
    * * Tim RiegelThat is way cool…dreams are the best part of life
        
        
        
        4 January 2011 at 06:18 � Like
      
      * Eric TurnbowThanks Tim. I am happier asleep than awake! Really. I just
        love it. Annoys the woman though! HA! But she can kiss my white ass!
        
        
        
        4 January 2011 at 07:45 � Like
   
   
   
   
   Write a comment…

Posted in John Lennon


(CONCERT REVIEW) ROD STEWART IN CONCERT IN THE ROUND 03-12-2007 @ THE SEATTLE
KEY ARENA

Posted on April 5, 2012 by ericturnbow


(CONCERT REVIEW) ROD STEWART IN CONCERT IN THE ROUND��������������������
03-12-2007� @ THE KEY ARENA IN SEATTLE WA.


� � � � � �� THE POP MUSIC JOURNAL OF ERIC TURNBOW

��������� (This is the actual concert in Seattle on 03-12-2007)

Rod Stewart was great in Seattle on Monday March 12th, 2007! Wow! Fantastic in
fact. He played over 3 hours, after subtracting his 15 minute break. Good deal.�
The round stage had 4 huge screens and a secret stairwell for Rod to go
underneath and change outfits about a dozen times. I wish all stages were this
cool! Thumbs up. Highly recommended. Sounding good these days. Oh what an
entertainer! Rock and roll. Great back up musicians, Incredible performance.
Here is a list that pretty much matched the show I saw in Seattle, Same tour and
same songs. I bought a poster and a key chain for my rock museum here on Tullis.
Fun night out. All safe and no� hassles. High tech and high energy as well.
Amazing. Same FREE parking as Bob Seger show!

�������������� � � � � �� (This the actual ticket from the concert)

I have been lucky enough to see Rod Stewart live 3 times! The first time was
05-06-1999 “All Rod All Night Tour”, and again live with great Stevie Nicks on
04-23-2011 for The “Hearts and Souls Tour”, all 3 times @ The Key Arena in
Seattle. But somehow the show I saw on 03-12-2007 was the most awesome and
amazing one of the bunch! No really….. He was so on that night!

����������������������� � � ��� (Rod in the Round is truly amazing)!

After returning to classic rock music on his album Still the Same, Rod Stewart
is setting out on an extensive North American tour in 2007. He will then turn
the tour into a full stadium extravaganza in Europe over the summer.

Here is Rod Stewart�s 2007 Set list:

�Tonight I�m Yours (Don�t Hurt Me)�
�Some Guys Have All the Luck�
�You Wear It Well�
�Lost in You�
�Reason to Believe�
�Infatuation�
�(I Know) I�m Losing You�
�Gasoline Alley�
�Ooh La La�
�Father and Son�
�I Don�t Want to Talk About It�
�Have I Told You Lately�
�Piece of My Heart�
�Hot Legs�
�Every Picture Tells a Story�
�Dirty Old Town�




(Intermission)

�The First Cut Is the Deepest�
�Tonight�s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)�
�You�re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)�
�Fooled Around and Fell in Love�
�Have You Ever Seen the Rain?�
�Forever Young�
�Down town Train�
�It�s a Heartache�
�This Old Heart of Mine�
�Young Turks�
�Rhythm of My Heart�

Encore:
�Maggie May�Note:

Note: Professor Turnbow may be reached at:
(360) 943-7039��� Email:� etcosmic2000@yahoo.com

�� � � � � �� (This the actual Poster and� ticket from the concert)



Posted in Concert Reviews


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