I Met the Walrus_ How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever - Jerry Levitan [24]
JERRY: I know. They’re like robots. It’s a pity…
JOHN: Yeah, right. You’ve got to show them what a good time you’re having.
JERRY: Oh yeah, I have a really good time. My brother-in-law has a fantastic stereo set, and that was the first time I enjoyed you artistically, and I listened to Sgt. Pepper on it and I nearly blew my top. I had the music on full blast with the earphones.
JOHN: That’s how we make it. Full blast. The only way to listen to Beatles music is full blast.
JERRY: Right! That’s what I was saying. Now I listen to your double LP [the White Album] and Two Virgins and I go crazy, really. This week I have a presentation in English…
YOKO: John, we should give him our new record.
JOHN: We just got John and Yoko’s latest album with us. I’ll give it to you now—it’s called Life With the Lions. It’ll really blow your mind. It’s a live performance Yoko and I did in Cambridge in England to the students, and it was strange for me playing to two hundred people instead of thirty thousand [laughs] but I really dug it, and I’ll give you the album now. You can play it around. It’ll blow your mind.
JERRY: Fantastic. You know my stereo set is just a normal $100 one with just two speakers and it’s not half as much, but when I listen to it I can at least dream of the experience I had listening to it on his stereo…the experience I had of it and that’s the first time I’ve ever really taken a liking to something as much as that.
JOHN: That’s great. If you’re the only one in school that can dig Two Virgins or Life With the Lions that’s enough for us. It’s a start. We read…they asked some people in a pop paper…
More photos by me and the Toronto Star photographer Jeff Goode. Jeff Goode/Toronto Star.
DEREK: I think one in a thousand is pretty good [laughter].
YOKO: Life With the Lions, we have to give him a copy.
JOHN: Go and get it then.
YOKO: Where is it?
JOHN: Ah hah! [Laughter.] In one of the twenty-nine bags. Some twelve-year-olds turning on to Life With the Lions in England. One of the pop papers asked the kids to criticize it ’cause most of the criticism of John and Yoko music is “What is it?” [Laughter.] It’s amazing. Twelve-year-olds writing, “I play this every morning before I go to school, it blows me mind.” Yoko is always saying, “They’ll get it, they’ll get it.” And I say, “They’re not going to get it, there’s no off-beat.” And she was right. You know, it’s going to be pop music in five years what we’re doing now.
JERRY: Everyone seems to think the best album of yours was Sgt. Pepper. I disagree. I think you better yourselves all the time. For example, the double LP, I was wondering…I never try to think of you…start studying with a microscope…
JOHN: Yeah.
JERRY:…your albums…till I find out…it just comes to me and once I just got this feeling out of your double LP after I was listening to it for a long time…and it just came to me…this is probably just a coincidence…but I started to get this feeling that there’s a message in it. And the message was, on the first side seemed to delve into the lives of people. Like, for instance “Back in the USSR” which I think is life in the UK?
JOHN: It’s anywhere, you know. It’s anywhere. Messages are there on all levels in all music. And whatever level you get it on, I’ve had it too when I wrote it or sang it. But some of that stuff, I write it, record it, and play it, and I don’t hear it till a few months later and I’m lying down with a set of headphones and listening to a Beatles album and try to hear it in retrospect, objectively. And then I hear it and say, “Oh, was I saying that? Oh, I see, I see what it’s about.” And it’s about everything. It’s about UK, about USSR, and it’s about nothing and it’s about the USA. Anything you hear is there. It’s all there, either trivial or profound, whatever, it’s all there. And the same as in a flower, everything’s there. It just is, and if you