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Yes.

How do you think that affected your conception of the music? In general.

It was only another mirror. It wasn’t a miracle. It was more of a visual thing and a therapy, looking at yourself a bit. It did all that. You know, I don’t quite remember. But it didn’t write the music; neither did Janov or Maharishi in the same terms. I write the music in the circumstances in which I’m in, whether it’s on acid or in the water.

The Hunter Davies book, the “authorized biography,” says . . .

It was written in [London] Sunday Times sort of fab form. And no home truths were written. My auntie knocked out all the truth bits from my childhood, and my mother and I allowed it, which was my cop-out, et cetera. There was nothing about orgies and the shit that happened on tour. I wanted a real book to come out, but we all had wives and didn’t want to hurt their feelings. End of that one. Because they still have wives.

The Beatles tours were like the Fellini film Satyricon. We had that image. Man, our tours were like something else; if you could get on our tours, you were in. They were Satyricon, all right.

Would you go to a town . . . hotel . . .

Wherever we went, there was always a whole scene going; we had our four separate bedrooms. We tried to keep them out of our room. Derek’s and Neil’s rooms were always full of junk and whores and who-the-fuck-knows-what, and policemen with it. Satyricon! We had to do something. What do you do when the pill doesn’t wear off and it’s time to go? I used to be up all night with Derek, whether there was anybody there or not, I could never sleep, such a heavy scene it was. They didn’t call them groupies then, they called it something else, and if we couldn’t get groupies, we would have whores and everything, whatever was going.

Who would arrange all that stuff?

Derek and Neil, that was their job, and Mal, but I’m not going into all that.

Like businessmen at a convention.

When we hit town, we hit it. There was no pissing about. There’s photographs of me crawling about in Amsterdam on my knees coming out of whorehouses and things like that. The police escorted me to the places because they never wanted a big scandal, you see. I don’t really want to talk about it because it will hurt Yoko. And it’s not fair. Suffice to say that they were Satyricon on tour and that’s it, because I don’t want to hurt their feelings, or the other people’s girls either. It’s just not fair.

What else was left out of the Hunter Davies book?

That I don’t know because I can’t remember it. There is a better book on the Beatles by Michael Brown, Love Me Do. That was a true book. He wrote how we were, which was bastards. You can’t be anything else in such a pressurized situation, and we took it out on people like Neil, Derek and Mal. That’s why underneath their facade, they resent us, but they can never show it, and they won’t believe it when they read it. They took a lot of shit from us because we were in such a shitty position. It was hard work, and somebody had to take it. Those things are left out by Davies, about what bastards we were. Fuckin’ big bastards, that’s what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, that’s a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Yoko: How did you manage to keep that clean image? It’s amazing.

John: Everybody wants the image to carry on. You want to carry on. The press around, too, because they want the free drinks and the free whores and the fun; everybody wants to keep on the bandwagon. We were the Caesars; who was going to knock us, when there were a million pounds to be made? All the handouts, the bribery, the police, all the fucking hype. Everybody wanted in, that’s why some of them are still trying to cling on to this: Don’t take Rome from us, not a portable Rome where we can all have our houses and our cars and our lovers and our wives and office girls and parties and drink and drugs, don’t take it from us, otherwise you’re mad, John, you’re crazy, silly