The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [29]
A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint—express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin’ dentist or a teacher. And then the fuckin’ fans tried to beat me into being a fuckin’ Beatle or an Engelbert Humperdinck, and the critics tried to beat me into being Paul McCartney.
Yoko: So you were very deprived in a way . . .
John: That’s what makes me what I am. It comes out; the people I meet have to say it themselves, because we get fuckin’ kicked. Nobody says it, so you scream it: Look at me, a genius, for fuck’s sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do and who I am? Don’t dare, don’t you dare fuckin’ criticize my work like that. You, who don’t know anything about it.
Fuckin’ bullshit!
I know what Zappa is going through, and a half. I’m just coming out of it. I just have been in school again. I’ve had teachers ticking me off and marking my work. If nobody can recognize what I am, then fuck ’em; it’s the same for Yoko. . . .
Yoko: That’s why it’s an amazing thing: After somebody has done something like the Beatles, they think that he’s sort of satisfied, where actually the Beatles . . .
John: The Beatles was nothing.
Yoko: It was like cutting him down to a smaller size than he is.
John: I learned lots from Paul and George, in many ways, but they learned a damned sight lot from me—they learned a fucking lot from me. It’s like George Martin, or anybody: Just come back in twenty years’ time and see what we’re doing, and see who’s doing what—don’t put me—don’t sort of mark my papers like I’m top of the math class or did I come in number one in English Language, because I never did. Just assess me on what I am and what comes out of me mouth, and what me work is, don’t mark me in the classrooms. It’s like I’ve just left school again! I just graduated from the school of Show Biz, or whatever it was called.
What accounts for your great popularity?
Because I fuckin’ did it. I copped out in that Beatle thing. I was like an artist that went off . . . Have you never heard of like Dylan Thomas and all them who never fuckin’ wrote but just went up drinking and Brendan Behan and all of them, they died of drink . . . everybody that’s done anything is like that. I just got meself in a party; I was an emperor, I had millions of chicks, drugs, drink, power and everybody saying how great I was. How could I get out of it? It was just like being in a fuckin’ train. I couldn’t get out.
I couldn’t create, either. I created a little; it came out, but I was in the party and you don’t get out of a thing like that. It was fantastic! I came out of the sticks; I didn’t hear about anything—Van Gogh was the most far-out thing I had ever heard of. Even London was something we used to dream of, and London’s nothing. I came out of the fuckin’ sticks to take over the world, it seemed to me. I was enjoying it, and I was trapped in it, too. I couldn’t do anything about it; I was just going along for the ride. I was hooked, just like a junkie.
What did being from Liverpool have to do with your art?
It was a port. That means it was less hick than someone in the English Midlands, like the American Midwest or whatever you call it. We were a port, the second biggest port in England, between Manchester and Liverpool. The North is where the money was made in the eighteen hundreds; that was where all the brass and the heavy people were, and that’s where the despised people were.
We were the ones that were looked down upon as animals by the Southerners, the Londoners. The Northerners in the States think that people are pigs down South, and the people in New York think West Coast is hick. So we were hicksville.
We were a great amount of Irish descent and blacks and Chinamen, all sorts there. It was like San Francisco,