[John] came up to me once at a dinner and said, ‘Have you ever thought about trepanning? It’s an ancient Roman thing — you have a hole drilled in your skull.’ And we talked about it a lot, as you did in the Sixties. I said, ‘No, not really.’ He said, ‘I think we should all have it done.’ I was still saying, ‘I don’t know about that. You have it done, and if it’s fine we’ll all have it done as well.’ That was the only way to get rid of John’s madcap schemes, otherwise he would have had us all with holes in our heads the next morning.
Paul McCartney
8 months ago on October 04, 2011 at 09:17pm
That is the main problem with fame — that people forget how to act normally. They are not in awe of you, but in awe of the thing that they think you’ve become. It’s a concept that they have of stardom and notoriety. So they act crazy. All you have to do is go on the radio or television once, and when people see you down the street, they act differently. And The Beatles had been on the front page of the papers every day for a year or so. Everybody changes; they are so impressed by it.
It was difficult going to the same places we’d been before. People were starting to ‘hey man’ us a lot. We went back to Liverpool and we were in the same club where we used to be a year earlier. We just went in for a drink, and now suddenly there was a lot of: ‘Hey man, hey man,’ and we couldn’t get a minute’s peace.
George Harrison
8 months ago on September 23, 2011 at 09:50pm
On any trips — whether they’re chemical or anything — things that you discover are self-awareness; all the things that you’ve already known. Nobody’s telling you anything new. A scientist doesn’t discover anything new, he just tells you what’s already there. Nobody can tell you nothing. Even somebody like a Dylan or a Sartre or somebody like that. They tell you something that is like a revelation — but it always is something that you know inside that they’ve just affirmed for you.
John Lennon
8 months ago on September 23, 2011 at 06:20pm
It just really built up: the bigger that we got, the more unreality we had to face, the more we were expected to do — until when you didn’t shake hands with a mayor’s wife she starts abusing you and screaming, ‘How dare they!’
There is one of Derek [Taylor]’s stories where we were asleep after the session, in a hotel somewhere in America, and the mayor’s wife comes and says, ‘Get them up, I want to meet them!’ Derek said, ‘I’m not going to wake them up,’ and she started to scream, ‘You get them up or I’ll tell the press!’
There was always that. They were always threatening what they would tell the press, to make bad publicity about us if we didn’t see their bloody daughter with braces on her teeth. And it was always the police chief’s daughter or the Lord Mayor’s daughter; all the most obnoxious kids, because they had the most obnoxious parents. We had these people thrust on us and were forced to see them all the time. That was the most humiliating experience.
John Lennon
8 months ago on September 16, 2011 at 09:51pm
The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love for us. There were music festivals, and everywhere we went people were smiling and sitting on lawns drinking tea. A lot of it was bullshit; it was just what the press was saying. But there was definitely a vibe: we could feel what was going on with our friends — and people who had similar goals in America — even though we were miles away. You could just pick up the vibes, man.
George Harrison
8 months ago on September 16, 2011 at 08:36pm
Melbourne was as wild as Adelaide, and I think that makes it equal. They were both about the wildest we’d ever seen. We never ask for civic receptions; we don’t expect them. If people do it, we’re flattered; but if they don’t, that’s that. There were crowds outside the hotel there. A lot of them got in — we’d find them in bathrooms.
We were all shoving our dirty rags into a case when I heard a knock on the window. I thought it must have been one of the others mucking around so I didn’t take any notice, but the knocking kept on so I went over to the balcony — and there was this lad who looked just like a typical Liverpool lad. I knew before he opened his mouth where was from, because nobody else would be climbing up eight floors. This lad — Peter — walked in and said, ‘Hullo dere,’ and I said, ‘Hullo dere,’ and he told me how he’d climbed up the drainpipe, from balcony to balcony. I gave him a drink because he deserved one and then I took him around to see the others, who were quite amazed. They thought I was joking when I told them.
John Lennon
8 months ago on September 16, 2011 at 06:16pm
We’re not cruel. We’ve seen enough tragedy in Merseyside. But when a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch my son and maybe he will walk again,’ we want to run, cry, empty our pockets. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.
John Lennon (1965)
8 months ago on September 15, 2011 at 06:16pm
There was a story in the paper about ‘Lovely Rita’, the meter maid. She’d just retired as a traffic warden. The phrase ‘meter maid’ was so American that it appealed, and to me a ‘maid’ was always a little sexy thing: ‘Meter maid. Hey, come and check my meter, baby.’ I saw a bit of that, and then I saw that she looked like a ‘military man’. The song got played around with and pulled apart, and I remember wandering around Heswall (where my dad lived and my brother now lives), trying to write the words to it.
Paul McCartney
8 months ago on September 14, 2011 at 06:15pm
I used to hate waving from balconies. ‘Wave,’ they’d say. ‘You’ve got to go and wave.’ Derek [Taylor] used to wave for me out of hotel windows.
Paul was good at waving and signing autographs. We’d be waiting in the car: ‘Come on, Paul, let’s go. Where is he? Oh, bugger, there he is.’ — ‘Oh, yes, what’s your name? Betty. To Betty, love Paul.’ — ‘Come on and get in the fucking car. Let’s get out of here!’
George Harrison
8 months ago on September 12, 2011 at 10:00pm
The German record company’s head of A&R had told me that The Beatles would never sell records in Germany unless they actually sang in German. I was disinclined to believe this, but that’s what he said and I told The Beatles. They laughed: ‘That’s absolute rubbish.’ So I said, ‘Well, if we want to sell records in Germany, that’s what we’ve got to do.’ So they agreed to record in German. I mean, really it was rubbish, but the company sent over one Otto Demmlar to help coach them in German. He prepared the translation of the lyrics, and ‘She Loves You’ became ‘Sie Liebt Dich’ — not terribly subtle!
On the appointed day I was waiting with Otto at the studios and they didn’t turn up. It was the first time in my experience with them that they had let me down, so I rang the George V hotel where they were staying, and Neil Aspinall answered. He said, ‘I’m sorry, they’re not coming, they asked me to tell you.’ I said, ‘You mean to tell me they’re telling you to tell me? They’re not telling me themselves?’ — ‘That’s right.’ — ‘I’m coming right over,’ I said.
So I went to see them and I had Otto with me. I was really angry and stormed in to find they were all having tea in the centre of the room. (They were, after all, very charming people.) It was rather like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party with Alice in Wonderland in the form of Jane Asher, with long hair, in the middle pouring tea.
As soon as I entered they exploded in all directions, they ran behind couches and chairs and one put a lampshade over his head. Then from behind the sofa and chairs came a chorus of: ‘Sorry George, sorry George, sorry George…’ I had to laugh. I said, ‘You are bastards, aren’t you? Are you going to apologise to Otto?’ And they said, ‘Sorry Otto, sorry Otto…’
They finally agreed to come down to the studio and work. They did record two songs in German. They were the only things they have ever done in a foreign language. And they didn’t need to anyway. They were quite right. The records would have sold in English, and did.
George Martin
8 months ago on September 10, 2011 at 09:31pm
