John and I didn’t often talk about the Beatles, largely because it was the one subject other people, particularly in the media, were always asking him about. He’d been answering questions about the group’s history for so long, rehashing its mythology over and over again, that by now the subject bored the hell out of him. “It was like a marriage,” he once told me. “I enjoyed the beginning more than I enjoyed the end, when we were doing those live shows and nobody could hear the music over the screaming. Everyone else was having a good time yelling and shouting, but we were suffering up there. We were just going through the motions. We couldn’t hear our own selves singing.”

Q: When you were recording the album on the island of Montserrat, people got the idea you were putting together a tribute album to John and reporters seemed to invade the place. How distracting was all that?

McCartney: The only real problem was the paparazzi. Newspapers tend to go for the best story whether it’s true or not, and the best “story” on this album seemed to be that it was a tribute to John. So they went after that angle though I tried to tell them it wasn’t true.

Q: Did all the commotion disturb you?

McCartney: Not really. You have to learn to filter yourself from things like that. I’ve been doing it for so long now that I sort of know the rules. If I let a few days of this get to me, you can imagine what the “Paul is dead” fuss would have done to me.

But I do remember these two guys who were following me in a car so ran into them. It was a great feeling.

Q: You ran into them?

McCartney: They were following us, so I stopped and asked them to leave us alone. But they kept following us, so I turned the car around and sort of ran into them, scraping the side of their car. I just had to do it. Usually, you’re the animal and they’re sort of the observers. 

You’ve got to turn it around sometimes and bite back. You can’t live your whole life as this hunted animal.

-Interview for Los Angeles Times • Tuesday, April 20, 1982

- Paul McCartney discussing the newspaper phone hacking scandal in interview with Caitlin Moran, from Moranthology (pg. 320)

Cher: The night I took a drunken John Lennon to the Playboy mansion - and he stripped stark naked in front of me in the infamous secret Grotto

Walking into an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles one Sunday evening I bumped into John Lennon and his friend Harry Nilsson and they asked if I could take them to Hugh Hefner's house for movie night.

'John's dying to see the Playboy Mansion,' Harry pleaded.

Hef held parties all the time, many of which became notorious as drunken orgies with some of the Playmates, but his Sunday movie nights were calm and casual affairs for friends to enjoy cocktails and dinner before watching a new release.

I didn't have anything else going on that night in 1974 so I agreed to drive them to Hef's and realised too late that they were drunker than I'd thought. There were about 50 people there and just as the movie was about to start, the two of them put on aristocratic English accents and started chanting, 'Hef! Hef! Hef!' except with the accents it sounded like 'Huff! Huff! Huff!'.

Mortified, I could tell Hef was starting to get annoyed.

'Stop that!' I told them. 'Come with me.' It was like I became the mother and they were two 14-year-old boys.

Giggling and falling over each other, John and Harry followed me out into the grounds. Sitting them down inside the infamous Grotto – it was like a huge cave that one end of the swimming pool went into – I went to find a drink and when I came back they were standing in the middle of the Grotto naked but still in the water, thank God.

'This is not pretty what I'm seeing,' I said when they started to emerge from the pool. 'Guys, please do not come out.'

I was trying not to laugh, but it was impossible not to as they threatened to wander around the mansion naked. It took me ages to get them back in their clothes. It was like herding drunks.

(source)

Pattie Boyd on herself, George, John and Cynthia being spiked with LSD-laced coffee by their dentist, John Riley

I can’t find the interview that I read it in yesterday and I know that stories change over time and that a slightly different account shows up Loving John but if May Pang is telling the truth and John actually told her that he wished that Sean was his and her baby and not his and Yoko’s then JAIL JOHN, JAIL FOR ONE BILLION ZILLION YEARS.

GET A JOB! STAY AWAY FROM HER!

It's from The Independent, 17 December! 2023

Paul on The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman

The Lives of John Lennon was published in 1988. According to Wikipedia, it presents John as a manipulative, schizophrenic, dyslexic, abusive, antisemitic drug addict. Of course, the only thing Paul McCartney (and most others) had a problem with here was that Goldman also said John was bi.

Entertainment Tonight (5-16-89)

Paul in The Beatles: Off the Record

The Ox: The Last of the Great Rock Stars: The Authorised Biography of The Who's John Entwistle, Paul Rees (2020)

John, however, obviously couldn’t just waltz into FAO Schwarz, especially right before Christmas Eve, when it was packed elbow-to-elbow with shoppers. But one year, when Sean was barely a toddler, John asked me to call the store and see if they could shut down for an hour or two so that he could do a little last-minute gift buying. Not surprisingly, the management was not crazy about the idea. Closing its doors in the middle of their busiest sales season so that one celebrity—even a former Beatle—could purchase a few thousand dollars’ worth of presents was not smart business practice. But they did offer to let John into the store after its normal closing time.

I happened to be in New York that Christmas and joined John for his FAO Schwarz after-hours excursion. John was about thirty-eight at the time, but the minute we stepped through the door, he dropped about three decades. He literally became a kid again.

As part of the decorations, there was a giant toy train track suspended from the ceiling and snaking around the store—it must have been “fifty yards long—with big, chunky Lionel locomotives huffing and puffing along its rails.

“That! Let’s get that!” John exclaimed the second he saw it.

“And where would you set that up in the Dakota?” I asked him. “The dining room?”

“Okay,” he said, dejected. “Maybe not that.”

"John learned to play upside down too because of me"

Photo showing George playing Paul’s bass upside down. The photo is from the Cavern on April 5, 1962. Pete is singing, Paul is on drums and George is on Paul’s Hofner bass.

#I knew that Paul learned to play upside down #but I didn't know John did too #that's really sweet #effort goes a long way

This rare photograph was discovered on a negative given to the owner of “The Beatles Shop” on Mathew Street in Liverpool: The Beatles (with Pete Best) and some fans, before or after a gig, presumably on July 13, 1961, at St. John's Hall in Tuebrook, Liverpool. This was their first hometown concert after having returned from playing Hamburg's Top Ten Club.

But by far the greatest Christmas gift John ever gave to Yoko—as well as to me—wasn’t anything he’d purchased at a store or recorded onto a cassette tape. It was an event, an enchanted twinkling of pure distilled joy, that he orchestrated just for the three of us during the waning hours of December 31, 1979.

A few days earlier, John had laid out his plans to me. He wanted to turn the newly acquired apartment 71 into a private club. John was not a huge fan of nightlife—crowds were problematic for obvious reasons—but he enjoyed the concept of an exclusive, intimate space, something like an old English men’s establishment... So, shortly after Christmas, he and I went shopping on New York’s Lower East Side, where there were dozens of secondhand shops, and proceeded to purchase enough cheap furniture and other decorations—overstuffed sofas, martini shakers, pink flamingo cardboard cutouts—to turn 71 into what John had by now begun referring to as Club Dakota.

After furniture shopping, we spent a few hours combing through vintage record shops, looking for old 78s to fill that antique bubble-top jukebox Yoko had given John. (We found Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By,” Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Bing Crosby’s “Please,” Gracie Fields’s “Sally,” and scores more.) Then we headed to Canal Street and picked up moldy old black-tie tails and white gloves to wear on Club Dakota’s opening night, which John had decided would be on New Year’s Eve. Technically, John and I were to be the club’s only charter members, but he instructed me to write out a formal invitation to Yoko, which I would later hand deliver to her on a silver platter. Yoko was made merely an “honorary” member because, as John joked to me, otherwise she would immediately try to sexually integrate the club.

I have thought often about that night, about how best to describe it to those who weren’t lucky enough to be there (which, of course, would be the whole rest of the world). And the best I can come up with is that it was like spending a blissful interlude suspended in a magical snow globe. In my memory, we all seem to move in slow motion, as if gliding through glycerin-laced air. The three of us—Yoko in an elegant black evening gown, John and I in ridiculous old penguin suits (he paired his with a white T-shirt and his old Liverpool school tie)—danced and laughed (and smoked) together without a care in the world, the jukebox filling the living room with glorious old tunes from the ’40s and ’50s. I took dozens of Polaroid photos of them that night, but for some reason none of them capture the magic of the moment.

And then, at midnight, our reveries were interrupted by the pop and crackle of fireworks. We all stood by the windows and watched the skyline over Central Park light up with flaming balls and sparkling whirly fountains and a slew of other aerial bursts and barrages. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. And I’d never seen John and Yoko looking more content and in love.

It was that rarest, most precious thing in life—a perfect moment.

It would also, as fate would have it, be John’s last New Year’s Eve.

John and I did run into some trouble in Frankfurt, Germany… Somehow, the desk clerk at the airport hotel couldn’t find our reservations, and no amount of my pleading could convince him to give us some rooms. I reported the bad news to John, who’d been “hiding” in the hotel lobby by using his old disguise of staring close up at a wall.

“They have no rooms,” I said.

“They have rooms!” he said. “They always have rooms!”

“Maybe you can try?” I asked. “I mean, you are John Lennon. If anybody can get us rooms, you can.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I can’t say, ‘I’m a Beatle: give us rooms.’ ”

“John, it’s raining outside. We can’t walk around Frankfurt in the rain all night.”

John sighed and headed towards the front desk to reluctantly play the Beatle card. For the next few minutes, I watched as he and the clerk chatted, occasionally smiled, and at one point even laughed. And then, for some reason, John pointed at me. The clerk stared in my direction, nodding furiously. A few moments later, John came over with two keys.

“I told him you were Paul McCartney,” John said. “That seemed to work.”

It worked, all right. I was given a gorgeous suite with a feather bed and a sauna. A little later, the desk manager sent up a tray of delicious snacks and a bottle of wine. Life as Paul McCartney was clearly good.

But then, early in the morning, John was at my door, looking tired and miserable. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “This place is such a dive. They gave me a bloody closet.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “This place is great!”

John stepped into the suite, surveyed its opulence, and his jaw practically hit the floor.

“I guess the desk manager liked the “fact that I wrote ‘Yesterday,’ ” I joked.

John didn’t laugh.

Get Back session, January 1969

McCartney, by Christopher Standford

Y’ALL WHY IS JOHN ALWAYS ASKING PAUL THIS, IT BREAKS MY HEART.

AND NOW IM THINKING ABOUT JOHN’S LYRIC “I WAS FEELING INSECURE, YOU MIGHT NOT LOVE ME ANYMORE.” This is too much.

We All Shine On - Elliot Mintz

We All Shine On - Elliot Mintz