There Are Seven Levels

Derek: What do they think about when they're imprisoned in their hotel room?

John: We don't think about anything...

Derek: Is that what you meant, madam?

John: We don't think about one thing... well, some of us do [nods to Paul], but... we just think about anything normal, you know?

I see you, Paul

“I never think about Beatles songs,” [John] said. “I use them as me calendar. That’s how I remember when things in me life happened: I remember where I was when Paul and I wrote a song. But outside of that, I don’t give them much attention. I seldom play them. I rarely listen to them. Especially the early songs.”

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.”

After lunch, we all returned to the Dakota, where I hoped the repartee might become somewhat more sparkling. Yoko and Linda paired off for a bit and chatted amiably—the two of them got along famously, bonded by the shared experience, perhaps, of being married to a Beatle—while John and Paul stood by the windows overlooking Central Park, watching as the afternoon sky turned a whiter shade of pale over Manhattan. They remained silent for long stretches, until awkwardness forced one of them to take a stab at conversation.

“Are you making any music?” Paul asked at one point.

“Well, you know, I play some stuff for me, but I’m not working on anything. Music isn’t what’s driving me at this point. It’s all about the baby. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m always recording,” Paul said. “I couldn’t live without the music in me life.”

Then, for a spell, they fell back into silence.

It seemed that these two rock ’n’ roll behemoths, men who in their youth had all but defined the zeitgeist of the ’60s—who had inspired an entire generation and redirected music’s very destiny—were now, a mere decade later, struggling to find things to say to each other.

A part of me found it sad. But then, what was I expecting? Even the best of childhood friends eventually slip into separate lives. It’s called growing up. Now they were just two old chums who no longer had all that much in common. It was unreasonable of me to presume that merely being in the same room together would somehow ignite the genius and energy of John and Paul’s initial creative partnership.

Still, on the walk back from the Dakota to the Plaza that evening, as I passed all the glimmering Christmas lights and heard snippets of holiday melodies wafting out of the few restaurants and bars that were still open and serving, I couldn’t help but think that history might have been made on this day.

“Are you making any music?” Paul had asked John.

What if John had said something like “No, but me guitar is in the next room. Let’s sit down and make some…”

God only knows what classic Lennon-McCartney creation might have been born that afternoon.

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.

“When we sang together,” Lennon told Mintz in one of their conversations, “Paul and I would share the same microphone. I’d be close enough to kiss him. Back then, I didn’t wear me specs onstage – Brian Epstein said they made me look old. So we’d be playing these concerts, in front of thousands of people, but the only thing I could see was Paul’s face. He was always there next to me – I could always feel his presence. It’s what I remember most about those concerts.”

With thanks to @anotherkindofmindpod for originally posting the quote

Sixty years ago today, John nearly had the beginning of Mr Moonlight…

Happy ‘thinking about the time John talked about Paul’s strong left arm’ Day

John: What am I playing, Richie?

Ringo: You’ll be on drums

John: Ooh, drums, right. I think Paul’ll want to do drums, won’t he? With his strong left arm.

What did he just say…