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Lennon Remembers is a 1971 book by Rolling Stone magazine's co-founder and editor Jann Wenner. It consists of a lengthy interview that Wenner carried out with the former Beatle John Lennon in December 1970 and which was originally serialised in Rolling Stone in its issues dated 21 January and 4 February 1971. The interview was intended to promote Lennon's primal therapy-inspired album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and reflects the singer's emotions and mindset after undergoing an intense course of the therapy under Arthur Janov. It also serves as a rebuttal to Paul McCartney's public announcement of the Beatles' break-up, in April 1970.
Accompanied by his wife, Yoko Ono, Lennon aired his grievances to Wenner about the Beatles' career and the compromises the band made during their years of international fame. He makes cutting remarks about his former bandmates, particularly McCartney, as well as associates and friends such as George Martin, Mick Jagger and Derek Taylor, and about the group's business adversaries. Lennon portrays himself as a genius who has suffered for his art. He also states his disillusion with the philosophies and beliefs that guided the Beatles and their audience during the 1960s, and commits to a more politically radical agenda for the new decade.
Although Wenner's decision to re-publish the interview was done without Lennon's consent, the book helped create an enduring image of Lennon as the working-class artist dedicated to truth and lack of artifice. While some commentators question its reliability, the interview became a highly influential piece of rock journalism. It also helped establish Rolling Stone as a commercially successful magazine.
Wenner was finally able to interview Lennon in late 1970, when he and Ono were in New York City visiting friends and filming Up Your Legs Forever and Fly with avant-garde film-maker Jonas Mekas. The interview took place on 8 December in the boardroom of Allen Klein's company ABKCO, at 1500 Broadway, and was intended to promote John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Lennon was accompanied by Ono, and Wenner taped the proceedings.
Lennon had arranged to meet with McCartney while they were both in New York, in order to discuss their differences regarding the Beatles' company Apple Corps, but McCartney cancelled the meeting. Lennon said that he was planning on not showing up anyway. Since making his announcement in April, McCartney had told London's Evening Standard newspaper that he wanted to leave the Beatles' record label, Apple Records, and reiterated his opposition to Klein's appointment as the band's business manager. With no further explanation on the break-up, media speculation had instead focused on the possibility of the band members solving their differences and reuniting.
By comparison, Lennon denigrates most of the Beatles' work as dishonest. He highlights his compositions "Help!", "In My Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Across the Universe" as examples of the "truth" he brought to the band's music. He says that, with Ono's influence, his songs on the White Album represent a sustained study in first-person narrative and therefore authenticity in his art. When asked about his former bandmates' recent solo releases, he describes McCartney's self-titled album as "rubbish" and says that Plastic Ono Band will most likely "scare him into doing something decent". Lennon says he prefers Harrison's All Things Must Pass to McCartney, but qualifies the comment by saying: "Personally, at home, I wouldn't play that kind of music ... I don't want to hurt George's feelings, I don't know what to say about it." He similarly describes Starr's Beaucoups of Blues as "good" but says: "I wouldn't buy it, you know ... I didn't feel as embarrassed as I did about his first record ''Sentimental."
He identifies himself as a "genius" whose talents were overlooked or ignored since childhood, by school teachers and by his aunt, Mimi Smith, who brought him up following the death of his mother. According to Lennon, this genius was similarly belittled or compromised by the expectations of fans and music critics, who favoured the conformist, "Engelbert Humperdinck" side of the Beatles, as represented by McCartney. When discussing the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership, Lennon identifies himself as the artist and truth-teller, and McCartney as a commercially focused tunesmith. He complains that, as an artist, having to play the part of a Beatle was "torture", adding: "I resent performing for fucking idiots who don't know anything. They can't feel ... They live vicariously through me and other artists ..." He denigrates the band's US fans at the height of Beatlemania, saying that American youth in 1964 displayed a clean-cut, wholesome appearance yet represented an "ugly race". Regarding rock critics, he states: "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' dare criticize my work like that. You, who don't know anything about it. Fuckin' bullshit!"
Lennon says that the Beatles' image was sanitised by their agreeing to Epstein's requirement that they wear suits and curb the riotous behaviour that had been a feature of the group's stage shows in Hamburg in the early 1960s. He says that with their international fame, the band's existence became a constant humiliation in which they were denied the freedom to speak out about global issues and their artistic integrity was lost. He dismisses the 1968 book – the band's authorised biography written by Hunter Davies – as a further example of their image being whitewashed for the public. Lennon says that he himself allowed his Aunt Mimi to remove the "truth bits" about his childhood in Liverpool, but that Davies omitted any mention of drug-taking or the "orgies" taking place during the Beatles' concert tours. Lennon likens these backstage and hotel parties to the debauchery depicted in Frederico Fellini's film Satyricon. He blames the Beatles' audience for idolising the false image and reinforcing the myth surrounding the band.
Lennon dismisses producer George Martin's contribution to the Beatles' music, saying that Martin was merely a "translator". He pairs Martin with the Beatles' former music publisher, Dick James, as two associates who took credit for the band's success when in fact it was only the four Beatles who were responsible. Lennon says: "I'd like to hear Dick James' music and I'd like to hear George Martin's music, please, just play me some ... People are under a delusion that they made us, when in fact we made them." He then attacks the Beatles' long-serving aides Peter Brown, Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall as having believed they too were part of the Beatles. According to Lennon, these individuals represented a false illusion among the staff at Apple, whereby the Beatles provided a "portable Rome" in which Brown, Taylor and Aspinall felt entitled to a position beside "the Caesars".
Lennon portrays Klein as the saviour of the Beatles' finances against entrepreneurs such as Lew Grade and Dick James. He says that Klein brought a working-class honesty to their business dealings and that this contrasted with the snobbishness of Lee Eastman, who was McCartney's choice over Klein. In Lennon's description, by siding with Eastman, McCartney had adopted a business stance that said: "I'm going to drag my feet and try and fuck you." Lennon also says that he left the Beatles in September 1969 but acquiesced to McCartney and Klein's urging that his departure be kept private, for business reasons, yet McCartney then turned his own departure into a public "event" in order to promote his first solo album.
The two issues sold out immediately. The interview elevated Rolling Stone to its most prominent position yet in the US and established the magazine as an international title. Time magazine dubbed the combination of McCartney's lawsuit and Lennon's interview "Beatledämmerung", in reference to Wagner's opera about a war among the gods.
Titled Lennon Remembers, the book was published by Straight Arrow in the autumn of 1971. By this time, Lennon had rejected Janov and, with Ono, had adopted a new philosophy, focused on political radicalism with New Left figures such as Jerry Rubin. In response to Wenner's invitation that they meet and discuss the book's publication, Lennon wrote him a letter, in late November, in which he said that he had only agreed to give Wenner the interview to help turn around the business difficulties that Rolling Stone was facing in 1970, and that Wenner had acted illegally. Lennon challenged Wenner to print the letter in Rolling Stone, "then we'll talk." Lennon took to calling the book "Lennon Regrets". In retaliation at Wenner, Apple temporarily withdrew its advertising from Rolling Stone. In early 1972, Lennon and Ono began contributing to a new San Francisco-based political and cultural magazine, SunDance, in an attempt to sabotage Wenner's commercial standing.
Lennon Remembers was re-released in 2000 by Verso Books. For this edition, it contained the full two-part interview along with text that had been omitted from the initial publication. In his introduction, Wenner writes that the 1970 Lennon interview represented "the first time that any of the Beatles, let alone the man who had founded the group and was their leader, finally stepped outside of that protected, beloved fairy tale and told the truth ... He was bursting and bitter about the sugarcoated mythology of the Beatles and Paul McCartney's characterization of the breakup."
In the UK, the interview was broadcast in full for the first time in December 2005. The following year, Rolling Stone made the audio available as a podcast on its website.
Hunter Davies said that shortly after reading the Rolling Stone interview, he phoned Lennon to complain about his disparagement of the 1968 Beatles biography. According to Davies, Lennon offered an apology and said: "You know me, Hunt. I just say anything." In an interview with Doggett, Derek Taylor refuted Lennon's assertion of him and Aspinall, saying that they had both always respected the boundaries between themselves and the Beatles, and were feeling disconsolate enough with the failure of Apple. Taylor added: "John later retracted some of it, and we became friends again ... He would forget he'd said something, and expect to be forgiven, as he always was." George Martin was infuriated and recalled challenging Lennon on his comments in 1974: "He said, 'Oh Christ, I was stoned out of my fucking mind. You didn't take any notice of that, did you?' I said, 'Well, I did, and it hurt.'"
In his first Rolling Stone interview, in late 1973, McCartney admitted he had been devastated by Lennon's statements about him. He recalled: "I sat down and pored over every little paragraph, every sentence ... And at the time I thought. 'It's me ... That's just what I'm like. He's captured me so well; I'm a turd." McCartney responded by writing "Too Many People", in which, he told Playboy in 1984, he addressed Lennon's "preaching". After the song's release on McCartney's Ram album in May 1971, Lennon detected other examples of McCartney attacking him and responded with the song "How Do You Sleep?" The two former bandmates continued their public feud through the letters page of Melody Maker, with some of Lennon's correspondence requiring censorship by the magazine's editor.
Janov reflected in 2000 that, with Lennon and Ono having left his care in August 1970 due to intervention from US immigration authorities, "They cut the therapy off just as it started, really." Janov added: "We had opened him up, and we didn't have time to put him back together again." Harrison said that, until Lennon entered his primal therapy period, "we didn't really realize the extent to which John was screwed up." In a 1974 interview, Harrison criticised Wenner for publishing the book and for ignoring Lennon's claims that he no longer meant some of the things he had said.
Combined with the uncompromising message of Lennon and Ono's political direction over 1971–72, the 1970 interview became the subject of parody. Released in 1972, National Lampoon's Radio Dinner included the track "Magical Misery Tour" in which Tony Hendra parodied the primal therapy-inspired songwriting of Lennon. The lyrics of the song were taken entirely from Lennon Remembers and, as a closing refrain, highlighted Lennon's contention that "Genius is pain!" ending with a parody of Yoko's voice saying: "The Dream Is Over".
Aware of his betrayal of Lennon's trust when he published Lennon Remembers, Wenner sought to make amends following the singer's fatal shooting in New York in December 1980. For the John Lennon commemorative issue of Rolling Stone, Wenner wrote an effusive feature article that lauded Lennon's achievements during and after the Beatles. Having renewed his friendship with Ono, Wenner also used the magazine to champion her work and to defend Lennon's legacy against author Albert Goldman's depiction in the controversial 1988 biography The Lives of John Lennon. McCartney believed that this commemorative issue, along with other posthumous tributes to Lennon, afforded his former bandmate a messiah-like status that served to diminish the importance of his own contribution to the Beatles. In his first major interview after Lennon's death, McCartney said, "if I could get John Lennon back I'd ask him to undo this legacy he's left me." Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, McCartney sought to correct what he saw as a Lennon-biased revisionism to the Beatles' history, culminating in the 1997 publication of his authorised biography, , by Barry Miles. In Weber's view, Many Years from Now represents the "closest thing to a personal rebuttal of the Lennon Remembers interview" from any of Lennon's former bandmates.
Writing in the London Review of Books in 2000, Jeremy Harding said that Lennon's 1970 interview and the Plastic Ono Band album combined to "round off the 1960s nicely – or nastily, come to that", with Lennon's rhetoric echoing the lyric from "God" that "The dream is over". He wrote that the "perplexing contradictions" manifested in the book "seem easier to grasp in retrospect ... rock and roll fundamentalism v. avant-gardism; therapy v. politics; and, above all for Lennon, John v. the Beatles and all they stood for". Harding added that this "self-engrossed, witty, malicious, foolish" Lennon of 1970 was also more appealing to a new generation of listeners than had been the case for the Beatles' contemporary fans.
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