Nicola Bardola - John Lennon - My Love Is Like A Bird With A Broken Wing

The main trouble with the mail from America is that they put self-addressed envelopes with American stamps on. If they’d thought of it, they’d know it doesn’t work. They should put English ones on.

The papers changed their tune. We noticed in ‘The Daily Worker’ in Britain, at first they were saying we were capitalist things, and then they changed and said we were sort of raising the workers up to fight against capitalism. So they’ve changed their tune a bit. That’s the way we found out. The ‘Daily Worker’ is the British communist paper.

Ours were Civil awards, and theirs were sort of, what are they - they got theirs for killing people. And I think, we deserve ours for not killing people.

We rehearse the sound with the technicians, not the songs.

There’s only one person in the United States we ever wanted to meet - not that he wanted us. And we met him last night. We can’t tell you how we felt. We just idolised him so much. … You can’t imagine what a thrill that was last night. Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn’t been an Elvis, there wouldn’t have been the Beatles.

John Lennon in Los Angeles am 29. August 1965 nachdem die Beatles Elvis besucht hatten.

***

We signed for all the people waiting to get their MBEs and OBEs.

She (die Königin) said to me, ‘Have you been working hard lately?’, and I couldn’t think what we had been doing so I said: ‘No, we’ve been having a holiday’. We’d been recording, but I couldn’t remember.

John Lennon bei der Pressekonferenz anlässlich der Überreichung der MBE’s (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) durch die Queenam 26. Oktober 1965.

***

Das sechste Studioalbum „Rubber Soul“erscheint im Dezember 1965.

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed, some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain. All these places had their moments with lovers and friends, I still can recall, some are dead, and some are living.

In My Life, Dezember 1965

Is it right that you and I should fight every night? Just the sight of you makes night time bright.

It’s Only Love, 1965

Well, you know that I’m a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind and I can’t spend my whole life trying just to make you toe the line.

Run For Your Life, 1965

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere, so I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

Norwegian Wood, 1965

He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see.

Nowhere Man, 1965

She’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there: You feel a fool.

Girl, 1965

***

Got a good reason for taking the easy way out.

Day Tripper, Dezember 1965

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, Rock’n’Roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

John Lennons folgenreiche Aussage fällt während eines Interviews mit Maureen Cleave und erscheint am 4. März 1966 im Rahmen einer Homestory im Evening Standard. Darin befinden sich weitere, sehr selten zitierte Sätze zu Reichtum, zur Klassengesellschaft oder zu indischer Musik, die ihm George kürzlich mitgebracht hat oder zu den Kelten und über das Lesen und die Vorstellungskraft - Imagine:

I want the money just to be rich. The only other way of getting it is to be born rich. If you have money, that’s power without having to be powerful. I often think that it’s all a big conspiracy, that the winners are the Government and people like us who’ve got the money. That joke about keeping the workers ignorant is still true. That’s what they said about the Tories and the landowners and that. Then Labour were meant to educate the workers but they don’t seem to be doing that any more.

You’re not listening, are you? … It’s amazing this – so cool. Don’t the Indians appear cool to you? Are you listening? This music is thousands of years old. It makes me laugh, the British going over there and telling them what to do. Quite amazing.

I’ve read millions of books, that’s why I seem to know things. … I have decided I am a Celt. I am on Boadicea’s side, all those bloody blue-eyed blondes chopping people up. I have an awful feeling wishing I was there, not there with scabs and sores but there through reading about it. The books don’t give you more than a paragraph about how they lived. I have to imagine that.

Zunächst hat der Jesusvergleich keine Konsequenzen. In Großbritannien wird er medial nicht weiter beachtet. Erst Ende Juli beginnt eine heftige Debatte darüber in den USA.

John Lennon bezieht Stellung dazu während einer Pressekonferenz in Chiacago am 11. August 1966. Es ist eine rhetorische Meisterleistung: Wer eine Entschuldigen fordert, bekommt sie, gleichzeitig wahrt John Lennon dank der Präzisierungen sein Gesicht und fügt am Ende an, dass seine Aussage vielleicht auch missverstanden wurde.

I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have gotten away with it. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down. I was just saying it as a fact and it’s true more for England than here. I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong.

***

I don’t need to go to church. I respect churches because of the sacredness that’s been put on them over the years by people who do believe. But I think a lot of bad things have happened in the name of the church and in the name of Christ. Therefore I shy away from church, and as Donovan once said, „I go to my own church in my own temple once a day“. And I think people who need a church should go. And the others who know the church is in your own head should visit that temple because that’s where the source is. We’re all God. Christ said, „The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.“ And the Indians say that and the Zen people say that. We’re all God. I’m not a god or the God, but we’re all God and we’re all potentially divine – and potentially evil. We all have everything within us and the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh and within us, and if you look hard enough you’ll see it.

John Lennon anlässlich seiner Friedensinitiativen in einem Gespräch für die BBC mit David Wigg am 8. Mai 1969.

***

We’re going to Germany, America and Japan this year. It’s an accident that we’re not working now. We should have just had two weeks holiday after Christmas and then started on the next film, but it isn’t ready and won’t be for months. We want to work and we’ve got plenty to do - writing songs, taping things and so on. … I feel we’ve only just finished ‘Rubber Soul’ and I keep looking for the reviews - then I realize we did it months ago. We’re obviously not going to work harder than we want to now, but you get a bit fed up of doing nothing. … I thought about this a while back and decided I’d been a bit extravagant and bought too many cars, so I put the Ferrari and the Mini up for sale. Then one of the accountants said I was all right, so I got the cars back. It’s the old story of never knowing how much we’ve got. I’ve tried to find out but with income tax to be deducted and the money coming in from all over the place, the sums get too complicated for me … The thing I’ve learned is that if I’m spending 10,000 Pounds I say to myself: ‘You’ve had to earn 30,000 Pounds before tax to get that. … I’m dying to move into town but I’m waiting to see how Paul gets on when he goes into his town house. If he gets by alright then I’ll sell the place at Weybridge. Probably to some American who’ll pay a fortune for it. I was thinking the other night though that it might not be easy to find a buyer. How do you sell somebody a pink, green and purple house? We’ve had purple velvet put up on the dining room walls. It sets off the old scrubbed table we eat on. Then there’s the ‘funny’ room upstairs. I painted that all colors changing from one to another. … The next LP is going to be very different. We wanted to have it so that there was no space between the tracks, just continuous. But they wouldn’t wear it. Paul and I are very keen on this electronic music. You make it clinking a couple of glasses together or with bleeps from the radio, then you loop the tape to repeat the noises at intervals. Some people build up whole symphonies from it. It would have been better than the background music we had for the last film.