I can’t remember where I was in 1971 when I first read Jann S Wenner’s brilliant interviews in Rolling Stone magazine with John Lennon. (They later came out as a book, which is still in print, and are probably the best interviews John ever gave.) I do remember a bit of jawdropping admiration and, yes, jealousy that Wenner had managed to get so much out of him. He’d obviously caught John at a good moment, when he was raging against the world in general and the Beatles in particular. He said that their manager Brian Epstein had forced them into suits and that they’d “sold out”. And he attacked Paul: “When Paul was feeling kind, he’d give me a solo.” Most of all, he rubbished himself, saying what a bastard he had been.
I was enjoying all this when Wenner suddenly asked John about my book, The Beatles: the Authorised Biography, first published in 1968. “Well, it was really bullshit,” said John. He went on to explain that had omitted“the orgies and shit that happened on tour” and that I had allowed his aunt to take stuffout. It was the word “bullshit” that jumped out. I’m sure it gave huge pleasure to all theother Beatles hacks at the time but over the years it has largely been forgotten.
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