It may take 10 minutes for you to see it, but it’s there. Trust me.
 
(via The World’s Best Ever)

 
An open letter in the underground press that accused the Beatles of going soft and selling out to the establishment, comparing John Lennon’s call for pacifism in “Revolution” to a BBC radio soap opera, and conferring superior revolutionary credentials on the Rolling Stones, so incensed the Beatle that he spent six hours 40 years ago giving an interview to a couple of college students offering a rebuttal that was finally published today in the pages of the New Statesman magazine.

In 1968, Maurice Hindle and a friend hitch-hiked to Surrey to meet Lennon, who picked them up personally at the train station in his Mini Cooper. Yoko Ono fed them homemade macrobiotic bread and jam. Lennon spoke nearly continuously for six hours.

He says “Revolution” was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary. So it mightn’t have been. But the point is to change your head - it’s no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think he’s gonna change? The system’s what he says it is: a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn’t gonna do it.

Hindle writes “Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which took [writer John] Hoyland to task for his “patronizing” tone, and ended with the defiant challenge: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.”
 

 
The full interview is only available in the print edition of New Statesman magazine.

Last Friday on Twitter, Yoko Ono announced that she’d answer questions tweeted to @yokoono on her website and mine was one of the ones she answered:

@RichardMetzger
Do you find that children ?¢‚Ǩ?ìget?¢‚Ǩ¬ù your conceptual art pieces better than adults?

@yokoono
Not necessarily. There are kids who think they are grown ups and don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t want to know anything that smells like kids stuff. And there are grown-ups who are still kids at heart who clearly get my work.

I love Yoko Ono. I am a complete Yoko Ono fanatic, so this was a wonderful thing. It made my day! You can read the rest of the Yoko Q & A here.

And you can watch her perform “Whole Lotta Yoko” with “The Dirty Mac” (Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Richards and John Lennon) as part of the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus below:

If TMZ had been around in the 60s, you can bet that D.A. Pennbaker’s famous film of John Lennon and Bob Dylan “clearly fucked up on junk” in the back of Dylan’s limo would have made it to their blog and been blasted all over the Internet. But it wasn’t until the mid-80s when the videotape trading underground really took off, that copies made their way into collector’s eager hands (I had a copy). Now it’s easy to see, of course, on YouTube.

I’d always read that Dylan was extremely drunk and that Lennon was tripping or else just stoned, but maybe they were on something stronger. Lennon would know, right? It would explain the vomit talk, I guess! Dylan is obviously out of his mind on something and makes little, if any sense. Lennon seems a little embarrassed but still willing to play along. Whatever surreal flights of rock god verbal fantasy they had planned for this filming, the results were something rather less than coherent.

This is history baby. Not like great history or anything, but history nonetheless…

Famous People on Drugs (YouTube link)

Famous People Still on Drugs (YouTube link)

The John Lennon Bit (scroll down)

Dylan vs Lennon (transcript)

I like how he’s confused by the rules of American Football. I doesn’t make any sense to me, either, and I’m American… (HT Mikki Halpin)