BEST OF John Lennon and George Harrison on The Dick Cavett Show!

i guess you all know that um that john lennon uh together with the three other fellows uh named mccartney and harrison and the star uh were responsible for becoming uh i guess the most written about most listened to most imitated uh musical group of the sixties and for about eight years uh they were leaders in the musical world and not only that but i probably affected what um a decade of young people uh looked like and thought about and dreamed of and they achieved the absolute pinnacles of success they were even honored by the queen an honor which they eventually uh returned i believe uh i'm sure it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that the beatles are no longer together um in in recent months john lennon and uh has well john has sort of surfaced in the underground press where he gave a long interview in rolling stone magazine which he talked with some a great deal of candor and some bitterness i suppose about the old days and his wife fioco ono is maybe one of the most controversial ladies since the duchess of windsor wally simpson kept the duke from becoming the king tonight they are however quite above ground and i'm very pleased to welcome them here will you welcome please john ono lennon and yoko [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] how are you nervous but okay thank you are you really yes no is that a little bit but it isn't as if we've never met because we we did meet once we did meet in a dingy hotel room so you're jack lemmon yes you're registered or is it awesome well that's fair yoko how are you good good okay uh is there anything that you want to know about me to start off with that we can just to sort of get them to get them actually this is my profession i know he lives here yeah i practically do i hardly ever get out of here the chair collapses into a bed and uh yoko sat in that very chair [Applause] well i bet many people have sat inside a lot of people have said in it but i was just i saw the show it was very nice did you see that yeah yeah it was one thing they forgot to plug so i thought so i thought i'd plug it for them and that's their new christmas record we wish you merry christmas war is over get yours now thank you is there such a record yes he made it after he was on the show so he didn't get a chance to talk about it is there a slight undercurrent of hostility between you and uh no no remember really you know i wouldn't i'm not going to tell anybody i i just thought i'd take the opportunity and promote his record for him war is over if you want it happy christmas yeah and for records well are you in any sense in contact with each other i mean yeah i saw him last night actually at the premiere of raga which is what we should talk about maybe okay but i mean what did you say i said hi hello do you have writers who think of these things or do you just have them ready and you can just snap them right out yeah we have ryan's home and solo what did he come back with right away with hi yeah well let's talk about that for a second because you know yoko you've even been you've even been called the dragon lady who um yes the lady who brought the beatles apart and i took them all i have trouble with english can we please give her the credit for all the nice music that george made and ringo made and paul made and i've made since they broke up if she blessed he did it [Music] that's true i know uh turned out all right didn't it yeah but you're aware of that i mean that the press always saw you as the the wedge that was driven in at a heightened drive a wedge in three places or whatever how many spaces there are between four people but um that was the there are millions of girls who would love to have met let alone married uh one of the four any one of the four probably but certainly a lot of them and i resent to you know to think of him as as one of the four you know i mean or any one of the four etc because i just met him as another artist and all that and i didn't you know particularly realize that part of it really you were a beatles fan or before or would you say you were a lenin fan before um neither neither she didn't care for either of them i know about it the only name she knew was ringo because it means apple in japanese ringo means apple did you know that when you named your company apple no no it was just one of those happy accidents just one of those happy apples yes [Music] happy applesauce right number syllable ringo if you spell it sideways spells groin yes star backwards is rats i know and there are a lot of do you do those things too i find that when i go along the road in the car i'm always doing the signposts backwards anyway she didn't split the beetles because how could uh one girl split the beatles or one woman the beatles are drifting apart on their own you know do you can you remember when you realized that it was inevitable that you would split up uh i wouldn't know first of all it's like saying you know did you remember falling in love not quite you know just sort of happens how long was it fun yeah well everything's fun off and on you know so i suppose it could have gone on being fun off and on or it could have gone worse i don't know it's just that when you grow up you know we don't want to be the crazy gang which they might know over here which is british or the marx brothers which is sort of being dragged on stage playing she loves you when we've got you know asthma and tuberculosis and when we're 50 you know here they are again yesterday so a long time ago i said that i didn't want to be singing she loves you and i'm 30 i said that when i was about 25 or something which in a roundabout way meant that i wouldn't be doing whatever i was doing then you know 30 well i was 30 last october and that's about when uh my life changed really especially for john i can say that he's at least sort of overgrown outgrown you know whatever they were in you know because i think it's very difficult for for artists who are so brilliant and talented to be together and do everything together you know i mean just impossible almost so whatever they were doing was almost miraculous you know that they work together when you uh if you and you and john and yoko do meet though you're not really no no gritting your teeth no we're good friends yeah well all of that about her being the problem with the group is that slightly silly that little one woman could be so much of a problem no the group had problems long before yoko came along many problems folks can you remember who was the first to say you know i bet we'll break up one day um that this won't go on that this is sort of a dream that we can't all stick together uh i don't really remember anything about the beatles days uh it seems like a sort of you know previous incarnation when i think about it and a long time ago like another life yeah yeah do you regret any of it no no don't regret really anything you know i mean that's what happened and it was good you know it was good but it was also good to carry on do something else in fact it was a relief sometimes they say you were some people can't understand that you know because beatles was such a big deal they can't understand why we should uh actually enjoy splitting up but there's a time you know there's a time when people grow up and they leave home or whatever they do and they go for a change you know and it was really time for a change do you think a lot of people just envied the idea of being world celebrities though and well some people you know would go on and on forever singing the same tune and playing the same gig if they were making some money you know yeah but uh i think we'd all rather give that up and try going on our own and try doing something we really want to do and if we don't make it then hard luck as it happens we've all got such a lot of like goodwill hanging over from beam beetles yeah i mean you probably wouldn't have me on the show if i hadn't been one let's face it no you wouldn't get here on looks alone do you just because that comes on doesn't mean you have to do it right away oh do you feel like doing it now no i just did it oh really oh i see four or five minutes he's right folks we will return after this message from our local station see when you say it talking with george harrison who wants to know if it's over yet do you think you might have been the most anxious of the four to get out i get that impression from reading about it uh maybe maybe yeah yeah i wonder well because um over the uh years you know i had such a lot of songs mounting up that i really wanted to do but i only got my quota of one or two tunes per album and that way i would have had to recorded about a hundred beatle albums just to get out the tunes i had in 1965. were you held down by the other fellas uh well very subtly yes yeah i would not really they didn't strap me down or anything like that yeah but um no it was just the way things happened you know they it started off i didn't write they wrote then i started to write and it was uh sort of trying to push in a bit you don't you don't actually read or write music do you no well then when you say right well right if you have a tune that hits you how do you get it down just keep it in your head you know just work it out on the piano on the guitar but then do you tape it or what presents sometimes sometimes put it on tape but usually you can remember it in your head if you don't i write the words down and remember the tune in my head do you wish you'd studied composition and no all of that you don't need it well maybe maybe it would help somewhere i probably wouldn't have to pay a copyist yeah but you don't miss it i mean you can no no it's it would just help because it's not really sort of music you know it's like uh i mean there's a difference between people who write music and classical things and big arrangements to the sort of thing i do it's just really it's very simple and the other the other guys most of the melodies were were john's or paul's that were done um yeah done on the album that was funny when john was on every time you had a commercial break and then came back part 20 and they keep playing paul's songs just put our guests at ease i guess but they always talk about you as the real musician of the group and if you haven't studied music what do they mean by that you're more serious about me you've seen that though that they said probably because i didn't smile so much to be a real musician you have to be sour i suppose yeah okay there was also the theory that you attracted more girls by being the quiet one in the same sense that a guy at a party who sits in the corner uh we'll have the girl come and say oh what's the matter it's just uh this was not a calculator philosophy was it just a rumor yeah yeah i think paul used to get them all with his you know [Music] oh we don't have much time left if any does anyone have any idea how much time we do have let me confirm quickly a couple rumors with you yes one of them has it ever been settled whether lucy in the sky with diamonds was a code for anything it never was and nobody believes me i even saw some famous star introducing i've forgotten who it was introducing a lena mccartney show and it was mel tormey saying about how loosely in the sky with diamonds is about lsd this is the truth my son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange looking woman flying around i said what is it he said it's lucy in the sky with diamonds i thought that's beautiful i immediately wrote a song about it the song had gone out the whole album had been published and somebody noticed that the letters spelt out lsd and i had no idea about it and of course after that i was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelt out there they didn't spell out anything none of the others and uh it wasn't about that at all you know they could do that eleanor rigby nobody believes yeah stood for it was henry the horse in the song i wrote called mr kite the lyrics which i got most of it off was an old poster for an old-fashioned circus you know from the 1800s and it was all about pablo frankie's fair and the horse was there and they said henry the horse was horse which i didn't know anything about then and happiness is a warm gun was another one they said which was banned on the radio they said it was about shooting up drugs and it was the there was the front of a gun magazine which said happiness is a warm gun you know they're advertising guns i thought it was so crazy that i made a song out of it do you ever think of anything i don't know if you knew janice joplin will or jimmy hendrix she sent me a birthday tape on my birthday last birthday you'll asked all different people to make a tape for me and she was one of them and we got it after she died it arrived in the posting that she was singing happy birthday to me in the studio what do you think could be done about drug overdosing in or out of the profession i think the the basic thing nobody asked is why do people take drugs of any sort from alcohol to astros to hard drugs and that question has to be resolved first before you think well what can we do for the poor drug addict why do we and you and anybody have to have these accessories to normal living to live that means there's something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized that we cannot live in it without guarding ourselves against it so it's that basic the problem i think if people are allowed to be a bit more free and express themselves they wouldn't have to inhibit themselves by taking drugs to not be hurt people take drugs and drink so they don't feel what's going on around them total freedom for everybody is our goal you know that way you know it will be a utopia people frighten the freedom they think freedom all there'll be excesses of course there would be excess to an extent and then it would settle down in the way that the porno films don't pull so many people in now so what it'll it'll level out and uh all forms of freedom will be the same as that if people are allowed to be completely free it would let it level out and people would be less inhibited and not be frightened of each other and wouldn't have to take drugs to prevent being hurt by each other [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

Views: 1,987,342

Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, Dick Cavett, Dick Cavett Show John Lennon, Dick Cavett Show George Harrison, Yoko Ono, The Beatles, Who was in The Beatles, Who is John Lennon?, John Lennon full interview, Why did the Beatles break up?, Who broke up the Beatles?, Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?, Do the Beatles still speak together?, When did John Lennon die?, John Lennon 41st Anniversary, Who is Yoko Ono?, What is George Harrison known for?, The Beatles Get Back, John Lennon music

Id: O0HVeG-JpLc

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021