Читать книгу John Lennon - My Love Is Like A Bird With A Broken Wing - Nicola Bardola - Страница 9

 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.

John Lennon im Gespräch mit Chris Hutchins für den „Musical Express“ vom 11. März 1966.

***

 If I thought I’d got to go through the rest of my life being pointed and stared at, I’d give up The Beatles now. It’s only the thought that one day it will all come to an end which keeps me going. … There are only about 100 people in the world who understand our music: George, Ringo, and a few friends around the world. Some of the artists who recorded our numbers have no idea how to interpret them. Keely Smith added nothing to our compositions but a couple trumpets. I loathed Matt Monro’s version of ‘Yesterday’ and liked Marianne Faithfull’s … When Paul and I write a song we try and take hold of something we believe in, a truth. We can never communicate 100 per cent of what we feel but if we can convey just a fraction we have achieved something. We try to give people a feeling, they don’t have to understand the music if they can just feel the emotion. This is half the reason the fans don’t understand but they experience what we are trying to tell them. … Lack of feeling in an emotional sense is responsible for the way some singers do our songs. They don’t understand and are too old to grasp the feeling. Beatles are really the only people who can play Beatle music.

John Lennon im Gespräch mit dem „Flip Magazine“ für die Ausgabe Mai 1966. Die Beatles sind in dieser Zeit intensiv mit den Aufnahmen für das nächste Album „Revolver“ beschäftigt, das in jeder Hinsicht neue Wege einschlägt. Gegen Ende wird John noch gefragt, was er von Journalsiten und Reportern hält:

 You can spot the good ones even in a crowded reception hall. You’ll be saying something which no one else is writing down but just one or two reporters. I’ve seen enough journalists to recognize those who know what we’re all about.

***

 Better to watch singing than wrestling, anyway.

 There’s probably more wind from the press than from us.

 We’re trying to change that image of England.

 Well, we think about it everyday (an den Krieg in Vietnam), and we don’t agree with it and we think it’s wrong. That’s how much interest we take. That’s all we can do about it, and say that we don’t like it.

 We’re not on holiday. We don’t expect to see any sights or have any fun. And if we get fun as well while we happen to be touring, well then it’s okay, you know. But it’s our job as well.

 There’s no excuses or reasons for seeing us. People keep asking questions about why they come and see us. They come and see us because they like us. That’s all. There’s nothing else to it, you know. And they don’t have to let off steam at our concerts: They can go and let off steam anywhere.

 If he doesn’t think we’re adult, then you know, that’s his opinion. But we are adult, and if the question was a joke it wasn’t funny. We’re as adult as he is, and probably moreso. … you look adult enough to not ask questions like that.

John Lennon bei einer Pressekonferenz in Tokyo mit Antworten u.a. auf die Frage, was er tun wird, wenn er erwachsen sein wird, am 30. Juni 1966.