The Playboy Interviews With John Lennon & Yoko Ono – David Sheff, 1981 ★★★½

No Time for Fussing and Fighting

John Lennon had the most fascinating life of any ex-Beatle, despite it being so much shorter. In a succession of distinct if not exclusive public identities, he went from blissful dreamer to tortured artist to committed radical to party-hearty studio rat and finally bread-baking papa. Much of that time he was in the company of his lover Yoko Ono, a conceptual artist who saw in John’s celebrity an opportunity to advance big ideas and challenge stereotypes.

It makes for a great story, anyway; can you dig it? Many could, happily buying up issues of Playboy magazine when it hit stands the first week of December, 1980. For a few precious hours readers were able to appreciate David Sheff’s interview with John and Yoko on its own merits, blissfully ignorant of what was to come.

For these next 36½ years, reading the Playboy interview has been a profoundly different experience. Is it possible to read his answers and think of John not as someone about to be murdered but just a famous guy entering a new phase of a multi-faceted public life? I sure tried, and found the experience frustrating if refreshingly worthwhile.

One thing’s certain: There was a lot less angst about Lennon ‘80. Sheff describes him as an eager interviewee, with a plethora of happy experiences and positive vibes he is keen to share. Gone is the “tough, hard-biting rock ‘n roller with the acid tongue,” as John puts it.

“The game isn’t over yet,” he tells Sheff. “Everyone talks in terms of the last record, or the last Beatles concert – but God willing, there are another forty years of productivity to go. Time will tell where the real magic lies.”

Many know the version of the interview that was published in Playboy, which is available online. The book version of this interview, released the following August and subtitled The Final Testament…, is a different, more wide-ranging reading experience. In an introduction, editor G. Barry Golson notes the task of editing 20 hours of interviews into just 20,000 words left a lot of sugar on the floor.

“There has been editing for clarity and brevity,” Golson notes, “but two-thirds of the material in this book has never been published before.”

What do you get from the book that wasn’t in the original magazine piece?

One thing I noticed is a stronger focus on the John-Yoko relationship. There’s not only more Yoko in the book, but more emphasis on the couple’s relationship, and its centrality to John’s life and artistic direction.

“The number-one priority is her and the family,” John explains early on. “Everything else revolves around that.”

John Lennon & Yoko Ono sit for a portrait by Tom Zuk in conjunction with their 1980 Playboy interview. "This will be the reference book," Lennon told David Sheff. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/533395149586827389/.

It was at the time a unique working relationship. Until that summer, when Lennon returned to the studio after a five-year absence, his life was that of a self-described “house-husband,” baking bread and being the principal caregiver for their young son, Sean.

Back in 1980, mothers didn’t cede the caregiver role to fathers, particularly when Daddy was a rock star. But “playing the game,” as Lennon describes it both in this interview and in one of the songs he was recording at the time, “Watching The Wheels,” was something he was happy leaving behind.

And Yoko didn’t want the job of mommy, as she explains to Sheff:

ONO: The connection with the child is there anyway. I mean, it’s my flesh and blood. But it’s almost like I did this beautiful painting or something and then someone tells me, “All right, you did this beautiful painting and now you have to maintain it: dust it and clean it and always look after it.” That’s the part that someone else can do and the child’s better off for it and the parents are better off for it and society’s better off for it.

You get a few huh moments like that with Yoko. Whether she’s whining at how people disregard her oddball ideas just because she’s a woman, or how she needed to send a dangerously unstable John away from her side for 18 months in 1973-74 as a form of therapy, there’s plenty of times she says something that leaves me shrugging.

Maybe I didn’t notice this so much when I first read it because the tragedy of John’s loss was so fresh and raw. I notice it more now. The sense of entitlement, of persecution, and of having a whip hand over John comes off so strong at times its almost choking.

PLAYBOY: You make your relationship with Yoko sound like a teacher-pupil relationship.

LENNON: It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That’s what people don’t understand. She’s the teacher and I’m the pupil.

Was the relationship a public-relations sham, played for the cameras and microphone while the pair lived out separate lives? The idea has been circulating for some time. I don’t buy that, though.

As annoyed at times as I was by Yoko, or perplexed by John’s subservient demeanor with her, it was hard not to see her effect on John being quite positive. I still blame her in large part for the Beatles’ breakup, and her treatment of John’s first wife and son was horrid by any standard. But if she was a dictator to John, it was of a benign sort which John, who craved gurus, appreciated with open eyes.

There are lots of little moments where Sheff describes the comfort level between the couple. John alternately jokes and argues with Yoko and continues conversations they obviously were having in private. It is evidence of a real relationship, not perfect but recognizably human.

ONO: Even now, I just read that Paul [McCartney] said, “I understand that he wants to be with her, but why does he have to be with her all the time?”

LENNON: Yoko, do you still have to carry that cross? That was years ago.

Talk of Paul and the other ex-Beatles would be the main point of commercial interest, something John consented to as a means of getting publicity out for Double Fantasy, the album he and Yoko were recording at the time. When Sheff’s interview first appeared, Beatles content dominated. A lengthy section consisted of John explaining who wrote what in the Lennon-McCartney partnership, a breakdown which many Beatles scholars reference and argue over to this day.

Funny to say, I find the song rundown the dullest part of the interview, more so in the longer form found in the book. Prompted by Sheff by various song titles, John explains who wrote what and offers occasional capsule commentary.

PLAYBOY: “Your Mother Should Know”?

LENNON: Guess who? Paul.

PLAYBOY: “I’m Only Sleeping”? One of my favorites.

LENNON: It’s got backwards guitars, too. That’s me – dreaming my life away.

PLAYBOY: “Fool On The Hill”?

LENNON: Paul. Proving he could write lyrics if he was a good boy.

You can feel John’s palpable boredom as he endures this exercise for the sake of promoting work he cared about, in the process giving a few incomplete answers and a couple of howlers, like his writing most of the lyrics for “Eleanor Rigby” or describing “Cry, Baby, Cry” as “a piece of rubbish.”

The December 1980 issue of Playboy magazine would be best-known for its feature interview with John & Yoko, yet the magazine had other things to sell at the time, specifically a pictorial of actress Barbara Bach, not yet herself a Beatle wife. Image from http://www.john-lennon.com/playboyinterviewwithjohnlennonandyokoono.htm. 

The exercise is nevertheless fascinating and essential for Beatles fans, given how John’s living witness would shortly be taken away. There are also moments of real magic, like when John holds forth on one Lennon-McCartney song, one he readily admits was Paul’s baby: “Hey Jude.”

LENNON: I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it…Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying, “Hey Jude – hey, John.” I know I’m sounding like one of those fans who read things into it, but you can hear it as a song to me.

Moments like that one give this interview a radiance that neither time nor an assassin’s bullets can steal. It helps make the often-rambling interview a quick read. There is also a vibrancy to the fine details, the filigree around the questions that places this interview transcript very firmly in its time. Lennon brings up such pop-culture nuggets as the “Who-shot-J. R.” cliffhanger on TV’s “Dallas” and sings a commercial jingle for panty hose [“sheeeer ener-GEE”] which was on my TV too at the time. Sure, I expected nostalgia here, just not 1980 nostalgia.

Having Lennon back in my life, if only inside an old paperback, carried a quality of casual reality I don’t quite get listening to his music. You can see him sitting cross-legged on the floor, chain-smoking pungent Gauloises and wryly enjoying his life with a kind of open-hearted enthusiasm that still feels infectious even after you know what comes next.