Interviews by Howard Smith
For this episode, we used two of the five interviews Smith did with John Lennon and Yoko Ono between 1969-71. One took place at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s apartment in the West Village in New York City. The other interview was done over the phone while the couple was in Montreal during their famous Bed-In.
We discovered these interviews in the Smith Tapes archive.
The Animated Transcript
Howard Smith was an Oscar winning film director, broadcaster and journalist for The Village Voice. TheSmithTapes.com
People seem to be having a lot of trouble getting along with each other, I mean couples. Both of you seem very, very close. What’s your secret?
I can’t give you the formula for meeting the person that you’re going to love, but it’s around, you know. And it happens. I mean it happened to me at 29 and Yoko Ono at 32.
Yoko: Whatever.
And it’s a long wait, you know, I didn’t think it was… I thought it was an abstract thing, you know, when I was singing about all you need is love. I was talking about something I hadn’t experienced. I had experienced, you know, love for people in gusts, and love for things and trees and things like that, but I hadn’t experienced what I was singing about. It’s like anything, you sing about it first or write about it first, and find out what you were talking about after.
Yoko: Well, I never thought that it would happen in this late stage of my life. I mean, I just sort of, I was starting to give up hope, you know, that kind of thing, you know. Becoming very cynical and all that. But it happened and it’s very, very, very good.
It’s no good having, being with people you can dominate all the time. Or being with someone who can dominate you all the time. Because either one is boring. But if you’re with somebody who’s got a ticking mind, which was the best part about being with the Beatles when they were ticking, is they were ticking, you know? But it began to slow down.
But with Yoko Ono, it’s like living with 4 or 5 people…. [laughs] It’s far out.
Yoko: Well we do say, four of us are getting along very well these days aren’t we? Or something like that.
That’ll do. they’ll have us put away.
Marriage thing itself, as an official ceremony seems to have somewhat gone out of style. How come you decided to go through with a regular marriage?
Because we turned out to be romantics. I mean we went through the whole intellectual bit about marriage, you know, where it’s a bit of paper and some guy gives it to you. And that’s all true. But when he gave it to us, it was very emotional, you know, and it wasn’t even a, we couldn’t even get a nice vicar or a bishop, you know, to do it. It’s completely against what we thought, what I thought intellectually, I thought well it’s never again, forget about this one. You know, what a joke, what a joke it all is. And the next minute, I’m standing there and she’s crying and it’s like we’re soft kids, you know. So we’re romantic, and it made a difference.
Can there be such a thing as being too close? Can that actually… Because in your case it doesn’t seem that way.
Like stifling each other then. You see we’re both mind people, you know. So to be apart, we don’t have to physically be apart.
Yoko: Exactly. You have to say that.
I just said it.
Yoko: Oh, alright.
I just said it. Ding dong, ding dong. Next round.
Yoko: But the point is this is an interesting example….
Well they’re all brought up to think that a couple, you mustn’t give a child too much love, a couple mustn’t be together too much, it’s good for the husband to be working in America while the wife’s in Brazil. You know, we don’t believe all that jazz. That’s just some social Christian jazz that someone must have laid on us a few generations ago. And you can’t give a child too much love and if you love somebody, you can’t be with them enough. There’s no such thing. We don’t want to be apart.
I just like TV, you know. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.
Yoko: The complexity of it is incredible, you know. So you can see, observe TV on many levels actually, many different levels.
I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely. One minute it’s the saint, the next it’s a rocket, or Vietnam. It’s very surreal. I leave it in on whether I have the sound on or not.
Yoko: You don’t have to go to India any more. You know, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just be here.
It’s like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I’ll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar. Apart from Yoko Ono.
Bonus Interview Outtakes
All You Need Is Love
“They were playing, All You Need is Love earlier on [the radio] and I was saying to Yoko, ‘I still believe all you need is love, you know.’ But I don’t believe that just saying it is going to do it, you know. I still believe in the fact that love is what we all need, what makes us all so desperate, [inaudible], or whatever the word, neurotic, etc, etc. But I still believe there’s many ways of getting to that situation, you know. There’s a lot of changes in society to come before we can ever get to a state of even realizing that love is what we need, you know. But I still believe in it, and there are some rude cracks about oh Beatles sang All You Need is Love, but it didn’t work for them, you know. But nothing will ever break the love we have for each other and I still believe all you need is love [crosstalk] I don’t have to live with three guys to prove that love is the basic necessity of all of us, you know.”
Mind People
“And because we are mind people, I thought it was because I was an only child, but what I had stepsisters, I lived alone. I always tripped out on my own or in books or something like that, you know. But she had sisters and brothers, but she was a different age group from them so she was pretty lonely. I guess it’s that, you know. We’re both conceptual people in a way, and it’s that. So we don’t have to be apart to get away from each other. And we really like being together all the time. And what about Sonny and Cher and Liz and Richard? I don’t think they’re ever apart, you know.”
John Winston Lennon
He was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool during a German air raid in World War II.
Lennon was a choir boy and a boy scout while growing up.
He got his first instrument from a bus driver: a harmonica.
In the summer of 1956 he crossed paths with Paul McCartney.
Lennon reportedly met Yoko in 1966 at one of her art gallery shows in London.
John and Yoko recorded their first album, Two Virgins, in 1968–two years before the Beatles broke up.
The couple married on March 20, 1969 in Gibraltar. During their honeymoon, they held their first “Bed-in for Peace” at the Amsterdam Hilton.
Lennon fought the U.S. government to avoid deportation in the early 1970s.
Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman outside his New York City apartment on December 8, 1980. He was 40 years old. Remarkably Lennon had signed an autograph for Chapman earlier that same day.
CREDITS
Executive Producer
David Gerlach
Animator
Patrick Smith
Audio Producer
Amy Drozdowska
MUSIC
“Love”
Written by John Lennon
Performed by Priscilla Ahn
Courtesy of In a Tree, Inc.
By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing
“Love”
Written & Performed by John Lennon
Courtesy of Capitol Music Group
under license from Universal Music Enterprises
By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing
“Oh, Yoko”
Written & Performed by John Lennon
Courtesy of Capitol Music Group
under license from Universal Music Enterprises
By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing
“Love”
Written by John Lennon
Performed by Beck
Courtesy of Fonograf Records
By arrangement with Downtown Music Publishing
PHOTOS
The Smith Tapes
National Archives of the Netherlands