Paul McCartney and his wife Linda discussed some of his final conversations with The Beatles bandmate John Lennon before his death in a Playboy magazine interview published in the mid-80’s. McCartney also recently discussed if Lennon and other Beatles bandmates ever were with underage girls.
PLAYBOY: Was the way you two went at each other good for the music?
PAUL: Yeah. This was one of the best things about Lennon and McCartney, the competitive element within the team. It was great. But hard to live with. It was hard to live with. It was probably one of the reasons why teams almost have to burn out. And, of course, in finding a strong woman like Yoko, John changed.
LINDA: But that way, you lose yourself.
PAUL: Yeah, I think that probably is the biggest criticism, that John stopped being himself. I used to bitch at him for that. On the phone with me in the later years, he’d get very New York if we were arguing. New York accent “Awright, goddamn it!” I called him Kojak once, because he was really laying New York street hip on me. Oh, come off it! But, through all of that, I do think he was always a man for fresh horizons. When he wanted to learn Japanese for Yoko, he went to the Biarritz.
LINDA: I like that! Biarritz! You mean Berlitz.
PAUL: Yeah, he wanted fresh challenges all the time. So it was nice of Yoko to fulfill that role. She gave him a direction.
The Beatles icon Paul McCartney confirmed that John Lennon wanted to put Adolf Hitler on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and revealed a remark he made about Hitler in a GQ interview.
Did he really come to that meeting near the end of the Beatles and say he was Jesus Christ?
“I don’t remember that. I think I would have remembered that. He was the kind of guy that could do that. I don’t remember him actually ever doing it. I mean, on the Sgt. Pepper cover he wanted Jesus Christ and Hitler on there. That was, ‘Okay, that’s John.’ You’d have to talk him down a bit—’No, probably not Hitler…’ I could say to him, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ He was a good enough guy to know when he was being told.”
Did he have a rationalization for why it was a good idea to put Hitler on there?
“No. It’s a laugh. We’re putting famous people on the cover: ‘Hitler! He’s famous!’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, but John, we’re trying to put heroes on the cover, and he’s not your hero. Winston Churchill’s your hero, John.’ He was a big fan of Winston. So he was just fucking about. That was John. He was very witty, very wonderful, and would like to push the envelope, and it was entertaining to be around someone like that. These are cool people. But you can’t always do everything they suggest.”
