OUT ON A LIMB: The Beatles’ Paul McCartney Explains Why Things John Lennon And Yoko Ono Believed In Were Crap.
Now, Paul McCartney has commented about Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s anti-war action. When the interviewer mentioned Lennon‘s quitting The Beatles to explore new artistic territory with Yoko Ono, McCartney said the things they’ve believed in were crap. According to him, a war could not be ended like this.
“The thing is – so much they held to be the truth was crap,” McCartney says. “‘War is over,’ well, no, it isn’t. ‘If enough people want the war to be over, it’ll be over…’ – I’m not sure that’s entirely true.”
Lennon eventually may have figured that out also, in his last days, before his life was tragically cut short. His personal assistant from 1979 until his death late the following year has said, “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on Jimmy Carter.”
Because of Lennon’s murder, and because so much footage exists of him recording the Imagine album in 1971, his radical chic image has become freeze-dried. But it was simply another phase for Lennon, in-between the psychedelia of the mid-‘60s, the booze-fueled “lost weekend” of the mid-‘70s, his house husband phase raising his son Sean few years later, and his return to recording near the end of the ‘70s.
As Lennon himself said in one his last interviews, “I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”