from COUNTERPUNCH:
"Power to the People"
The Lost John Lennon Interview (1971)
By TARIQ ALI
and ROBIN BLACKBURN
Editors' Note: It was twenty-five years ago today that John Lennon
was murdered outside the Dakota building on Central Park West in New
York City. We doubt many CounterPunchers have read the following 1971
interview with Lennon done by CounterPunchers Tariq Ali and Robin
Blackburn. It's a lot more interesting that the interminable Q and A
with Lennon done by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner. Tariq and Robin
allowed Lennon to talk and spurred him on when he showed signs of
flagging. Lennon recounts about how he and George Harrison bucked
their handlers and went on record against the Vietnam War, discusses
class politics in an engaging manner, defends country and western
music and the blues, suggests Dylan's best songs stem from
revolutionary Irish and Scottish ballads and dissects his three
versions of "Revolution". The interview, which inspired Lennon to
write "Power to the People", ran in The Red Mole, a Trotskyist
broadsheet put out by the Internation Marxist Group, a British
appendage of the Fourth International. The Mole had popped up after
its predecessor, The Black Dwarf, went to ground. As you'll see, those
were different days. The interview is included in Tariq Ali's
Streetfighting Years, recently published by Verso. AC / JSC
Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements,
especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your
views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this
start to happen?
John Lennon: I've always been politically minded, you know, and
against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like
I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise
the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead
somewhere.
I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to
wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the
system.
In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to
overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And
that religion was directly the result of all that superstar
shit--religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well,
there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?'
But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I
wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean
gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play
about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since
my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them
around.
I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my
shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the
class repression coming down on us--it was a fucking fact but in the
hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from
reality for a time.
More at: http://www.counterpunch.org/
--
Jim Devine
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let
people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
