39 Facts About Lennon Remembers

Lennon Remembers is a 1971 book by Rolling Stone magazine co-founder and editor Jann Wenner.

Lennon Remembers makes cutting remarks about his former bandmates, particularly McCartney, as well as associates and friends such as George Martin, Mick Jagger and Derek Taylor, and about the group's business adversaries.

Lennon Remembers portrays himself as a genius who has suffered for his art.

Lennon Remembers was accompanied by Ono, and Wenner taped the proceedings.

Lennon Remembers had arranged to meet with McCartney while they were both in New York, in order to discuss their differences regarding the Beatles' company Apple Corps, but McCartney cancelled the meeting.

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Lennon Remembers said that he was planning on not showing up anyway.

Lennon Remembers discussed the Beatles' history, giving details that were little known beforehand.

Lennon Remembers begins by saying that Plastic Ono Band is "the best thing I've ever done".

Lennon Remembers says that, with Ono's influence, his songs on the White Album represent a sustained study in first-person narrative and therefore authenticity in his art.

Lennon Remembers identifies himself as a "genius" whose talents were overlooked or ignored since childhood, by school teachers and by his aunt, Mimi Smith, who brought him up following the death of his mother.

Lennon Remembers says that the Beatles' image was sanitised by their agreeing to Epstein's requirement that they wear suits and curb the riotous behaviour that had been a feature of the group's stage shows in Hamburg in the early 1960s.

Lennon Remembers says that with their international fame, the band's existence became a constant humiliation in which they were denied the freedom to speak out about global issues and their artistic integrity was lost.

Lennon Remembers dismisses the 1968 book The Beatles – the band's authorised biography written by Hunter Davies – as a further example of their image being whitewashed for the public.

Lennon Remembers says that he himself allowed his Aunt Mimi to remove the "truth bits" about his childhood in Liverpool, but that Davies omitted any mention of drug-taking or the "orgies" taking place during the Beatles' concert tours.

Lennon Remembers likens these backstage and hotel parties to the debauchery depicted in Frederico Fellini's film Satyricon.

Lennon Remembers blames the Beatles' audience for idolising the false image and reinforcing the myth surrounding the band.

Lennon Remembers discusses his consumption of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, saying that he and Harrison were the most adventurous with the drug, and claiming that he himself had taken "a thousand trips".

Lennon Remembers agrees with Ono that LSD and his subsequent absorption in meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi were "mirrors" to his own identity.

Lennon Remembers says that Janov's primal therapy is another "mirror", but it has freed him from his natural introspection.

Lennon Remembers says that after Epstein's death in 1967, McCartney assumed a leadership role, but it took the band "in circles".

Lennon Remembers identifies Let It Be as a project "by Paul for Paul", in which scenes featuring Lennon Remembers and Ono were excised to show McCartney as a more powerful force.

Lennon Remembers heavily criticises his bandmates for their coldness towards Ono and their failure to recognise her as a creative equal.

Lennon Remembers says that while Starr was more accepting, he could never forgive Harrison and McCartney for their dismissal of Ono.

Lennon Remembers dismisses producer George Martin's contribution to the Beatles' music, saying that Martin was merely a "translator".

Lennon Remembers says that Klein brought a working-class honesty to their business dealings and that this contrasted with the snobbishness of Lee Eastman, who was McCartney's choice over Klein.

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Lennon Remembers identifies 1950s rock 'n' roll and his latest work as the only valid form of rock music.

Lennon Remembers criticises the Rolling Stones for slavishly copying the Beatles, and questions the Stones' reputation as a more political and "revolutionary" group than the Beatles.

Lennon Remembers expresses his gratitude to Ono for introducing him to the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp.

Lennon Remembers was away in Spain but later left a message for Wenner saying that the interview was not to be re-published and that Wenner was "jumpin' da gun" by discussing the idea with a book publisher.

Lennon Remembers was bursting and bitter about the sugarcoated mythology of the Beatles and Paul McCartney's characterization of the breakup.

Lennon Remembers's comments were applauded by members of the New Left and ensured that he and Ono became figureheads for the cause.

Buckley criticised Lennon Remembers for revelling in egotism, and for his derision of those who had failed to venerate him in the past.

Lennon Remembers said that, in debunking the Beatles and 1960s counterculture, Lennon "revives the idea of leader as exemplar" and had provided a new direction for "the movement".

Hunter Davies said that shortly after reading the Rolling Stone interview, he phoned Lennon Remembers to complain about his disparagement of the 1968 Beatles biography.

Lennon Remembers's 1970 Rolling Stone interview became a key document in Beatles literature and, until the mid-1990s, was often viewed as the definitive statement on the Beatles' break-up.

The publication in book form aided these developments, in addition to Wenner continuing to present it as an accurate record of events, despite Lennon Remembers having contradicted or retracted some of his assertions in the years after the interview.

Aware of his betrayal of Lennon's trust when he published Lennon Remembers, Wenner sought to make amends following the singer's fatal shooting in New York in December 1980.

McCartney believed that this commemorative issue, along with other posthumous tributes to Lennon Remembers, afforded his former bandmate a messiah-like status that served to diminish the importance of his own contribution to the Beatles.

In 2005, BBC Radio 4's John Lennon Remembers Season included a feature on the interview, using the original tapes and new commentary from Wenner and Ono.