CLUB SANDWICH 76

            During the making of the Anthology it's been fascinating to observe the level of diplomacy and democracy that has to exist now, that wasn't necessarily present in the sixties.

            No, it was. Democracy was. There was no diplomacy whatsoever but democracy, yes. You're right about the diplomacy thing. We weren't diplomatic with each other and that does have to exist now. But democracy was one of the great things about the Beatles: if Ringo didn't like one of the songs we were doing we didn't do it. Whether John and I were the great writers and Ringo was not, he still had a vote. We each had a veto. And that was very important for the Beatles.

            But now there seems to be the scenario of: we're using your choice of studio so we're using my choice of producer, your choice of engineer, my choice of art director, your choice of press agent, and so on.

            Yes, that's true. You have to do that. I think it's only right. We're more diplomatic as people. As you get older you learn this. I think it's OK where we're at now. It sometimes is a bit annoying when you really think that someone has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, as I have once or twice in this project. One example we all found slightly amusing was when we came to say who thought of the name Beatles. George and I both had a very concrete memory of meeting John and Stuart shortly after they'd thought of the name, and them saying, "We thought of a good name for the group: Beatles, with an 'a'." And we went, "Well that's interesting, why?" And they said, "The double meaning, like the Crickets," and so on. There was some thought about it being to do with The Wild Ones too, and we knew they were into all of that.
            Well, when the paper Mersey Beat first came out, Bill Harry, the editor, asked John, who was a college mate of his, to write a piece for it, and he did a piece of what I would call "comic writing". That was John's thing. He didn't write serious prose, he wrote In His Own Write and "in the early hours of the morecambe". So he wrote a piece called 'On The Dubious Origins Of Beatles', and the basic line that we all laughed at was something like "I had a vision and a man came unto me on a flaming pie and said 'You shall be Beatles with an 'a', and so it was." We took this to be Goon humour and a sort of Biblical joking - "and God said unto thee 'come forth', and he came fifth". That's very much the humour that was going around Liverpool at the time.
            Now, it turned out that we couldn't have this in the Anthology because Yoko believes that John did have a vision. I'm very friendly with Yoko now so I don't want this to look like a snide thing, but it genuinely intrigues me that she thinks this. And the way I tried to put it to her was, you can say, "I had a vision" and people will go "OK". You could say, "A man came unto me". "OK, it's starting to sound a little biblical, but it's all right, still." "On a flaming...". "Yes, this is OK, it's even more biblical". Now, if you'd have gone to the word "chariot", we would be all right. Or if you'd gone to the word "phoenix" we would be all right. But the word "pie" is a dead giveaway. "A man came to me on a flaming pie?" I know, in my mind, that John didn't have a vision about this, but the way Yoko puts it is, "If it's OK for Paul to dream 'Yesterday' then it's OK for John to have a vision." So these are the kind of things that cropped up. It's only a difference of opinion so it doesn't matter vastly. We've tried to make our point, she's made her point and we've arrived somewhere in the middle.