“John came over to my loft one day and he was all excited,” [DJ Howard Smith] recalls. “He said, ‘I think I finally wrote a song with as good a melody as Yesterday.’” Sat at Smith’s piano, Lennon revealed he had a title – Imagine – but only a smattering of lyrics. For the rest he sang ‘scrambled eggs’. “He played it through and asked me what I thought. ‘It’s beautiful.’ ‘But is it as good as Yesterday?’ ‘They’re impossible to compare.’ So he played it again. And again. And he said, ‘You’ll see, it’s just as good as Yesterday.’”
— Howard Smith, interview w/ Danny Eccleston for MOJO: John Lennon was haunted by yesterday, says confidante. (July 8th, 2013)
“Found you when your heart was broke I filled your cup until it overflowed Took it so far to keep you close (keep you close) I was afraid to leave you on your own”
There was a time when we walked by the docks And I told you, “I need you all of my life” And watching the tugs rolling by together Do you remember? Do you remember the lights on the shore? How they reflected the rain on the road? I believed that you love me alone It was real, do you remember?
“John and Paul related to each other as peers. Theirs was not a big brother/ little brother relationship (as seemed to exist between John and George), despite the fact that Lennon was a year and a half older than McCartney. They clearly had the closest friendship within the Beatles, at least at first, but they couldn’t have been two more different people. Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offense at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say. In fact, unless he felt especially strongly about something, he was usually amenable to change.”
Darkness came quickly and the moon emerged among a sprinkling of first stars. John tried to identify the stars, but became confused. The only one he was certain about was Venus, which seemed brighter than the rest. As the sky grew darker, another star appeared to shine even more brightly than Venus, and John speculated that it could be Mars. “Ah, Venus and Mars,” he laughed softly. “Sounds like an album title.”
Frederic Seaman, The Last Days of John Lennon(1991)
