There are moments in history where everything lines up like an acid trip that actually makes sense.
One of those moments happened in Room 1742 of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono camped out in white sheets, preaching peace to a world that only understood napalm and Top 40 radio. It was part protest, part performance art, and all Lennon — weird, sincere, slightly stoned, and totally committed.
John was perhaps the most iconic figure to ever grace the covers of SCREW — and it just so happens he was one of our biggest fans! The influential singer, songwriter, peace activist, founding member of The Beatles, and other-half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting team, with more awards and accolades than anyone can count, is a symbol of so many things to so many people he might as well be Jesus Christ. Yet fifty-six years from his first interview with SCREW, most people still don’t know he was also an erotic artist.
John’s relationship with SCREW goes back to the beginning. It was the first year of SCREW’s publication, during John and Yoko’s Bed-In-For-Peace in Montreal that they granted SCREW publishers Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley an interview. John loved the irreverence of SCREW. He was a subscriber, often calling in to have his subscriptions forwarded to wherever he was in the world because he hated to miss an issue.
John’s first interview, which appeared in SCREW #18 (June 27, 1969), helped give the magazine a much-needed boost in credibility and prestige. In it, John showed a side of himself he was unable to show in other publications.
Here’s an excerpt:
SCREW: What was your first sexual experience and how old were you?
John: Oh, probably around six, you know, I don’t remember anything before that, really, I mean I suppose your first sexual experience is fiddlin’ with yourself, but the first of my big episodes was a little girl up in entry and we had her knickers down and some guy came along, you know, and she ran off with her knickers around her legs and we all ran away. She was about four years old. All the other guys got caught but me (heh, heh!), so that’s why I remember it so well. We were just lookin’ and before that I can’t remember anything.
SCREW: You want to pose naked for our centerfold? We’ll be glad to take the picture.
John: You and whose army? I even took the photograph for Two Virgins. We were alone when we took that photograph. We’re very shy people, you know. What do you think we are, some kind of sex perverts or something? You’re talkin’ to Abbott and Costello.
SCREW: Do you still want to get into the United States?
John: Sure. I want to see Nixon, to give him an acorn… We think the whole scene’s too serious, that’s why SCREW is good… The whole movement is all a load of intellectual shit. And all them “hippie-aware” people are just a gang of snobs.
SCREW: I was once managing editor of a paper called The New York Free Press and the main problem with it was it took itself so serious. If I wanted to say this cop was kind to children I’d probably get censored.
John: Right! That’s where it’s at. Like the Underground in England is so serious. The International Times is so serious they won’t even review our records. Because we made it. We “sold out” and it’s a real laugh. Now they’re talking about changing it and talkin’ about Gandalf and fuckin’ Alice in Wonderland. The hobbits.
SCREW: Are you guys ever planning to get together again and do something?
John: I’ve tried to get them all on the road, but Ringo doesn’t want to, so… I’m not that mad about it, but I’m interested in going out. So I’m just doin’ a few gigs with Yoko.
SCREW: Have you gotten out of the bed at all these past few days?
John: Just to shit and pee.
SCREW: You got that SCREW reader? Get closer to the mike.
John: Yeah, we got out of bed one day and we just SHAT!
SCREW: This is going to be hard to take. A lot of little girls are going to be very disappointed to find out that a Beatle shits.
John: I used to wonder about the Queen.
SCREW: Why did you come to Montreal?
John: Because they wouldn’t let me in the States.
SCREW: But you could’ve gotten in?
John: They only would have let me in if I did an anti-narcotics thing with a senator. McGovern, I think.
Six months later John and Yoko return to SCREW for the first-ever, stateside release of John’s hand-drawn erotic art. Of all the places and magazines he could have chosen to publish his art for the first time, John chose SCREW, because we’re the only publication that agreed to publish them without censoring them.
Read all about that here: “The Erotic Art of John Lennon and His Historic First Showing in SCREW”.
—P.
