#i can see him being petty and like hahHA that album was shit

[lovedbythesun]

Robert Rosen on John, Paul, obsession and John’s reaction to Paul’s arrest in Japan (bolded)

RR: If you read Nowhere Man, you're gonna spend a couple of 100 pages in Lennon's head and you'll see what that's like. The neurosis and the occult, and the insecurity and the anger and the rage and the petty jealousy and the absolute expression of joy when McCartney was busted in Japan for trying to smuggle in marijuana.  And you'll also get the creative genius, the guy who went down to Bermuda, knowing it was time to break out of his seclusion and get back into it and release an album. After five years, the painful creative struggle to reconnect with his muse and the love he felt towards Yoko and towards Sean. I mean, that's all there. It's like the beautiful part of Lennon and there was indeed, a beautiful part, with the part that was heady and angry and resentful and jealous.

Host: You just described his reaction to the Tokyo drug bust with Paul. There's been definitely conflicting accounts, what the state of their relationship was not just the 1980 but throughout the whole of the Beatles solo years, where he definitely had the signs of an obsession with Paul's career and his successes. At the same time publicly talked about I don't pay attention to Wings, I don't pay attention to my peers. I don't pay attention to Jagger, or Dylan or all that stuff. Yet. You see things like the tape diary he did in 79, where he clearly is paying attention very much to Paul's career. Overall, did you get an impression of where things stood regarding his feelings toward Paul?

Robert Rosen: That is like a huge part of Nowhere Man because he spent so much time thinking about Paul and writing about Paul and obsessing over Paul. And everything Paul did, it drove him..every time he heard a Paul song on the radio, especially Coming Up off McCartney II that it would make him jealous. He saw his life as him and Yoko being either up or down in relation to Paul and Linda. And he just flat out said, I know this is not the way to be. There was like, the jealous part of him, that would just go crazy over something Paul did..and nobody's paying attention to me now. And there was that part of him and then there was the larger part of him, where he wanted to be like Jesus and Gandhi and Mohammed and Buddha, and he wanted to follow the path he wanted to follow the way, he wanted to merge with God.

It was just this constant struggle between this man who wanted to be pure and this man who wanted to take drugs and have sex with May Pang and just like, oh I bought this beautiful house in Palm Beach and Paul's gonna read about it and that's a great victory over McCartney and oh, Yoko just sold a cow for a quarter million dollars and it's gonna be in the papers and Paul's gonna read about it.  That's another great victory over McCartney and it's just like Yoko did it, she used her magic powers to have Paul busted in Japan and this is not in Nowhere Man because this is what he wrote in the diaries that I couldn't quote from the diaries but he was just so overjoyed that say, it was like the high point of 1980 up to that point and he writes, go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200 - that's the thing from Monopoly and I'm not quoting from the diaries, I'm quoting from the Monopoly board, right [both laugh].

You know, that's what John wrote and he was just "oh, Paul's still in jail, maybe they'll keep him there for a couple of years and they let him out after only 10 days but the Wings tour was ruined and it made him happy.” 

- Robert Rosen / Something About The Beatles Podcast / 10/08/2022 (x)