"THE SMITHS TAPES" PROJECT

AN INTIMATE INTERVIEW WITH YOKO ONO AND HER LATE HUSBAND John Lennon reveals just how much the two clicked as soul mates.

“It keeps your mind alive, you know,” Lennon said of his relationship with Yoko. “It’s no good being with people who can dominate you all the time or that you can dominate all the time. But if you’re with somebody who’s got a ticking mind, which was the best part of being in the Beatles…but you can’t slow down. With Yoko, it’s like living with four or five Beatles.” 
The intimate revelation is part of a series of interviews known as “The Smith Tapes” project. Howard Smith was a journalist as a radio personality for New York’s WABC and a star columnist at the Village Voice throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s. Hundreds of his interviews with some of rock’s biggest names were discovered in 2000 when his architect son Cass Calder Smith was helping him move to a smaller apartment.

The tapes contained hundreds of conversations with legends like Mick Jagger, Eric Capton, Lou Reed — and remained untouched for 40 years. Smith, now 80 and fighting cancer, told his son that he had hoped to use them to write a memoir. The younger Smith then spent years cataloging and digitizing the interviews with the assistance of producer Ezra Bookstein. “This is not someone talking about the time; this is the time,” Bookstein told the New York Times of the tape’s amazing contents. Since last November, segments of the interviews have been released on iTunes as part of The Smith Tapes project.

On March 12th, Collection No. 5 debuts, with Smith interviews with the The Rolling Stones, Jerry Garcia, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

In the upcoming Lennon interview, John and Ono address the criticism that the couple faced about their relationship. People were accusing the two artists of being too close and dependent on one another.

“To be apart we don’t have to actually be apart,” Lennon tells Smith during one of five interviews they gave to him at their room at the St. Regis Hotel. “We’re all brought up to think that you mustn’t give a child too much love, a couple mustn’t be together too much, also it’s good for the husband to be working in America while the wife’s in Brazil. We don’t believe all that jazz. That’s just some social Christian jazz that somebody must have laid on us a few generations ago…We don’t want to be apart.”

Ono tells a story about wanting to attend a women’s meeting with John, but being told that she had to come alone. But Ono insisted that John be by her side. The group acquiesced, but then proceeded to criticize her, calling her arrogant and dependent on John.

“Every person can have his or her own bag,” Ono said. “We don’t all have to be alike. We can’t be….We just have to realize our own bags. I wish they would understand that. … Let us be as we are.”

Ono then expresses her frustrations with people trying to label her relationship with Lennon. “To make some fantastic, you know, kind of theory out of us is ridiculous,” Ono said. “Well this is a sign of dependence or whatever. Both of us are very strong people, and also very vulnerable.”

Lennon then makes the obvious statement that close bonds with friends and loved ones are a natural occurrence.

“There were times when I spent as much time with George, Paul, and Ringo as I did with Yoko,” Lennon said. “I mean, I slept with them in the same room in twin beds, of course, on tour, and I lived, ate, and breathed with them for five or ten years. Nobody said that about four young fags living together.” Lennon laughed before continuing. “But between a man and a woman, oh my goodness, what’s going on there with each other all the time? There must be something perverse about it.”

“It’s not fashionable anymore, I suppose,” Ono said in response to Lennon. “We’re both particular people. I don’t think we can stand for a moment anything that we can’t stand, and we wouldn’t even think of doing something that we can’t stand….You know we’ve been together for a long time [and] it seems like it’s agreeable to us, doesn’t it?”

That Hippie Penny Lane