Q: Would any of you care to comment on any aspect of the war in Vietnam?
Q: Could you elaborate any?
JOHN: No. I’ve elaborated enough, you know. We just don’t like it. We don’t like war.
GEORGE: It’s, you know… It’s just war is wrong, and it’s obvious it’s wrong. And that’s all that needs to be said about it.
PAUL: We can elaborate in England.
Q: Now that Paul is the only bachelor Beatle, do you find that the girls gravitate more to him than they do to the rest of you fellas? How do you feel about that?
PAUL: Well, the thing that we found… We found after all this business, of all the buttons that say ‘I love Ringo,’ “I love John,’ John’s were outselling everyone’s.
Q: This one to John, please. Any remarks whatsoever on some of the recent remarks attributed to you and the Beatles concerning religion?
JOHN: Well, I think I’ve said enough about that. I can’t say anymore, and just sort of going over the same thing over again. You know, a lot of it just is a lot of rubbish and a lot of hysteria.
Q: […] I’m wondering where you consider yourself to be now, music-wise.
JOHN: (jokingly) On Decca Records.
Q: Do any of you have plans to record on your own?
JOHN: We do at home, you know. We might.
GEORGE: In fact, we have done, I think.
GEORGE: ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was Paul on his own.
JOHN: We were just drinking tea.
Q: No, the thing that I’m trying to get at is, do you have plans like anything definite at all?
PAUL: Not for separate recording careers, if that’s what you mean.
Q: One of you, I believe it was George, said that you couldn’t comment on Vietnam in this country but you could in England. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
GEORGE: I didn’t say that. Maybe one of us said that, but I didn’t.
PAUL: It was me. I mean, you know about that, anyway, you know. I mean, we could say a thing about… like John’s religious thing in England and it wouldn’t be taken up and misinterpreted quite as much as it tends to get here. I mean, you know it does. The thing is that, I think you can say things like that in England and people will listen a bit more than they do in America, because in America somebody will take it up and use it completely against you and won’t have many scruples about doing that. You know, I’m probably putting my foot in it saying that, but…
JOHN: You’ll be explaining to the next bunch.
PAUL: [About Shea Stadium not selling out] Well, I don’t know, but the thing is– Do you expect us just to go on forever making more and more money, making more and more figures, bigger and bigger? You can’t just go forever!
GEORGE: And if certain people have decided they don’t like us after John’s statement then, you know, we don’t want…
JOHN: We’ll have to get rid of them.
GEORGE: We’d rather just have people who like us, and really like us, rather than pretend to like us because we’re the in-thing.
[Extracts from the Beatles press conference at the Warwick Hotel, Manhattan, New York on 22nd August, 1966. From BeatlesInterviews.org]
Pics: The Beatles at Warwick Hotel, Manhattan, New York on 22nd August, 1966.16 Magazine photo archive, courtesy of Tracks Ltd.
