SHEFF: Paul had more musical training than you did, right? JOHN: Yeah, his father was a jazz musician. When I met him he could play guitar, trumpet, and piano. Doesn’t mean to say he has a greater talent, but his musical education was better. I could only play the mouth organ and two chords on a guitar when we met. I tuned the guitar like a banjo. I’d learned guitar from my mother, who only knew how to play banjo, so my guitar only had five strings on it. Paul taught me how to play the guitar proper—but I had to learn the chords left-handed, because Paul is left-handed. So I learned them upside down and I’d go home and reverse them. I can still play upside down, with the high strings on top. That’s what I was doing the day we met—playing on stage with a group, playing a five-string guitar like a banjo, when he was brought around from the audience to meet me. In the Hunter Davies biography of the Beatles, there’s a photo of the day we met. (Pause) You see, I told you I have a good memory. SHEFF: But you didn’t compose your stuff separately, as other accounts have said? JOHN: No, no, no. I said that, but I was lying. [Laughs.] By the time I said that, we were so sick of this idea of writing and singing together, especially me, that I started this thing about, “We never wrote together, we were never in the same room.” Which wasn’t true. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one-on-one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, “Oh you-u-u… got that something…” And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, “That’s it!” I said, “Do that again!” In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s nose. We spent hours and hours and hours… We wrote in the back of vans together. We wrote “She Loes You” in a van on the way to Newcastle. And “From Me To You”.
John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)
