Pod Insights The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan Elliot Mintz | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan About this episode In this conversation, I sit down with Elliot Mintz, the man who became John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s closest confidant during their most radical and reclusive years. Elliot shares how a single radio interview turned into hundreds of late-night calls, secret meetings in Ojai, and a front-row seat to Lennon’s life after the Beatles. We talk about government surveillance, artistic risk, and the quiet cost of fame. Elliot reflects on John’s complex relationships with Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, the making of Some Time in New York City, and the moment John handed him a test pressing and told him to “break the record.
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Transcript 11,892 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:09 Speaker 01 Yoko was the first one out. And I heard a voice from the back of the station wagon saying, "Go on, hug him." She gave me a light touch on the shoulder. And then he bounced at the car and gave me a linen bear hug. She tells me to sit at the corner of the bathtub, turns on the water, comes closer to me, almost as a whisper. The house is completely bugged. Everything that we're saying is being recorded. We're being watched.
1:43 Billy Corgan? The Bronx, 1945. Is that accurate?
1:46 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:48 Billy Corgan? Do you remember the world that you grew up in?
1:51 Speaker 01 I was born in the Bronx.
1:53 Billy Corgan? OK.
1:53 Speaker 01 I probably spent just a number of months there, Bronx Hospital. And then the entire family moved. The entire family was my mom, dad, and sister. We moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan.
2:06 Billy Corgan? OK.
2:07 Speaker 01 In Upper Manhattan. And lived there for virtually all of my adult life. My parents lived there and died in that two-bedroom apartment. And it was just... Lower middle class. I remember the neighborhood well. I remember Fort Tryon Park. I don't remember much of my youth, you know, between forty-five and fifty-five.
2:36 Billy Corgan? Why do you think that is?
2:39 Speaker 01 Either it was an incredibly uneventful time for me, with nothing to hang on to by way of memory. I'm just surprised when people can talk to me about what they were doing when they were four, five, six, seven, eight years old. What the heck were any of us doing? We were doing things with crayons, I guess, and maybe on a...
3:00 Billy Corgan? In my, sorry, in my case, I remember a lot of those things because a lot of traumatic things happened. So if I hadn't had those traumas happen, maybe I wouldn't remember. You see what I'm saying?
3:12 Speaker 01 Did you have traumatic things?
3:13 Billy Corgan? Oh, yeah.
3:14 Speaker 01 Between...
3:15 Billy Corgan? Between the ages of like four and sixteen, there was all this crazy stuff that happened. So my memories are all tied to, this happened, this happened, like a movie script, you know?
3:27 Speaker 01 Well, if you're talking about teenage years, yes, I did have some traumatic experiences. But I can recall what they were.
3:36 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
3:38 Speaker 01 But nothing bad happened to me up to five. What really got to me...
3:50 Speaker 01 Around the time I was fourteen, fifteen or so, I woke up one morning with a chronic stutter. A stutter that would haunt me for at least two years of my life. I'm gonna give you an example in it. I'm not making fun of people who stutter. But I'd talk like this. I'm not exaggerating. So there I was, you know, at PS 187, the smallest kid in the class.
4:26 Speaker 01 The most inhibited. And the one who couldn't talk. That, I mean, what I went through during that period was... So I eventually went to a therapist to try and figure out what it was that caused this sudden...
4:47 Billy Corgan? Did they, did they think it was psychological or emotional?
4:50 Speaker 01 Initially, they thought it was psychological. Then emotional. They couldn't do anything about it.
5:00 Speaker 01 So when I was seventeen and decided finally to leave the home and came out to L.A.,
5:09 Speaker 01 I had the stutter.
5:12 Speaker 01 And I had a New York accent, of course. I go over to L.A.C. College, the only place that's gonna accept me. Because my grades were terrible.
5:22 Speaker 01 And I tell them I wanna be a broadcaster.
5:26 Speaker 01 That's what they did.
5:28 Billy Corgan? It's a good story.
5:30 Speaker 01 It's true.
5:31 Billy Corgan? Was music, before we get you here in, in Los Angeles, before, was music a part of your, your youth in a, in any particularly vital way? Your life is very much defined by your musical association.
5:46 Speaker 01 My father, um, on that large mahogany Victrola that was in the little dining room area, he used to like opera music.
5:58 Billy Corgan? Okay.
5:59 Speaker 01 And, you know, it was just in the early fifties, I'm five, six, seven years old. And I start hearing, um, you know, white people covering, uh, some black songs. The Pat, you know, the Pat Boone kind of period.
6:20 Speaker 01 I guess it was fourteen, fifteen, I was fourteen or fifteen, when I wandered into the local pizza store on one hundred and eighty first and Broadway. And they had a jukebox. And the jukebox was my first iPod.
6:37 Speaker 01 Up to then, it was always somebody else was programming my music for me, and it was their music.
6:43 Billy Corgan? So you didn't have any particularly emotional association, is what you're saying, yeah?
6:47 Speaker 01 Until I put, dropped a dime in the jukebox. It's the first place where I heard Elvis.
6:55 Speaker 01 And it was the first place where black music was being allowed to be heard.
7:01 Billy Corgan? Yes.
7:01 Speaker 01 In that time, I know it's hard for people to remember.
7:04 Billy Corgan? Do you remember the Elvis song you heard?
7:05 Speaker 01 The Hound Dog.
7:09 Speaker 01 Black music was not allowed to be aired.
7:12 Billy Corgan? Right.
7:13 Speaker 01 Period. It was called race music, I think. So the only way you heard the way Chuck Berry and Little Richard and those guys actually sang was not through Pat Boone's version, but at the jukebox at the pizza place.
7:30 Speaker 01 And I went to the pizza place every day and listened to everything that was on the machine. Those were my early music origins that played a very significant role in my life. And doo-wop and, you know, all of that stuff.
7:49 Billy Corgan? And isn't it funny that, you know, across the ocean there, the Beatles are listening to the same music at the exact same time?
7:56 Speaker 01 John, I used to talk about that. That, you know, he was raised on the BBC.
8:03 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
8:04 Speaker 01 Which is as conservative as it can get. So he wasn't getting his music initially through the radio. He was getting it from Merchant Seaman, who would be coming, you know, back to the docks, carrying records.
8:22 Speaker 01 And his earliest recollection of the music came off of, most likely, seventy eights at the time.
8:28 Billy Corgan? Sure.
8:30 Speaker 01 And then slowly, you know, the BBC loosened up and he couldn't get enough of it.
8:38 Billy Corgan? Yeah. So you come out here and you end up becoming a DJ.
8:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:44 Billy Corgan? Where did the idea of becoming a DJ sort of, I know you talked about your physical impairment, but like, what was it about being a DJ that attracted you?
8:56 Speaker 01 The first gig was being a talk show host, interviewing people.
9:03 Billy Corgan? Okay.
9:03 Speaker 01 I was, I started when I was twenty-one and I was the, for whatever it's worth, I was the youngest talk show host in America.
9:13 Billy Corgan? This is radio or TV?
9:14 Speaker 01 Radio.
9:14 Billy Corgan? Radio, because TV comes later, yeah, right?
9:16 Speaker 01 Correct.
9:16 Billy Corgan? Okay.
9:17 Speaker 01 And this is a small, little community station called KPFK on Koanga Boulevard that did have a powerful signal, but there I am. I have just now spent a year going home every night with a thirty-pound typewriter on my solar plexus, working on breathing exercises, elongating my tongue to try and get past the stutter, that's how I got past the stutter, and working on the accent. That's why I wound up with the voice that I currently have, that people feel is affected, where they can't really tell where I'm from, or Canadian. It came from all of that. So I'm twenty-one and for two years I have a talk show where I interview
10:01 Speaker 01 the Frank Zappas and the Grace Licks and the people of that era that had no other place to go.
10:08 Billy Corgan? So you became sort of the media for them?
10:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
10:15 Speaker 01 The counterculture heroes of my time wandered into KPFK. That led to a series of five, six, seven ongoing radio stations. And I became a disc jockey after I had done years of telephone talk radio.
10:36 Billy Corgan? Explain telephone talk radio to me.
10:38 Speaker 01 Really?
10:43 Speaker 01 You interview a guest. The guest leaves. And you open the phones and say.
10:50 Billy Corgan? Oh, okay.
10:51 Speaker 01 I'm Elliot Min.
10:52 Billy Corgan? Sorry, yeah, yeah.
10:52 Speaker 01 Here are the phone numbers.
10:53 Billy Corgan? Now I understand. I thought I was missing something technically. So. The, the, this, what year would that have first started when you were 21? So 45, 66? 66, 67?
11:06 Speaker 01 I'm so bad with numbers.
11:08 Billy Corgan? No, but that's just the general thing.
11:10 Speaker 01 Mid 60s.
11:10 Billy Corgan? So, so you're here, you're here at the height of, of.
11:14 Speaker 01 The cultural revolution.
11:15 Billy Corgan? Love, uh, summer of love and what was your impression of that music at the time? Cause a lot of people that I've talked to that were actually here at the time didn't think much of the music. Now it's easy to sort of say, you know, For What It's Worth by Steven Stills is a classic. But at the time, a lot of people were like, you know, including Sinatra criticizing rock and, you know, there was a lot of kind of like, it was faddish. And even the Beatles had, had a brief foray into psychedelia, didn't actually last that long. So it was treated like a fad. Did you, what was your impression of that music in being here at the moment?
11:52 Speaker 01 At the moment? I thought it was almost all great.
11:58 Billy Corgan? That's cool. So give me some of your favorite artists at the time.
12:02 Speaker 01 From the mid 60s?
12:03 Billy Corgan? Yeah. I love this particular period of music. That's kind of what I'm after.
12:09 Speaker 01 Well, of course, I enjoyed the Beatles. I love Bob Dylan.
12:15 Billy Corgan? Sorry, I'm not trying to, but I'm saying the, that scene that was here, I guess, was what I'm after.
12:20 Speaker 01 Oh, the whole scene, the Lovins and, you know, the, the coming of age, the Laurel Canyon stuff, the, the flowers and.
12:29 Billy Corgan? But did you like the birds? Did you like, you know?
12:32 Speaker 01 I love the birds, I love the Jefferson Airplane, I love the Grateful Dead. You just name it, all the stuff that was coming out of San Francisco. Both the well-known ones as well as, you know, the more obscure ones. I know people today of a certain age say that we mythologize that music too much.
12:54 Billy Corgan? I don't think, I don't think you can mythologize it enough.
12:57 Speaker 01 We're on the same page.
12:59 Billy Corgan? I think it's such a fecund period, to use an interesting word, but, you know, it's such a fecund period between about sixty-five and sixty-eight. There's so much great music that came out in such a concentrated area, particularly San Francisco, Los Angeles, by extension, some of the East Coast stuff, like Tommy James and...
13:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, but we owned it. It was West Coast music.
13:26 Billy Corgan? Very much so, yeah.
13:27 Speaker 01 And I know that you have been somewhat publicly critical of some of the contemporary music, or stuff that people are listening to today. I don't want to misquote you.
13:39 Billy Corgan? Well, I go back and forth. It depends on, it depends on, like, let's call it the perspective, right? I think, I don't think there's any shortage of talent. I think the current music system is taking very talented people and leading them to slaughter, because it works in their business model. I don't think there's a shortage of talent at all. You could argue that there are more talented people in the music business now than at any, in time of history. But rather than creating diamonds out of the compression of a capitalistic marketplace that's throwing ideas into the center, they basically have cut off more than half the music business and said, "We're only interested in pop sirens, and people are willing to work in our business model." See, that's why you're not creating the next Jimi Hendrix,
14:24 Billy Corgan? or the next Byrds, or the next Barbra Streisand. You're not creating these great artists because you're not letting them organically find an audience with what they bring to the table.
14:37 Speaker 01 So your criticism is not with the music. It's with the system that suppresses.
14:42 Billy Corgan? Well, you could argue by extension, I'm critical of the music because it's pablum.
14:47 Speaker 01 Right.
14:47 Billy Corgan? But that's no different than the Beatles felt in 62 about what they were hearing and what I felt in 87 with what I was hearing. Every rebellious generation goes, I don't want, get that crap out of my way. I'm gonna do it my way.
15:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:01 Billy Corgan? But look at what comes from that beautiful desire to sort of sweep what came before you out of the way. There's no, I don't have any issue. Those artists should be making people like me irrelevant. But the reason they're not is because the one thing I have over them is a level of authenticity that they can't even wrap their heads around because they can't wrap their heads around the business model. Because in a click economy, a click economy is never gonna let you find out who you are.
15:31 Speaker 01 So I'm a young, talented musician. No, hardly. It's 2024. I've got a band. We're playing in the garage. We have aspirations.
15:47 Speaker 01 What would be your advice to those folks?
15:51 Billy Corgan? Figure out how, because I get this question a lot from, parents will pull me aside and say, my kids can sing.
15:57 Speaker 01 Sure.
15:58 Billy Corgan? It's, if you, if you're willing to look at the history of rock and roll, the artist that made the most money, got the most attention and had the most impact were singular artists.
16:12 Speaker 01 Let me think about that.
16:13 Billy Corgan? How many people copied the Beatles, including me? But there's only one Beatles. There's only one Byrds. There's only one, you know, Rolling Stones. There's only one Jimi Hendrix. There's only one Black Sabbath. There's only one Barbra Streisand. There's only, there's, if you wrap your head around the fact that true success is only predicated on the fact of finding artists who are singular. There's, they're one of one. You know, when you buy a print, one of three, one of seven?
16:40 Speaker 01 Yes.
16:40 Billy Corgan? It's one of one.
16:43 Billy Corgan? Janis Joplin was one of one. I've heard 50 girls through the years who tried to sing like Janis Joplin. You could argue are better singers.
16:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:50 Billy Corgan? But Janis Joplin was one of one.
16:52 Speaker 01 One of one. Name three others that were one of ones.
16:57 Billy Corgan? Michael Jackson.
16:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
16:59 Billy Corgan? Prince.
17:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
17:00 Billy Corgan? Sly Stone.
17:04 Billy Corgan? I could, I mean, John Coltrane, you know, Elvis.
17:10 Billy Corgan? Bob Marley.
17:12 Speaker 01 And nobody could argue in defense of anybody that we know of currently on Spotify.
17:21 Billy Corgan? Sure.
17:22 Speaker 01 That you would consider a one of one.
17:24 Billy Corgan? With Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey.
17:30 Speaker 01 And then I think, I agree with those. I think to stretch it to, could you name 10 of them, which you could have named from the Janis Joplin period?
17:41 Billy Corgan? That's, that's kind of one of my arguments.
17:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:43 Billy Corgan? Take any generation.
17:45 Speaker 01 I get it.
17:45 Billy Corgan? Popular music sort of starts to kick in. Let's argue in the 1930s. Let's, you could argue earlier, but say 1930s.
17:53 Speaker 01 Right.
17:53 Billy Corgan? Crosby, you know, there's obviously others, you know.
17:58 Speaker 01 Early Sinatra.
17:59 Billy Corgan? Sure. And then, you know, the Von Monroes and, you know, all of it, the Dorsey Brothers, whatever.
18:05 Speaker 01 Dean Martin.
18:06 Billy Corgan? Every decade had singular artists in, in great numbers. And by the way, we're still making money off those artists 100 years later. What does that tell you? Why does the music business want to continually commit suicide with short money? I don't get it.
18:24 Speaker 01 I don't either.
18:26 Billy Corgan? I, I had the honor or distinction of testifying in front of Congress about a music rights issue in 2009.
18:34 Speaker 01 Tell me about that.
18:35 Billy Corgan? Sure. John Conyers was the leading, he was the majority and it was, it was a The quick version of the story is somewhere around 1909 or something. Because they didn't want to have to pay musicians, because back then it was orchestras, they didn't want to have to pay them performance rights. They got some exemption from Congress that allowed the radio stations not to have to pay you per play or something.
19:02 Billy Corgan? So here I am testifying in 2009 and that exemption was still in place. So the guy who played the riff on My Girl. Got paid forty bucks. There was no mechanism to make sure that those artists would get paid performance royalties. In addition, in retaliation, Europe, because we weren't paying European artists, we were forcing European artists to live by our exemption congressionally, had retaliated. So, American artists were not being paid in Europe either. So, we were getting double penalized. So, I was on a congressional committee, four hours, no PP break, okay?
19:47 Billy Corgan? With, you know, because they come and go. Yeah. But at various times, there were forty members of a congressional committee asking us really pointed questions. And they're all lawyers. You got the, exactly. You got the RIAA. You got the guy who's representing the, you know, the trust of the radio stations, your business, and you got me as the, and when I met Senator Conyers before the hearing, he's very nice, he said, "It's really cool you're here. You're the only person from your industry that would agree to testify. And the only reason this hearing is going forward is because no one from your business has the courage to stand up and say this is wrong.
20:32 Billy Corgan? They'll grouse behind the scenes." And I said, "Well, why won't anyone come?" To me, it would be like, "Why wouldn't someone come here and talk to you?" Yeah. He said, "Because they're afraid of being retaliated against by the radio stations." Of course they are, right. So, he said, "You're the only person that has the courage to stand up here and talk." Good for you. So, for four hours, okay? And the key moment in the thing was somebody, I think they were on the right side of the equation, was challenging me on my assertion. And one of the points I'd made is, it was a wide-ranging discussion, but I said, "Do you notice how we're not making as many stars as we used to make?"
21:10 Billy Corgan? And somebody asked me a question, it might have been Maxine Waters, said, you know, what is, why is this such a big deal to you? And I said, if you're the guy who on a Tuesday in 1964 plays the riff to My Girl, there should be some other means of earning, if your song is being played into infinity,
21:32 Speaker 01 Yep.
21:32 Billy Corgan? 60, 70 years later.
21:34 Speaker 01 Yep.
21:35 Billy Corgan? And I said, with all due respect, Congress lady, if it's so easy to emulate, why don't we emulate it and just have another version? Which by the way, these guys would profit more from. No, we want to listen to that version of My Girl.
21:53 Speaker 01 Right.
21:54 Billy Corgan? Why do we want to listen to that version? Because it's that guy playing that note that day. And that should be respected in our culture and the fact that we do not celebrate that. Rock and roll is the great American export. So, long story short, I so wiped the floor with these, you know, hacks who were there to defend their corner of the earth, that I went, at the end of the session, Conyers literally looked at the other people on the panel and said, do you hear what he's saying? You better make a deal, otherwise we're going to step in. And so it took like four years of negotiating and finally they started moving and the goalposts had moved. They didn't wipe the exemption, but they got them to kind of find a compromise point.
22:36 Speaker 01 Good for you.
22:37 Billy Corgan? You know what my reward for that was? Zero. I've never received a thank you from anyone in the music business for anything.
22:44 Speaker 01 Is everybody in the music business aware of what you did?
22:47 Billy Corgan? Doesn't matter.
22:48 Speaker 01 I mean, at the time, was it in news making?
22:50 Billy Corgan? Here's all you need to know about the way the music business operates.
22:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
22:53 Billy Corgan? Okay. Never received a thank you, never received any sort of, you know, didn't get a gold watch or anything. Okay. Made a lot of people a lot more money than they would have made because I was willing to stick my neck out. Hadn't heard from the association that brought me in to represent whatever their special interest group was. They wrote me an email a month ago, hey, we're trying to get this thing moving again because of something, something, something. Can you come back again?
23:15 Speaker 01 Sure.
23:18 Speaker 01 Sure.
23:21 Billy Corgan? God bless, as we say in my house.
23:23 Speaker 01 Would it be fair to say that the only other musician, prominent musician, that testified before Congress beside yourself would be Zappa?
23:33 Billy Corgan? Don't know. I can't remember what Frank testified to, but...
23:37 Speaker 01 I think it had to do with the...
23:38 Billy Corgan? Was it censorship, maybe?
23:39 Speaker 01 Yep, censorship, the R-rating.
23:43 Billy Corgan? By the way, Push by Tipper Gore, remember all that?
23:46 Speaker 01 Very well.
23:47 Billy Corgan? I remember that. In fact, for a few years, they were making us put labels on our records.
23:52 Speaker 01 They were.
23:52 Billy Corgan? Because, God forbid, I used a cuss word.
23:55 Speaker 01 That was the fundamental... That's where stickers on records became... That's Danny Goldberg and Tipper and all of them became involved. And Zappa did go and testify in an extremely articulate manner. It's on YouTube and all that.
24:14 Billy Corgan? Frank's a lot smarter than I am. God bless him.
24:19 Billy Corgan? Can you talk a little bit about when you became a television correspondent?
24:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:27 Speaker 01 I've always been more comfortable on the radio. Radio, by its nature, is a more intimate experience, you know?
24:33 Billy Corgan? You have a great voice for radio.
24:36 Speaker 01 Probably a better voice for radio than a face for TV. But I was on KABC Radio interviewing people. And the higher-ups at ABC, who owned at the time KABC, KLOS, and KABC Television, said, "You know, he's gonna go somewhere to interview Alice Cooper.
25:06 Speaker 01 So how much would it cost us if we sent a one-person or two-person camera crew to wherever he's gonna be? And we'll take just a bite. We'll take, you know, a minute and a half, two minutes of the interview, and we'll put it on TV." It seems simple.
25:24 Speaker 01 Cost effective for them. I remember it was my first piece for Eyewitness News that I called Alice and said, you know, you're going to do the show and we're going to do a lengthy interview, two and a half hours for radio. Can we just knock this thing off? And he said, sure, I'm golfing at the such and such and we'll do it there.
25:46 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
25:48 Speaker 01 And I traipse out to some golf course and there he is, passionate about the game, puts the clubs or irons down, whatever, I've never played golf. And we're, you know, doing the thing. They liked it and I was there. I, I must have done 50, 100 pieces for them.
26:11 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
26:11 Speaker 01 Of, you know, the most well-known, primarily music celebrities of the time. So suddenly I became an early version of George Pinocchio. He does it much better than I do, but that's what I was. I was the entertainment correspondent.
26:27 Billy Corgan? I'm obsessed with old Hollywood.
26:29 Speaker 01 Yes.
26:31 Billy Corgan? And one thing I wish, you know, I obviously can't go on a time machine back to 1939 or whatever, but what strikes me is you were around it, that's sort of the fading of the old Hollywood.
26:46 Speaker 01 It came in just after the thing.
26:49 Billy Corgan? But when I see names like Jane Mansfield, John Wayne, Karen Black, Sal Mineo, Groucho.
26:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
26:58 Billy Corgan? I mean, you had access to that. What was your impression? Cause I, it's hard to find a bead on, you know, cause you had that whole, you know, Easy Rider, they, you know, that crew came in and kind of kicked the old Hollywood aside.
27:09 Speaker 01 Right.
27:10 Billy Corgan? Rightfully so. And the death of the studio system and stuff.
27:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:14 Billy Corgan? But there was still that sort of allure or stench, depending on your perspective, or read a lot of different books about it. You know, the, you know, the, the May Murrays who would walk down Sunset Boulevard and all that stuff. What was your impression of that, those times?
27:30 Speaker 01 Like you, I loved the glamour of old Hollywood and I loved those movies. They had to be in black and white. And I don't have to tell you what a thrill it was when Mae West accepted my invitation to be interviewed. And I went to the Franklin Arms apartment building, or wherever it was that she lived. Yeah. And I sat down and she walked in in a complete beaded gown for the radio interview. And we sat and talked. We're spending, you know, an entire afternoon with Groucho Marx towards the end of his
28:15 Speaker 01 life, listening very carefully while we talked. And then at the end of it, him saying to me, "Look, I have a couple of friends coming by later on tonight. If you want, you can stick around." And I stuck around. And ten or twenty people floated into the living room. And Groucho greeted everybody, all very informal. And then he stood by the piano and sang for forty-five minutes. Groucho Marx songs. And the first time I went out to Orange County to meet Duke Wayne.
28:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when I used to go to the Archeo General Theater in my old neighborhood and watch those movies back to back. And there was the Duke, you know. And when he put his hand out, and at the time I had hair down on my shoulders. He didn't like hippies much. No, not at all. He had a couple of other prejudices as well. Yes. And I really wanted to talk about the old westerns and John Ford and stagecoaches. And he hated the title of being King of the Cowboys. And he cited other movies that he made that he was really proud of.
29:41 Speaker 01 And he's slopping down the bourbons, you know. And we talked for a couple of hours in his room next to his rifle collection, behind him, you know, in a cabinet. And he said, "If you want to stick around, we're gonna have lunch."
30:00 Speaker 01 We went into this kitchen and there were two plates set up for us. And there were franks and beans that were delivered. I said, I'll have a glass of wine. And he said, why are you having what I'm having? Yeah. He was drinking straight bourbon. And then we went back to the rifle room. And he went on and on and on. Oh, I love those figures, the ones you've named.
30:30 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
30:31 Speaker 01 Jane Mansfield was one of my first interviews when I was at L.A. City College. And every night I would come home and write a hundred letters to celebrities for the school radio show. There was no emailing or anything, it had to be handwritten.
30:48 Billy Corgan? It was, it was, dear so-and-so, I'd love to interview you.
30:52 Speaker 01 Dear Jane Mansfield.
30:54 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
30:56 Speaker 01 I'm seventeen years old, I go to Los Angeles City College. I saw your movies and I like them very much. Can I come anywhere to interview you? And naturally, ninety-nine percent of these letters went absolutely nowhere. They went to agents.
31:15 Billy Corgan? But she was notoriously a publicity hound.
31:17 Speaker 01 Was she ever. I mean, it didn't take more than five days before I'm in this one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed, you know, fixing some soup, and the phone rings. Ms. Jane. Not a publicist, not a secretary, and she said, um, you're Elliot? And I said, yeah, I'm Elliot, yes. And she said, I'm having a little party for my daughter in a week or so. If you want to come over to the house, um, we could talk for your radio show.
31:59 Speaker 01 And I remember taking the bus to this pink mansion on Sunset.
32:03 Billy Corgan? The bus.
32:05 Speaker 01 Of course, I didn't have a car for years in L.A.
32:08 Billy Corgan? This is Jane Mansfield.
32:09 Speaker 01 And it was Jane Mansfield. And I remembered she took me down to the recreation room as the party was going on upstairs. I'm guessing for Mariska Haggerty, or her daughter at the time.
32:25 Speaker 01 And we started to reminisce, and she couldn't have been more gracious with her time. And the room was covered with the pinup magazine covers of her. Until she said, "I would love to talk to you a little longer, Elliot, but I have some, I have a very important appointment that I have to make." And I said, "You've given me more than enough time, and I'm also thinking, oh, the bus is still running back to..."
32:54 Billy Corgan? I'm going to go back.
32:55 Speaker 01 "Jermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard." And later I would learn what the appointment was and where she went. She went from that interview with me to the Whisky Agogo to meet the Beatles. It was the night that they played the Hollywood Bowl.
33:16 Speaker 01 Later, I joked with John, and her name came up, and I told him the story. And I said, "So I guess it's fair to say that I knew her first, right?"
33:33 Speaker 01 And his response was, "Yeah, but she left you for me."
33:40 Speaker 01 London.
33:41 Billy Corgan? Nice one. You met John Yoko 1971, is that?
33:46 Speaker 01 I did a radio interview with Yoko, and we wound up becoming phone pals.
33:54 Billy Corgan? But slow down a little bit, because this is interesting. Because obviously, it's a big part of your life, and you just... I haven't read the book yet, because it just came out. I want to read it.
34:06 Billy Corgan? We All Shine On, John Yoko and Me.
34:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:12 Billy Corgan? Before you talk, so you first talked to Yoko as a radio interview?
34:17 Speaker 01 I was sent a bunch of records, the record company always, you know, sent.
34:22 Billy Corgan? Typical publicity stuff.
34:23 Speaker 01 Right. I listened to hers, I thought it was really unique. I thought she was unique.
34:32 Speaker 01 A one of.
34:34 Billy Corgan? For sure.
34:37 Speaker 01 And I, you know, went through her record company publicity guy who put me in touch with an assistant to the Dakota Building. He called me back and he said, "When do you want to do it?"
34:49 Speaker 01 "As soon as possible." Two days later, I'm on the phone with Yoko. And we have what I thought was a pretty damn good interview, a penetrating interview. And I wasn't interested in that.
35:04 Billy Corgan? Excuse me, what stuck out in to her? What stuck about her to you in that first interview? Like, you know, in terms of character or personality?
35:13 Speaker 01 Original thought.
35:15 Billy Corgan? Very much so.
35:16 Speaker 01 Original thought.
35:17 Billy Corgan? I, I, sorry to interrupt you. Obviously, Yoko through the years has gotten a lot of stick from the musical thing and, you know, trying to blame her with the Beatles and all that stuff. But what I think is really often missed with Yoko is she's one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
35:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:33 Billy Corgan? She really changed the way people viewed art.
35:36 Speaker 01 I believe that to be true.
35:38 Billy Corgan? And what I always cite, this is more private conversation, is it was John and Yoko that introduced the idea of like, war is over.
35:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
35:48 Billy Corgan? And at the time, we're mocked in the bed and all, but if you really look at that, that is revolutionary thought. That is an artist figuring out a way to game the system, use the media, and deliver a message that cannot be stopped.
36:03 Speaker 01 He was the first one to take the makeup off.
36:08 Speaker 01 He was the first one to
36:11 Speaker 01 wear the glasses because he couldn't see unapologetically.
36:16 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
36:17 Speaker 01 And he couldn't keep his mouth shut.
36:19 Billy Corgan? That's true.
36:20 Speaker 01 And I don't remember anybody else who came along before John and, you know, the Woody Guthries of the world and other people who spoke their mind. But in the essential rock community coming off of, some would argue, the greatest rock group ever. He risked it all.
36:42 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
36:43 Speaker 01 And the two of them were revolutionary in terms of those bed-ins for peace where he said, "Look, we got married and I know that the press is going to follow us all around looking how we could spend our honeymoon. So we're going to lay in bed for seven days
37:00 Speaker 01 and do an advertisement for peace. And we're going to invite the world press in every day to ask anything they want. And all we were going to do is try and spread our message." Well, you know, you tell me four other people or one other who would have risked all that stuff for that.
37:20 Billy Corgan? Well, to convert
37:22 Billy Corgan? the currency of his celebrity towards something that was beyond something self-serving.
37:29 Speaker 01 Precisely. Possibly self-destructive.
37:33 Billy Corgan? Well, there's that too, yeah.
37:34 Speaker 01 He knew that there were a lot of people who thought we should be in Vietnam and didn't like these peaceniks.
37:40 Billy Corgan? Sure.
37:42 Speaker 01 So during that first interview, I heard this original, what I considered original concepts and thoughts, which I probed.
37:54 Speaker 01 I drove back to Laurel Canyon that night. I now had a little $300 Morris Minor car, a used car. And I thought, well and good. And I'm an insomniac and it was 3, 4 in the morning and I...
38:11 Speaker 01 Fell out. Sometime around noon or one the next day, the personal phone in my house rings. And it's Yoko. And she called because she just wanted to thank me for the interview. She said that she really appreciated the fact that I didn't steer her off in terms of Beatle questions, John questions, the Dragon Lady questions, you know, all of it. And that she really had an opportunity to speak her mind. And she wanted me to know that.
38:50 Speaker 01 Now, I can tell you, I've spoken to other people in the radio and TV world. Guests will come and guests will go. And maybe it's different today. But certainly back then, nobody had ever called me to thank me for an interview. They were on to the next interview and the next one. They were doing junkets. They don't even remember the name of the guy. And I thought about it and I
39:19 Speaker 01 I just picked up the phone a day or two later and said, "Forgive me for intruding, you know, I had your number from the other night. But I have to tell you how moved I was by the fact that you called me.
39:34 Speaker 01 And we talked for two and a half hours.
39:39 Speaker 01 And the next day she called me and I called her. And it began probably six or seven weeks of conversation until one day she, and she was called at three, four, five in the morning. She called and she said, "What are you reading right now?"
40:00 Speaker 01 And I said, "At this very moment?" And she said, "No. What's on your night table? I know you were probably just sleeping." And I said, "There's a new book by J. Krishna Merti, who is a kind of a philosopher. And I've been perusing that." And she told me the title of the book. And I said, "Do you read those kinds of books?" And she said, "Never, I don't read any of those things." She said, "I primarily read mysteries. But John's reading it."
40:35 Speaker 01 And I knew that John had a, you know, a kind of questionable relationship with anything related to holy people or divine people, God. And I thought that was intriguing. And she said, "You should talk to him about it. You should talk to him about it tomorrow because it's his birthday." And I said, "I am so certain, I'm so certain that you..."
41:04 Billy Corgan? Sounds like a setup.
41:05 Speaker 01 "Your husband has better things to do than to be talking to me on the radio." Well, apparently, he didn't. And I had my first conversation with John on the eve of his 31st birthday.
41:19 Billy Corgan? On the radio?
41:20 Speaker 01 On the radio.
41:25 Speaker 01 And of course, it wasn't long after that that John called me, and Yoko called me, and John called me. And for months, I would be speaking with one, the other, or both, every night of my life, during the daytime hours as well. The longest conversation where she said, "Look, I'm going to the office, but the light's blinking, John wants to talk to you." And she would hang up. The longest of those conversations went on for six hours. It became my life.
42:03 Billy Corgan? Why do you... Maybe it's too spiritual a question. I'm a big believer in that, you know, we're meant to go certain directions at certain times.
42:13 Speaker 01 Me too.
42:14 Billy Corgan? So, what do you think it was about you or that moment that sort of had them loop you in? Because they, overall, I would imagine they were a bit paranoid.
42:25 Speaker 01 This was a period of time in their life where they were being pursued by government intelligence agencies.
42:36 Billy Corgan? And that's all come out now?
42:38 Speaker 01 It's all published.
42:40 Billy Corgan? Were they aware of that at the time?
42:41 Speaker 01 Completely. And would...
42:44 Billy Corgan? Sorry to interrupt you. Was it because people, sources or inside people would say, hey, by the way, you know, I'm a fan, I'm just letting you know. Like, how were they aware that they were being surveyed?
42:55 Speaker 01 They would hear noises on their telephone. They would see black cars following them.
43:01 Speaker 01 They were hanging out with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers. And they were, you know, obvious radical anti-war protesters. It doesn't take long to...
43:17 Billy Corgan? Sure.
43:17 Speaker 01 They put it all together, and they were right. So, in answer to that question about why...
43:27 Billy Corgan? Why you?
43:28 Speaker 01 Yep. There are a couple of reasons.
43:32 Speaker 01 One, I was alone.
43:36 Speaker 01 I didn't have a wife. I didn't have a girlfriend. I lived by myself. And they knew when they dialed that number, the only voice that would pick it up is me. And nobody would be listening beside me. Accessibility. The insomnia factor, that the time difference didn't mean anything. He's always awake, one way or another. I could be trusted. They could share information with me and not hear it come back at them or see it in page six.
44:10 Speaker 01 I'm a good listener. And I pay attention. I have my own opinions, but I'm not argumentative. I'm not a musician. I've never picked up a guitar.
44:23 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
44:25 Speaker 01 I wouldn't be peppering John with questions about music.
44:30 Billy Corgan? That would have been me.
44:32 Speaker 01 Yes, well, naturally.
44:34 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
44:35 Speaker 01 Music talk.
44:36 Billy Corgan? Yeah. When you went to that chord, that would have been me for sure.
44:41 Billy Corgan? I have learned my lesson with when I do get to know famous musicians. I wait a good year before I start asking those questions.
44:48 Speaker 01 What about people who just meet you? Do they, other musicians? Do they take time before they start talking with you about chords? They go right at your throat.
45:00 Billy Corgan? Pretty much.
45:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I imagine.
45:04 Billy Corgan? It's fine, but it's a, how can I put it? And this may go to the heart of why they were attracted to you as a person. You learn to read the room quickly about, let's call it, why is this person here?
45:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:19 Billy Corgan? What do they want? What do they need?
45:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:21 Billy Corgan? Do they need, there's that great scene in, I don't know, you know, everybody knows the scene where there's some kid shows up when they're living in, outside of, you know, in England. And the kid shows up and John's just like, "Look, I'm not Jesus," you know what I mean? And he has this long conversation with the kid. You know what I mean?
45:39 Speaker 01 He was somebody who was, he was a trespasser.
45:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
45:43 Speaker 01 He was a homeless guy who was camping out on their property. And one of the people just were concerned about him. He hadn't eaten and he was unshaven. And John went out to see him. And he was a delusional person who believed that John was writing songs only for him, all of that. And after a few minutes, Johnson said, "Are you hungry then?" And he nodded and just come on inside. And they shared breakfast and, you know, talked for an hour or so. John forever trying to demythologize himself. He's the working class hero.
46:23 Speaker 01 He's not the rock and roll priest from on high. I would meet them a few months after our telephone thing, for the first time. I got a call. "My name is Peter. And I'm with John and Yoko, and they would like to meet you."
46:50 Speaker 01 And I thought, well, this is gonna be great. And I assumed that they would be at some local hotel not far from where Laurel Canyon.
46:59 Speaker 01 And he said, could you be here in an hour? And I said, sure, where are you staying? And he said, we're in a place called Ojai. Which is not an hour from here. It's close to eighty miles away. I had literally just woken up again. I was in a bathrobe, I didn't have anything to eat. But what am I gonna say, can we push it up a day or two? Yeah. I said, give me the directions. And he gave me these very peculiar, circuitous directions of once you get off PCH, you make a ride to Ojai. But when you get on that road, you're gonna drive around these curvy roads until you're gonna come to a pasture.
47:43 Speaker 01 When you come to the pasture, in the middle of the pasture, there's a giant oak tree. To the left of the oak tree, there's gonna be a station wagon parked. Pull your car up alongside the station wagon.
48:03 Speaker 01 And I'm not a great driver, and I don't take directions well, and this before cell phones, and what if I got lost and didn't show up? Or I took a U-turn around the wrong oak tree?
48:16 Speaker 01 And of course, they had never seen me before. I knew what they looked like.
48:23 Speaker 01 And I got to the car, and you know, Yoko was the first one out.
48:30 Speaker 01 And I heard a voice from the back of the station wagon saying, go on, hug him. And she gave me a light touch on the shoulder. Very Japanese. Very Japanese. And then he bounced out of the car and gave me a linen bear hug. They had driven across the country with a driver named Peter Bendry, best known to Beatle fans as Peter the Dealer. That was his title. And he worked within the John Yoko experience.
49:06 Speaker 01 We went back to this little house in, like a bungalow in Ojai, which was really a hideout. And had a long history of being a safe house for radicals. And they were renting it and presumably hiding out.
49:26 Speaker 01 And we spent the afternoon together.
49:30 Speaker 01 And it was during that afternoon where, and it was kind of a rinky-dink kind of bungalow. And we were sitting around the small pool area, smaller than the room we're currently in. And I'm sitting next to John. And Yoko comes up to me and does this.
49:55 Speaker 01 And I follow her down a hallway into a bathroom.
50:01 Speaker 01 And she tells me to sit at the corner of the bathtub. She closes the door. I thought this was peculiar for a first visit. Yeah. Turns on the water, loud. Comes closer to me, almost as a whisper.
50:20 Speaker 01 The house is completely bugged. Everything that we're saying is being recorded. We're being watched. The water is there to drown out this information. So you have to be very careful what you say. Do you understand that, Elliot? And I said, I do, I do. Okay, we're gonna go back to the pool now.
50:48 Speaker 01 And I thought that was odd.
50:54 Speaker 01 And John said to me, Yoko just laid horizontal on a diving board, her long, black hair just inches above the water of the pool with her sunglasses, looking straight up. It was like a Fellini-esque scene. Sounds like it. And John said, "You're going to hear her say things that you won't understand."
51:24 Speaker 01 But listen to her, because she's almost always right.
51:28 Billy Corgan? Interesting.
51:30 Speaker 01 That was the first directive. We spent the rest of the afternoon primarily talking about the weather.
51:38 Billy Corgan? Looking back, do you think they were being monitored?
51:42 Speaker 01 I don't believe that a team of agents came to that bungalow in the middle of the night and hung microphones around faded palm trees around the swimming pool.
51:57 Speaker 01 But I thought that perhaps their comings and goings, who was going to see them, who would show up,
52:04 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
52:05 Speaker 01 could be useful ammunition.
52:07 Billy Corgan? I see, yeah.
52:09 Speaker 01 So at that point in time, I didn't necessarily believe it, but I was too confused about it and somewhat naive.
52:19 Billy Corgan? Well, you're also with these super famous people who are, you know, Titanic cultural figures on the world stage.
52:29 Speaker 01 I,
52:30 Billy Corgan? Maybe you weren't impressed like that. It would be hard for me to get past that.
52:33 Speaker 01 Well, from the very beginning, from the very, from that first visit at Ojai, you know, when he got out of the car and, you know, he looked like John Lennon.
52:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
52:45 Speaker 01 There was that moment of,
52:47 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
52:50 Speaker 01 But prior to that moment, I had already interviewed more than a thousand people. I had already stood in front of,
52:58 Billy Corgan? The famous, yeah.
53:00 Speaker 01 And you know how it is when you meet famous people. You know, for the first second, if it's somebody who you've always paid attention to, it's a super big deal. After fifteen minutes, I'm sure in your case, those trappings are dropped. So.
53:19 Speaker 01 He was never Beetle John to me. We both acknowledged that we were raised in Elvis. That would have been more, would have taken me, you know, a couple of beats longer to shake that one if he had come out of the car. And we also had established the telephone relationship.
53:35 Billy Corgan? Yeah, yeah.
53:36 Speaker 01 We had been talking up to that point for more than a hundred hours together.
53:42 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
53:42 Speaker 01 So what changed was his physical presence.
53:44 Billy Corgan? Yeah, yeah, I get it.
53:46 Speaker 01 But he did something as I was walking to my car, because I had a radio show to do. He said, "Before you go, we have a present for you." He said, "A present for me." And he came out with an acetate in a white cover with no art or anything on it, just side A and side B. And he said, "This is our new record, and you'd be the first disc jockey to break the record." And the two of them autographed it to me and said something sweet. I still have it, of course, it's in the vault.
54:28 Speaker 01 So I got into the car, and there's no way of playing an acetate in a car. There was no time to stop off at my house to do anything. I was up against a clock, and I raced into KLOS. And I had my bag with me with a stick of incense and a candle, dimmed the lights, centered myself, red light, engineer.
54:59 Billy Corgan? That's a good start.
55:00 Speaker 01 Hi, it's Elliot Mintz, and you're listening to KLOS. And I have a very, very special surprise for you. Tonight, we're going to listen to a new album just recorded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And I'm going to get a bunch of commercials out of the way so we can both experience this together for the first time. So just make yourself comfortable, and we'll be right back. And I just wiped out the 15 commercials. And I said, and I didn't tell them where I was, and I didn't tell them that they had given me none of that stuff. One of the admonitions in Ojai was that Yoko said...
55:42 Speaker 01 "Don't tell anybody that you know us." And I kept that secret for two years.
55:55 Speaker 01 Cue the engineer, tone-armed on the first track,
56:00 Speaker 01 listening to my earphones,
56:03 Speaker 01 and I hear John singing the song "Woman is the N of the world." But he didn't use the word "N." I know the song. And, um...
56:18 Speaker 01 We make her, paint her face and dance and... Yeah. An op-ed piece that Yoko once wrote for the New York Times, where she said of all the subjugated people in the world, "Women are in the lowest ring of the totem pote. They are the ends of the world." And she said the entire word, too. John was impressed by that piece. He wrote music to it. He sang it. A minute in,
56:47 Speaker 01 I knew I might as well pack my incense. And the engineer, who bears the responsibility for what actually goes out in the airwaves with the FCC license,
56:59 Speaker 01 he stared at me for a second, and we went right into a song about Free Angela Davis, a Berkeley Marxist professor, to Attic Estate, about releasing all the prisoners in Attic Estate. And the entire album was this incredibly incendiary piece of a John and Yoko collaboration, where they were just shouting to the world. Yeah.
57:39 Speaker 01 So I drove home that night.
57:43 Speaker 01 I got a phone call early in the day. And it was from one of the manager guys. They asked if I wouldn't mind coming in. You know, just hearing that, I knew it was up. And then they said that they were thinking of going in a slightly different direction with their format and...
58:07 Speaker 01 I got back to my place and I called them.
58:13 Speaker 01 And I said, "I've got some good news and I've got some bad news." And John said, "Give me the good news. I always take good news." And I said, "Well, the good news is I played the entire album without any commercial breaks."
58:28 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
58:29 Speaker 01 And I heard him screaming to Yoko, "Mother," which is what he called Yoko. "Mother, he played the whole record last night with no commercials." And she said, "Great, great, fantastic." And John went on, "F'ing great." And he said, "So what's the bad news then?"
58:52 Speaker 01 And I said, "Well..."
58:53 Billy Corgan? "I've been fired."
58:57 Speaker 01 And that was his reaction. He just broke out in laughter and he said, "Mother." And they fired him. And I heard Yoko explode in laughter. They just thought this was the funniest story. I didn't. And after a few more minutes, he said, "So what are you gonna be doing now?"
59:23 Speaker 01 "I'm gonna be sending out my resume and looking for a job, of course."
59:28 Speaker 01 And John said, "Tomorrow, we're gonna get out of here and we're gonna drive up to San Francisco.
59:36 Speaker 01 Why don't you just pack a bag and join us?" And that's when I joined the Magic Circus.
59:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah, the Magical Mystery Tour, Part Two.
59:49 Billy Corgan? Let's hit pause on the Beatles for a second. Beatle Land, John and Yoko Land.
59:58 Billy Corgan? We were doing publicity, or marketing, or both? Because John, uh, sorry, Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stilson, Nash, Diana Ross.
1:00:07 Speaker 01 There came a time in the broadcast career. Well, I just got tired of it. I just got tired of the the endless business. It was much more complicated than finding the guest. I didn't have a, well, I had a producer, but we still had to go through the machinations of calling the state, the publicity department, waiting for the manager to get back to us. It was just a a thing to get good guests on the radio. And not all of them were fascinating characters, and I just got burnt out with broadcasting.
1:00:46 Speaker 01 So it occurred to me that I had interviewed a couple of people who I particularly liked. And I called one or two of them. And said, "I know why you do media, you know, to promote your product, and get attention for it. And I also know the requirements of media in terms of selecting guests. So I'm now a media consultant,
1:01:16 Speaker 01 which is kind of like a publicist with a touch of managerial skin."
1:01:22 Billy Corgan? Sure.
1:01:22 Speaker 01 And I'm going to teach you this process.
1:01:27 Speaker 01 And I hung my shingle up. And it wasn't long after that that the first, you know,
1:01:36 Speaker 01 recognizable names jumped on board.
1:01:39 Billy Corgan? Right.
1:01:41 Speaker 01 It wasn't until after John died that Bob Dylan called one day and said,
1:01:48 Speaker 01 You know, I want to talk to you about what it is that you do.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 And I wound up spending ten years with Bob. I was with Dylan more than John and Yoko. So I was a media consultant and I promoted people and advised people. And that put me together with everyone from Diana Ross to Paris Hilton to Crosby, Stills and Nash to... I don't like to toot my horn like that, but it's all Google-able or Book-able. And that's what I did. And I guess it's fair to say it's really been my last legitimate line of work.
1:02:29 Speaker 01 I hosted a lengthy radio series called The Lost Lennon Tapes.
1:02:33 Billy Corgan? You still listen?
1:02:35 Speaker 01 Thank you. It went on for 215 episodes over years. But I don't do that anymore.
1:02:47 Speaker 01 And I wrote a book. And here I am.
1:02:51 Billy Corgan? The reason that the Dylan thing struck out to me, I didn't understand it was the way it read, wherever I read it, it seemed like it was around the same time that you met them. But it struck me that you've worked intimately with someone who, like you said, with John, who spent a lot of times demystifying his mythology. And Dylan, whose entire life has been to build and destroy and build and destroy again.
1:03:15 Speaker 01 It bothered the hell out of John. And I wrote about that. That he had a real love-hate relationship with Bob.
1:03:27 Speaker 01 I happened to have been a fan.
1:03:30 Speaker 01 George Harrison had been an enormous fan. The Beatles were an enormous fan of the first one or two records. The first one was stunning to John. But...
1:03:43 Speaker 01 There were two things that Bob did. One was a temporary conversion to Christianity.
1:03:50 Billy Corgan? The saved period, right?
1:03:53 Speaker 01 We all got to serve somebody. And that just infuriated John. He hated that. And, you know, in our late night discussions, he would say, "You know, I put everything out there. I tell people everything about myself." He just keeps, you know, this phony air of mystery around him, the unwashed phenomena. And he said, "It's just all phony." And I said, "John, he's considered, along with you, one of the most brilliant lyricists of the 20th century." And John said, "I write much better than he writes."
1:04:37 Speaker 01 It's easy for you to write a gobbledygook song that nobody can kind of figure out with the surrealistic impressions with a copy of the thesaurus next to you. The stuff that I write is from my heart.
1:04:52 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:04:54 Speaker 01 And I said, I think I just rambled off one or two songs by Bob. And John said, "Listen to Walrus." And I did. And it was surreal, as well as a number of other of John's songs. He didn't like the fact that more people considered him the great lyricist. And at that time in his life, he thought that most people thought of him as the ex-Beadle who married this Japanese woman.
1:05:30 Billy Corgan? I see, I see.
1:05:32 Speaker 01 He would later have the same feelings about Paul McCartney.
1:05:35 Billy Corgan? Right.
1:05:38 Billy Corgan? Because you would have been sort of around in their orbit. You know, this kind of, you know, Beatle lore is that McCartney was trying to rebuild their relationship and would occasionally show up at the Dakota. How much is that real?
1:05:52 Speaker 01 You know, they had gone through a whole mess of stuff together.
1:05:57 Billy Corgan? And public, too.
1:05:58 Speaker 01 And in public, poorly, with Paul writing a dumb song about John and how he heard him and John countering.
1:06:07 Billy Corgan? How you sleep and.
1:06:07 Speaker 01 How he asleep after Paul writes too many people. It was like two high school kids arguing on Instagram.
1:06:18 Speaker 01 And we had many talks about Paul. And John's thoughts about him ranged from the, you know, he always reminded me that he and Paul met long before the Beatles. Well, they.
1:06:34 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:06:35 Speaker 01 They met at a time when nobody else knew of the Beatles.
1:06:39 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:06:40 Speaker 01 Long before I would become aware of them. They were like brothers to each other, sitting in Paul's little living room that his parents has, composing all those early songs on the first album. And he spoke so lovingly of Paul. But then, when John was not making any music between 1975 and almost 80, and Paul would have these mega hits with the Wings, John became insanely jealous about that.
1:07:17 Billy Corgan? Did he think the music that he was putting out, Paul, in that period, was valuable? Or was it more about, was it a jealousy of he's doing good work? Or was it jealousy of like, look what he's doing?
1:07:32 Speaker 01 I perceived it as being the latter. He was jealous of the amount of attention and accolades and the fact that Paul was filling stadiums. At that time, John was just looking after Sean.
1:07:46 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:07:47 Speaker 01 Not just, he was devoting five years of Sean's.
1:07:53 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:07:54 Speaker 01 And when John would say to me.
1:07:59 Speaker 01 They're not embracing me, I'm paraphrasing, the way they are him.
1:08:08 Speaker 01 And I said, John, you're not on a concert stage, you're not in a stadium, you're not making music. And he said, you missed the point. They're embracing his genius. But have you ever heard silly little love songs?
1:08:25 Speaker 01 And I would say, let's be fair, he's done things other than silly little love songs. But that would go nowhere. It'd be like the arguments when I would come over to the Dakota and we would be discussing something that was on the New York Times Bestseller list. And he said, I should be on the New York Times Bestseller list. I should have the number one book. I have more to say than these people.
1:08:52 Speaker 01 And I said, John, you haven't written a book. That's why you're not on the New York Times Bestseller list. You missed the point completely. One day during Christmas, in the latter part, I think it's 1978.
1:09:13 Speaker 01 I'm in New York, they invite me to the Dakota to spend one of the Christmas days with them.
1:09:22 Speaker 01 And I go up to Dakota and I notice in the living room, there's a vase with a single branch of a tree that's their Christmas decoration. And I sat down on the white couch in the white living room and we're just making small talk. And then there's a knock on the door after the intercom. And he opens it and Paul and Linda McCartney walk in.
1:09:50 Speaker 01 And they greet each other.
1:09:51 Billy Corgan? Have you met Paul?
1:09:52 Speaker 01 Never, no, I had not met him up to that moment. And they come in and John just said, this is our friend Elliot. And I said, nice to meet you, nice to meet you, Linda. And we sat and we talked for a while, it was...
1:10:09 Speaker 01 How should I say it? It wasn't overly jubilant, it wasn't icy, it was just correct. And then we decided, they decided to go to a place called Elaine's, which was the, the celeb of restaurants in Manhattan at the time. And we got into Paul's car and we went up to Elaine's, the five of us. And they perused the menu, all of them. Didn't see anything they particularly liked, and Elaine's did have a reputation. I mean, you walk in and there's Woody Allen, there's Gore Vidal, and there's Tom Wolfe, and there's, you know, all those people. But the food was miserable.
1:10:53 Speaker 01 And everybody knew it, and it was reviewed as being awful. And Elaine could be problematic as well. And Linda said, you know, there's a great pizza place, not far from here. Really thin-crusted pizza, you know? Do you think you could get a pizza delivered here? And we could eat that?
1:11:20 Speaker 01 And she said it directly to me. Who else was she gonna suggest it to? Yoko, would you drop the dime? And I knew, I knew what a social faux pas was this. But I also knew that Elaine's was, Elaine was not gonna escort, you must leave my restaurant. We had the pizza delivered through the back door. It was taken out of the cardboard box, it was put on beautiful Elaine's plates, and brought out so a casual observer would think it's a dish that they hadn't seen yet. We had the pizza. It was pretty good. And then we took a car back to the Dakota.
1:12:02 Speaker 01 And then we went back into the white room, the sun was setting. And Linda and Yoko kind of went off on their own. Yoko always loved Linda McCartney. They got along great. And John and Paul kind of wandered over to this very, very tall window that looked down upon the west side of Manhattan. And the lights were coming on, you saw some of the Christmas decorations, etc. And me, the fifth wheel, was sitting on the couch, looking at the white carpeting and the branch and the vase.
1:12:43 Speaker 01 And I could pick up bits and pieces of conversation. Now, I've explained many times when people say, "How can you report exact conversations you had with John and Yoko in your book?" And go on for paragraphs and paragraphs, when you never had a diary, you never kept a journal, and obviously, I never tape-recorded them, except when we were on the radio. I have an answer for all that, but
1:13:14 Speaker 01 in this case, because I could barely hear, they were far away, I can only catch spasms.
1:13:23 Speaker 01 And it was small talk, nothing of substance. And I do remember Paul asking John, "So, you making any music these days?" And John replying to Sir Paul,
1:13:40 Speaker 01 "No, my time is with my baby, that's what I do all the time, I don't make any music." "What about you?" And Paul said, "I'm always making music. I make music every day of my life, I can't stop making music."
1:14:01 Speaker 01 And I thought to myself, as I sat on the couch, what would have happened if John bit the bait and said, "I got a couple of guitars in the other room." Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't I bring them out, you know, just for the hell of it? And the two of them could have sat in the living room and maybe changed the face of contemporary music. Yeah, one more time. One more time. The McCartney's stayed for another hour or so and left.
1:14:34 Speaker 01 I stayed on with John and Yoko.
1:14:39 Speaker 01 And again, wondering why they had me there. So I asked them. And they said, "No big deal, you were coming in for Christmas and they're coming, they were around, so why, didn't you like them?" They said, "No, they seemed like very, very nice people. How did that feel for you?" I said, "What do you mean, how did it feel to me?" And they said, "Was there any tension?" He said, "It was dismissive." He said, "You were with us all afternoon."
1:15:19 Speaker 01 I mean, the two of them have known each other since they were nine years old practically. So that, I've mentioned this story to a couple of the real Beatle historian people, who believe that that was the last time that they were together. I can't attest to that. And it's my point of view, Sir Paul has not discussed that visit at all. It was anticlimactic. And I've run into Paul, Sir Paul, on a few other occasions since. We both eat at a little restaurant out of the way.
1:16:02 Speaker 01 And we were just seated, I was with a date and he was with his new wife. And on the way out, I just said, "It's good to see you again." He asked how Yoko was doing, always very civil and polite. And went to one of his concerts and he greeted me after the concert. And we were going to do an interview, but we didn't. I got along with the others better, especially George. I went to all the Wilbury sessions, of course, that George had, because I brought Bob there.
1:16:39 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:16:41 Speaker 01 And, you know, George would never miss a Dylan concert, so I'd arrange for him to have a chair and a glass of water right up the side of the stage by a curtain. That's all he ever asked for.
1:16:57 Billy Corgan? Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because this incredible bond they had created so much great music. I saw a quote where Paul was saying, you know, "We sat down together to write a song," whatever it was, "a hundred and something times." And he said, "In every instance, we always came out with something." Always. Yeah, it's a really beautiful thing. So, I could talk to you forever about this stuff because I love this band. And when I knew I was going to talk to you today, I wrote Sean Lennon a little note. Huh. I know Sean a little bit. And I said, you know, "Are you cool with Elliot?" You know what I mean?
1:17:36 Billy Corgan? Because I wanted to bring him in into what I wanted to talk about. But, you know, if he wrote me back and said, you know, "Nah, it's my mother's thing," or something, you know, it's, every band has its politics. I know you understand. And he said, "No, I love Elliot," and I've known Elliot my whole life. And he was very sweet and talked about how much he liked the book. And so, and it's an odd setup, but I think it's an interesting way to end. You know, I asked Sean, and I don't, before I say what I asked him, I don't want to say what he said out of respect for his privacy. But I did ask him, I said,
1:18:18 Billy Corgan? "Why do you think your mother stayed in the Dakota after your father was killed?" It's a very interesting choice. So I ask you the same question because, you know, we all put ourselves into situations, you know? It's what we do as human beings. And, you know, it strikes me that Sean, as a little boy, you know, here he is, walking almost daily past the spot where his father was taken. And then to have to go out into the world and then have everybody sort of put their version of it on them. And when you talk about The Beatles, that's the whole world. There's no, there's no corner that...
1:19:03 Billy Corgan? Do you know what I mean?
1:19:06 Billy Corgan? Even today, before I spoke with you, I interviewed with Rick Springfield in doing my research when he was in Australia. His band covered Eleanor Rigby in like 1969. There's a clip on YouTube.
1:19:18 Speaker 01 Oh, I must see that.
1:19:19 Billy Corgan? The band was called Zoot. They played like almost like a heavy Led Zeppelinist version of Eleanor Rigby.
1:19:26 Speaker 01 Don't be intrigued to hear.
1:19:27 Billy Corgan? Right. So I found this clip and in talking to Sean a little bit, I said, oh, you should check out this this band. And he wrote back, oh, this is really awesome. You know, this is this interesting connection. But again, when you're talking about the Beatles, there's no end to the association. It's it's it's a limitless pool, right? So I humbly ask you this question. Why do you think Yoko chose to stay in the Dakota?
1:19:52 Speaker 01 I'm going to answer that question. And I also want you to know that
1:19:57 Speaker 01 Sean was the motivating factor for me to write the book. When I attended Yoko's birthday a year or so ago, two years ago.
1:20:09 Speaker 01 He had been asking me for a long time, what's taking me so long? And he, you know, he said that I knew them as well as anybody else did. He wrote a little blurb for me saying that Elliot was our closest friend.
1:20:30 Speaker 01 And his encouragement throughout the writing of the book.
1:20:39 Speaker 01 You know, I can't speak highly enough about him. I met him when he was two weeks old, you know, and grew up with him and his dad and then continued.
1:20:51 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:20:51 Speaker 01 So total love and respect for him. I last accompanied him to the Academy Awards and a few months ago, when he received an award for Best Short Animated.
1:21:04 Billy Corgan? Yeah, he told me about that. That's cool.
1:21:06 Speaker 01 And, you know, he's up for a Grammy now for Best Box Set. And I texted him the other night saying, if you need help again on the red carpet doing what I do, I'm there for you one more time. So I love him dearly.
1:21:26 Speaker 01 Why she stayed?
1:21:30 Speaker 01 And I was there that morning when that front doorway area was still a crime scene.
1:21:39 Speaker 01 And I had to step over the yellow tape and the broken glass.
1:21:45 Speaker 01 And it was an active investigation. So nobody had taken away the blood or things of that nature. And to get to see Yoko, to offer whatever counsel I could provide,
1:21:59 Speaker 01 as I speak to you, that's embedded in my brain.
1:22:06 Speaker 01 And in all the subsequent visits to see Yoko, after all these years since he's been gone,
1:22:16 Speaker 01 I still pause for a second when I enter and exit because that area, like the Dakota Building itself, nothing ever changes. It's just there.
1:22:28 Speaker 01 It bothers me. And I did ask her once
1:22:34 Speaker 01 about how she deals with that. Or does that ever...
1:22:43 Speaker 01 How painful it was, I think, was the question I asked.
1:22:47 Speaker 01 And she's...
1:22:52 Speaker 01 She's sometimes very good at deflecting. And then there's sometimes where she just is speaking her truth. She said, "John and I spend so many wonderful years in this apartment
1:23:10 Speaker 01 and one terrifying, impossible moment.
1:23:19 Speaker 01 And I try to always concentrate on the great times that we shared together."
1:23:28 Speaker 01 That's how she deals with it.
1:23:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:34 Speaker 01 Thank you, Elliot. It's great talking to you. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. And you're a superb host. Thank you very much.
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