YES — BREATHE

Laurie Kaye: “Can you tell us about that meeting?”

JOHN: “With Yoko? Well, it was sort of 1966 and, uh, I got a call from a guy called John Dunbar, who used to be married to Marianne Faithful – you know, everybody’s connected. 

And he had a gallery in London called Indica Gallery, an art gallery. And, I used to go there occasionally to see whatever art show was on, you see? 

And he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got this… there’s this fantastic Japanese girl coming from New York, and she’s gonna do this other thing but she’s also gonna put on an exhibition at my gallery. And it’s gonna be this big event’. 

Something about ‘black bags!’ and I thought, ‘Ooooh, orgies’, you know? These artists, they’re all ravers, you know? It was in the days of happenings, paint, and all that stuff, right? 

So I go right down there, you know, for the opening. ‘Goody, goody!’, you know? Lennon goes down to see what’s happening. I get down there, and it’s the night before the opening. I mean, I thought there was going to be a big party, and an opening and the whole bit, you know? A big hap…  I didn’t wanna get involved. 

I wanted to watch, you know? I get there and its all white and quiet and there’s just these strange things all on display, like an apple on a stand for 200 pounds – when the pound was worth 8 dollars, or something. Whatever. 

And there’s hammers, saying ‘Hammer a nail in’, all this very peculiar stuff, and a ladder with a painting on the sky… or it looked like a blank canvass on the ceiling with a spyglass hanging from it. 

So, I’m lookin’ ’round and there doesn’t seem to be many people. There’s a couple of people downstairs. And I didn’t know who was who. 

So, I get up the ladder, and I look through this spyglass and it says, ‘Yes’. And I took that as a personal, positive message, because most of the avant garde artists of that period were all negative. 

Like, breaking a piano with an axe; it was mainly male… I’m looking at the female…  it was mainly male art, and it was all destructive, and sort of ‘nay, nay-na-nay nay’, you know? 

But here was this little crazy message on the ceiling. And then the guy introduced me to her. And she didn’t know who the hell I was. 

She had no idea. She was living in a different environment altogether. And, uh, I was sayin’ ‘Well this is a good con, isn’t it? Apples at 200 pounds. Hammer a nail. Who’s gonna buy this?’, you know? 

I didn’t know what concept art was; which, in a nutshell is ‘the idea is more important than the object’. So that’s why you won’t see many rich concept artists around, because you can’t really, you know… like the guy that wraps up, uh, what’s the guy that wraps up the… ”

Kaye: “Christo… ”

JOHN: “Christo wraps up things. He doesn’t expect you to buy the canvass. What he’s doing is selling you this idea, whatever it is he’s projecting. It was the same kinda thing, but I hadn’t come across it before. How do you sell a ‘nail in a hammer?’ So anyway, I said, uh, the gallery owner was all fussin’ ’round saying, ‘Is he gonna buy something?’ And she’s not..she’s ignoring me. So he introduced us, and I said ‘Well, uh, where’s the event?’ you know, ‘Where’s the happening?’ ‘Cause I’d seen the bag. So she just takes a card out and gives it to me and it just says, ‘Breathe’. So I said, ‘like that?’ She said, ‘You got it’. I said, ‘Uh huh, alright’. I’m beginning to catch on, here. So, and then I see this hammer, this thing… ”

YOKO: “I just remember his nose… He did it exactly like that.”

JOHN: “… well, you know, what else are you gonna do? This was the big event. I mean, all the way from New York for that? So, I see the hammer hanging on the thing with a few nails. And I said, ‘Well, can I at least hammer a nail in? You know, I’ve come all the way from the suburbs for this’. And she says, ‘No!'”

YOKO: “‘Cause it’s before the opening… ”

JOHN: “… it’s before the opening and she didn’t want the thing messed up. So, anyway, the gallery owner has a ‘little word’ with her. Then she says, she comes over to me and she says, ‘Alright.’ No smiling, or anything. Because, you know how she is, she doesn’t… she’s not runnin’ for office – she never was, though. She looks at me and she says, ‘You give me 5 shillings’. Well, that’s about $10 or maybe $20… ”

YOKO: “$10?!? Are you kidding? 5 shillings was about 50 cents… ”

JOHN: “No, no, in those days the shilling,… well, whatever, she says ‘Give me 5 shillings and you can hammer a nail in.’ So I looked at her and I said, ‘I’ll give you an imaginary 5 shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail in, okay?’ And that’s when we connected really, and we looked at each other like… you know that sort of… something went off. Well, I didn’t see her again for a few weeks. We went to a Claes Oldenburg opening and we were all… we… I went with Paul, and I don’t know who she was with. But I got separated from Paul, and I felt this sort of vibe behind me. And I looked ’round and there she was. And, we’re both very shy – believe it or not. And we… I don’t know what I said. We said something… uh, we didn’t really get together until 18 months later. We didn’t make love ’till two years… You think we’re rock and rollers, you know, all the… life that people lead. And, uh, it’s alright coming on with someone you know its not going to go anywhere. It’s easy to one-night-stand, and groupies and that. But for a real relationship… I was so paranoid and it was 18 months or a year before we got near to, uh, each other physically, as it were. ‘Cause I didn’t know how to treat somebody – a real woman. I only knew how to treat groupies, really. That’s not to say anything against me first wife, but that was when we were kids and our relationship started when we were both kids, so it was a different thing altogether. But this was quite a shock for me, and somebody who demanded equal rights right from the word ‘go’, you know? It was quite a long trip. But we’ve been together now longer than the Beatles. You know that?”

YOKO: “That is interesting… ”

JOHN: “People always think, ‘well, John and Yoko just got together and the Beatles split’. But we’ve been together longer than the Beatles.”