One weekday morning, I found my way to the breakfast buffet in a hotel in the suburbs of Richmond, VA. Alone, I grabbed myself some eggs and sat down when an older gentleman rushed in apologizing for not being their to provide me service and offered to grab me a drink. I said no thank you but some company would be nice. I had been reading about Bill Russel and the Celtics dominance in the 1960's and this gentleman was clearly of the right age to remember such things so I asked him about basketball. He said, "O I never really got into sports. I moved to England and was a musician there throughout the 60's and 70's. In fact you can see a youtube of me playing with Pete Townsend." He proudly showed me this video of a younger him with a full afro and Pete Townsend jamming out to some funky beats sometime in the early 70's. He then told me about how he hung out with these illustrious musicians at house parties and bars, aka social settings that I'm familiar with. My parents had instilled this romantic image of the music scene of their childhood and how advanced the music was for the time. This guy actually hung out with these people. Jackpot I thought.
Being a huge Beatles fan, and (maybe even bigger) John Lennon fan, I asked him if he had ever hung out with the Beatles. He said oh sure and told me that Ringo was a blast, he didn't see much of George, and that Paul was the ultimate ladies man. But I really wanted to know more about John. He said he was so weird. He emphasized to me that all of these musicians were just people "like you and me"; they drink, they smoke, they get in fights and talk about what's going on. But he would also emphasize that John was impossible to talk to because he would quickly take you somewhere that you just couldn't follow in conversation. When everyone was looking to chill out and have a good time with some friends, John was trying to contemplate our existence from a perspective of a bird (not really but that's the idea I got). Apparently, there just wasn't normal conversation with him. He also said that at the time, John had a huge drinking problem (so did everybody ya) drinking Brandy Alexanders and getting very belligerent by the end of the night to the point he had to be carried out by his mates.
I see this as a view point of what John was like in the mid-60's when he was on top of the world in the social scenes that really haven't changed much over the years. This is John as a raw person that people don't really take the time to talk about because we would rather here about how he moved mountains and changed our lives. Biographical documentaries portray John like "yeah he did a lot of drugs but that led to the creation of Lucy in the sky with Diamonds!" As if we need reasoning. But at the end of the day, John is a person just like any of us that has positive traits along with unexpected quirks. Only his positive traits created some of the best songs of all time.