Abby

“I handed the film container to John, who was already pretty stoned. He said to Neil Aspinall, “Neil, do you feel like holding?” and giggled in the way that only John Lennon could giggle. Then John turned to me and repeated my name: “Hash Howard!” And, curled up in the corner of the booth, he giggled again. He was pretty wasted.”

Mclennon isn’t re-

I want someone to look at me the way John looks at Paul (or Paul looks at John):

“I don’t think John had a thousand trips; that’s a slight exaggeration. But there was a period when we took acid a lot - the year we stopped touring, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, we stayed home all the time, or we went to each others houses. In a way, like psychiatry, acid could undo a lot - it was so powerful you could just see. But I think we didn’t really realize the extent to which John was screwed up. For instance, you wouldn’t think he could get bitter, because he was so friendly and loving; but he could also be really nasty and scathing. As a kid, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, well, it’s because his dad left home and his mother died,’ which in reality probably did leave an incredible scar. It wasn’t until he made that album about Janov, primal screaming, that I realised he was even more screwed up than I thought. After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, ‘I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.’ That is an illusion people are under. It’s nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It’s down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what’s going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death. As Yoko came into the picture, I lost a lot of personal contact with John, but on the odd occasion I did see him, just by the look in his eyes I felt we were connected.”