drugs, divorce, & a slipping image.

“The other day I was looking up something. And I found out when I was interviewing Paul, I was asking him the famous meeting with John at Woolton Parish Church when the Quarrymen are playing. . . . And I was saying to Paul, ‘can you remember what was John wearing when you first met him?’ And he said, ‘give us your book’ and he drew a beautiful cartoon/drawing, cause Paul’s a very good artist. He did a lovely drawing of John Lennon the day he met him, with his slicked back hair and his Teddy Boy style. And that’s still in that notebook.”

— Hunter Davies “Hunter Davies presents: The John Letters.” The British Library, October 2012

PAUL: If I'm going to see a face in a painting it's highly likely to be [John’s].

INT: Do you think of him during the day or did this come, is this an unusual thing?

PAUL: I think of John a lot. Yeah. Because we were such good friends for so long. I also used to do little caricatures of his, him. It was quite easy to draw, this long aquiline nose and the sort of glasses and he used to have big sideburns, as you call them. Sideboards is what we call 'em. Um, so I used to draw him quite a bit. When we were just sitting around I'd do caricatures.

— Paul McCartney - Interview by Diane Sawyer. ABC news, November 2, 2000

“John is a central figure in my life. I will always be grateful for having so much intimate time with him. The more distant his stuff becomes, the greater he seems. I used to do caricatures of John. He was the only person I knew with an aquiline nose. When I painted him recently, I found myself saying: “How did his lips go? I can’t remember” Then I would think: “Of course you know, you wrote all those songs facing each other”