Gary James' Interview With The Author Of The Book
The Dream Is Over:
London In The '60s, Heroin And John And Yoko
Dan Richter



If you've ever wondered what life was like in the heart of the music business in the 1960s, Dan Richter wrote a book for you! It chronicles Dan Richter's time in London and the time he spent with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Titled "The Dream Is Over: London In The '60s, Heroin And John And Yoko", Dan Richter talked with us about an era that he was fortunate enough to experience.

Q - Dan, do I refer to you, as an Assistant to John and Yoko, confidante, or a good friend of, or all of the three?

A - I would say all three. I didn't start out as an assistant. My wife Jill and I had just come back from the States. She was talking to Yoko and she said, "We just bought this new place. Why don't you come over and stay with us for awhile, until you get situated." I immediately got wrapped up in their life. I did a record cover. I helped redesign the whole Build A Sound Studio. So, suddenly I sort of got swept away. After about a year I agreed to work for them, which I did for awhile.

Q - Usually any book about The Beatles or the individual members get a lot of attention. Did you go on a book tour in support of your book? And who published this book?

A - It was published by Quartet in London, who unhappily went bankrupt last year (2022). So, there's not a new edition. We pretty much did the launch in England. I went over to London for it. We had some events over there. I didn't do a full tour, but I did some readings and things like that here (U.S.). I don't remember where.

Q - Did you do Barnes And Nobel, stores like that?

A - Yeah. I did Barnes And Noble with it.

Q - The title of your book, "The Dream Is Over", what does that mean?

A - You know the song, "I Don't Believe In Zimmerman"?

Q - "I Don't Believe in Kennedy. I Don't Believe In Beatles."

A - Yeah. And he ends it with "The Dream Is Over. I was the walrus and now I'm just John. My Dream Is Over." It's referring to that. It's also referring to the fact that this was an amazing time in the late '60s, early '70s, when I was with John and Yoko. That Dream Is Over, after the Manson murders and other things. People stopped smoking dope so much and started using cocaine. Disco and violins. The Dream was over.

Q - I should point out that in your book, on page 244, the chapter "Ladies And Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones," first paragraph, second sentence, "John and Yoko's artwork at the Everson Museum in Rochester, New York." That should read Syracuse, New York.

A - Yeah. That's a mistake. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll put it in the notes in the next edition.

Q - And how many editions have come out?

A - Just one because the book was doing pretty well, but as I said, Quartet went bankrupt. Quartet was quite a reputable house. I don't know why, but they went south. In fact, I'm in the process of now talking to people about another edition. The edition would probably come out from the States, not from London.

Q - You did not attend John and Yoko's "This Is Not Here" art show at the Everson Museum because your wife had a baby.

A - Yeah. I was basically going back and forth between London and New York almost weekly. I saw a lot of airplanes in those days, because we had a lot of things going on in London and where John and Yoko were. And also, my wife was having my son Misha, and so I didn't make the show.

Q - The show that I saw at the Everson Museum, was that previewed at other art museums or was it the first time the public got to see it?

A - It was pretty much a first in my recollection. I know a lot of new work was done, the large guitar. A lot of things from my perspective were done quite hurriedly. They had a team of people working down on the first floor of Yoko's left. A lot of things happened very quickly. What I find interesting is John had done the Robert Fraser Show in London and I think it was '68 which was "This Is Not Here". I would suppose the Everson Show was a bit of an echo of that.

Q - Frank Zappa's VW was there, covered in melted wax.

A - Yeah.

Q - Then on a pedestal was a pair of old shoes. I'm guessing they were John's shoes. There was also an old bubble gum dispenser with a handmade sign pasted on the outside that said, "Cat Shit 5 cents". That had to be a send-up, a put-on by John Lennon. Is that art? I was never able to reconcile that in my mind. Do you consider what I just told you was in the Everson to be art?

A - Since I wasn't there, I'm going to cop out and not answer. Yes, it was conceptual art. It had some things that John showed at the Robert Fraser Show, the vending machine. Let's put it this way, I think Yoko's shows were better than John's shows. I think John's music was a lot better than Yoko's music.

Q - You write in your book: "Famous Rock stars are definitely apart from regular people. They have a quality of otherness about them and though they look, talk and seem like us, they are different." What's that word "otherness" mean? Is that another term for charisma, maybe?

A - Probably. A little more than charisma. They take on an aura. It's probably in our own minds, but because the legend and the whole atmosphere that's built up around them and their reputation colors the way we see them.

Q - John once asked you, "Who do you think is bigger, me or Elvis?"

A - Yeah, he did.

Q - I didn't read your answer in the book. What did you tell him?

A - I probably avoided the question with a bit of humor. Something like that. I think at that time John was sort of serious. I think it was done in a slightly joking manner, but he was serious. If you're John Lennon or Elvis Presley or Paul McCartney, you're concerned with stuff like that.

Q - The Beatles were and are bigger than Elvis.

A - The one way to gauge it is by the amount of sales, etc, and I don't have the final numbers. Elvis didn't write music. Elvis was a magical performer. Just the way he looked. He didn't have to do anything. Just his face and the way he moved. He was sort of a King in that sense, but The Beatles wrote some of the best music since Mozart. If you look at today, they're lasting longer than Elvis. Elvis is still well-known. They just made a movie about him. The Beatles are everywhere all the time and more and more, because the music is so good. The music affected people so much. When they went into the studio and John started doing "Rubber Soul" and "Sgt. Pepper's", Rock 'n' Roll bands before that point had gone into the studio and simply recorded what they'd do if they were on a stage. Occasionally a little echo was added. Things like that. But, The Beatles were the first people that realized that they could use the studio and the things they could get in a recording studio and they weren't limited to simply singing the songs they always sang them in a performance. That just took the lid off. That opened it up for so many artists.

Q - The Beatles were ahead of everybody else. They changed fashion. They changed music, songwriting, and production and presentation of the music.

A - Yeah. You take John or Paul as individuals, they're brilliant, brilliant songwriters. It's very rare, almost impossibly rare to have such a coincidence to have two gifted song creators, songwriters working together at the same time.

Q - And actually playing off each other, trying to one-up the other guy.

A - Very much so. They were also very aware of the difference between each other. They understood that John could write a brilliant, interesting and complex song, take it to Paul and Paul could come with a hook that made it for everybody. And then Paul could come up and write some beautiful melodies, but they might be a little too bubble gum, a little too frothy, and then John could just add a few lines, change a few lines, change a chord here and there and just give them some gravitates and give it weight.

Q - Here's something I had never read before. John tells you, "If I hadn't become a Rock And Roll star, I would have liked to be a hairdresser." I saw in a documentary where Ringo said he wanted to own hair salons. I never read or heard that John wanted to be a hairdresser.

A - I don't know if he ever said that to anybody else, but he loved to fix Yoko's hair and fix his own hair. Whenever he was about to be seen by anybody or walk through a door, he'd always check his hair. He was joking, but also he liked to be less macho. He had a very rich and broad personality. There were many Johns.

Q - On page 168 he says, "The rhythm guitar is the heart of Rock 'n' Roll." John, being a rhythm guitarist, you would expect him to say that. When he said that, did you believe him?

A - You know, I did. First of all, at that time most popular music was listened to from a very small car speaker. A lot of times mono. And so the rhythm guitar was right acoustically in the middle there. It would really drive songs. Take Keith's guitar out of any of The Rolling Stones' things and you'd really hear the difference. Take John's guitar out of any of The Beatles tracks and you will hear the difference. It has to do with the fact that the bass and drums can't tell you very much. They can set the beat and get the tone going right. The lead guitar is making the comments and drawing lines in space, but it's the rhythm guitar that's bringing it all together, that's right in the middle. And that's what John meant.

Q - Page 129, "John had a lot of buried pain and anger that (Doctor) Janov brought out." The pain and anger would have been about losing his mother at such an early age and his best friend, Stu Sutcliffe?

A - Yes, but I think it goes deeper than that. It goes earlier than that. This little boy, standing on a pier and I forget with town it is, and the mother and father deciding who was going to keep him. He lost his father early. To know that his father was alive and didn't care that much and only seemed to care after his son became famous. Then suddenly he turns up. It's terrible. His Aunt Mimi gave him a very loving, stable home to grow up in, but he knew that his father was alive and not in contact and sort of gone away and he knew his mother was alive, probably living nearby and yet she wasn't part of his life. Then when she finally was, she got killed. Terrible.

Q - Then he goes on to become a famous singer that everybody loves.

A - Yeah. And the other thing, and I talked about this to John, is he said he never had a chance to grow up. What he meant by that was he started playing fairly young and he didn't go through the normal process, the maturing process that people go through. He was too busy playing guitar and performing from his mid-teens on.

Q - Isn't it amazing though that a guy who really wasn't shown much love early on in life would go on to write some of the most beautiful love songs?

A - Yeah. All of his love songs have a bit of angst to them. They don't have the softness that some of Paul's do. Most of John's work, the pain and dealing with the pain, is always there.

Q - John said it was Paul's fault that The Beatles had broken up. "It's because he wanted to dominate us all." It obviously didn't help when John would bring Yoko to a Beatles' recording session. She didn't have any role there.

A - You have to understand something. They were finished already. They were done. George had written a lot of music. At the rate they were doing it, he would have to have two or three lifetimes to get all of his songs out. They certainly didn't need money anymore. They didn't need fame anymore. Once John had met Yoko he knew it was over with and he did not want to go on any further with The Beatles. But, it was Paul who kept trying to bring them together, the White Album is an example, the Don't Look Back film that just came out. They didn't want to be there. He was completely committed to working with Yoko by then and he told everybody that. If he was going to be anywhere, she was going to be with him. If Yoko wasn't doing it, John wasn't doing it. John wanted her there. He was telling them, "Listen guys, I don't want to do The Beatles stuff anymore. I'm done. So, I'm just going to do it my way."

Q - "Sometimes I felt that Yoko was using his innate insecurities to gain a kind of power over him (and) I think he wanted her to do that too." Again this relates back to John's mother leaving him at an early age?

A - Yeah. I think he needed a strong female figure. That was his need. Yoko certainly supplied that and he was very comfortable with it.

Q - What was it like to move a Beatle through an airport or a hotel? In your case it was John. What would you encounter?

A - (laughs). If you kept moving and you knew you could keep moving and wouldn't have to stop, you were pretty much okay as long as nobody knew before that you were going to be there. And that was the most important thing. When I would buy them airplane tickets I would quite often buy them in a different name, which you were able to do in those days. I remember buying us tickets, we were trying to get out of Majorca. They were having this fiasco down there, and get to Paris. I made reservations for Mr. and Mrs. Smith and friend. Three seats.

Q - If John did get stopped at say an airport, what were people looking to do, get an autography? Talk to him?

A - They see him and they'd just freeze on the spot. You'd see this look come over their face. They can't believe they're seeing him, that he's there. Yeah, an autograph. They didn't do "selfies" in those days unless you had a camera. Just to talk to him. Just to see him. He went through the world with all these faces looking at him in amazement. It was very hard for him just have a normal life where you could just talk to people and they were people and they weren't looking at you like they were looking at some Holy relic.

Q - I saw John Lennon in person and you really can't believe it's him. As crazy as it sounds, with this image that was built up around him you'd think he was a cartoon figure. And he was that too!

A - Yeah. That's what we've been talking about in a number of moments during this interview. Can you imagine being John and having the world look and treat you like that?

Q - I cannot imagine what that would have been like. I interviewed Gary Walker of The Walker Brothers and he was in a restaurant frequented by famous musicians. Whenever a Beatle would walk in, everybody would stop eating, turn around and look.

A - Also, at the end of the day you get to know somebody or have a relationship with and they're going to end up asking for money or they're going to want something. They don't just want to be your friend. They end up wanting something from you.

Q - It's great to be onstage and get the applause and recognition, but when you leave the stage you want to leave the fame onstage and go about your business.

A - Yeah. It's hard, not only for Rock musicians, but for famous actors. People think they know who they are and they don't know who they are. When you're not on film, many actors are totally different than the image they project.

Q - Would John have worn a disguise when he was going through an airport or a hotel, or it wouldn't have mattered, he'd still get recognized?

A - Well, you wear sunglasses, put a hat over your eyes. Things like that. But as I said, the main thing is just keep moving.

Q - And now it happens to Ringo at airports!

A - I ran into Ringo as the airport about ten years ago and we were both checking in at the American Priority desk. We talked a bit, but you could see all the faces all around just staring.

Q - You write that John was throwing up before going onstage at the Toronto Rock And Roll Festival.

A - Yes.

Q - I take it that was not uncommon for him to do.

A - Also he did at the One To One concert as well.

Q - Did he have a bad case of stage fright?

A - A kind of stage fright. I'm not totally sure. What I credit it to, what I think it is, is imagine you're arguably the greatest Rock Star ever. You've done a ton of masterpieces and now you've got to get up onstage. What happens if you've not good enough tonight? It's like this whole massive reputation is at stake every time you open your mouth.

Q - It would be a problem if you really thought about it, but then some people can get onstage and have an off night and the fans don't really care.

A - Yeah. I mean (Bob) Dylan is like that. He'll play a half empty bowling alley. He'll just keep performing and he loves doing it and it doesn't affect him the way it affected John. With John it was so much at stake each time and it could've just been stage fright. I think it was more of that.

Q - When most people take a drink they don't become a alcoholic. With heroin can you become addicted after the first injection?

A - Heroin addiction is a number of things. The main thing about heroin addiction is it's a physical addiction. In other words, after you take it for awhile you would become sick if you stopped taking it. Now alcoholics have to get years into it before that starts happening, before they have the DTs, or dry heaves, or whatever.

Q - I don't really understand how heroin would come into the picture in London in the 1960s. The music, the fashion was so exciting, but heroin? I never understood what the attraction of heroin was to musicians.

A - Well, you have a number of things at play here. First of all, everybody is using lots of drugs because consciousness expansion is a big issue. Everybody is turning on and experiencing expanding their consciousness. They had been reading Adlous Huxley and listening to Tim Leary. So, everybody was using drugs. Now, England at the time had a problem with addicts. They could register with the government. There was a lot of legal heroin around. So, people tried it. One of the problems with heroin is that if you've got any pain, you take some heroin and you're not going to have any pain, whether it's physical, mental, psychological or spiritual. You've gonna feel okay. And so if anybody is suffering from anything, they're at risk.

Q - People looking at John Lennon from the outside would not have known the pain he was in.

A - Yeah. And luckily John and Yoko didn't use that much heroin. Their experiment or time with it was relatively short. They were able to get off it pretty quickly.

Q - I hope this book of yours comes out with a different publisher in the U.S. People should read it.

A - I do too.



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