Travel: London to Chicago

Q: Are you concerned that your image may be changing and diminished in the eyes of the kids?

George Harrison: We change all the time, really, our style.

Ringo Starr: I mean, we look different every time we come to America, if you look at the old photographs. We never keep to a strict fashion.

John Lennon: You can see how we’ve changed.

Q: Do you do that on purpose?

Paul McCartney: No.

Lennon: No. We’re just growing old.

Starr: No, it’s just that we don’t control ourselves that much. We just look the same for 12 months.

Harrison: If you look at a photograph of yourself last year, you probably changed.

Q: It hasn’t been done by any design?

McCartney and Starr: No.

Q: Does that mean your hair is longer?

Lennon: Probably, yeah.

Starr: It could be. I don’t think mine is.

Q: Do you chaps want to go into short hair?

Starr: No, I don’t like short hair, you know.

Lennon: We don’t follow fashion anyway.

Q: When are you gonna make another movie?

Starr: Erm, maybe January, with any luck.

Q: Do you have any idea what it’s going to be about, or…

Starr: It’s just a small idea. There’s no script yet.

Q: What’s the most enjoyable thing for you four about this adulation: this almost ‘Godhood on Earth’ that you’ve achieved?

Lennon: Don’t say that.

McCartney: It was him. He said it.

Lennon: Now, you all saw that.

Q: Can we talk about your music a little bit? You’ve gone a long ways from ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ to Eleanor Rigby and the raga and so on. What direction are you trying to move your music?

McCartney: The thing is, we’re just trying to move it in a forward direction. And this is the point, you know, this is why we’re getting in all these messes with saying things. Because, you know, we’re just trying to move forwards. And people seem to be trying to just sort of hold us back and not want us to say anything that’s vaguely sort of, you know, inflammatory. I mean, we won’t if, really, if people don’t want that, then we won’t do it. We’ll sort of just do it privately. But I think it’s better for everyone if we’re just honest about the whole thing.

Q: How are you going to respond after tonight? Are you going to try and explain yourselves every time somebody asks, or what?

Lennon: Well, I’ll try if they keep asking me, you know.

Q: It’s very important to you?

Lennon: I’ll try… I’ll go on and on trying until they get it straight, you know, because I just don’t like to be sort of thought of as what I’m really not, you know. It’s nothing like me. The thing they’re putting round is nothing to do with me as a person, you know.

Q: [to Harrison] What about you? What was your reaction to what he said, and the reaction to what he said?

Harrison: Well, in the context that it was meant, it was the fact that Christianity is declining, and everybody knows about that, and that was the fact that was trying to be made.

Q: Do you agree with it?

Harrison: I do agree. I agree that it’s on the wane.

Q: What do you think about that fact that you believe that it’s true? What’s your reaction to that truth?

Lennon: Well, my reaction is that I was deploring it, you know. I was pointing it out. I mean, if somebody like us says it, people sort of do take notice, you know – even church people are trying to be ‘with it’ with pop groups and things. They’re still doing it the wrong way, and I was just stating a fact as I saw it. And I wasn’t trying to compare me or the group with Jesus or religion at all, but just only in that way – the way I’m trying to tell ya.

Q: Can I have just one more question? I’d like to ask your reaction to the fact that at London Airport this morning, some of the girls were crying, ‘John, not Jesus.’

Lennon: Well you know, I don’t take that seriously, either.

McCartney: They’re taking it the wrong way like everyone else, you know.

Q: Are you unhappy about that?

Lennon: No, you know, It’ll get straightened out, because, I mean, I could have stopped there and said, ‘Now listen, that’s wrong, what you’re saying,’ but I couldn’t do that. I had to come over here anyway and do all this, and try and straighten this out first. So, if it does get straightened out, it’ll be straightened out for them.