“When he died that day, I was so horrified, I just had like, stage fright all day. Some of it was just fright, like ‘Are you next?” That was a question whipping around the three of us, but also the complete emptiness and the finality of it.
“Someone stuck a microphone in the window of the car as I was leaving the studios that night; I was just beginning to wrestle with it and it was just sinking in, and someone said, ‘What d’you think of the death of John Lennon?” And I really couldn’t think of anything more to say than ‘It’s a drag’ and it came out really slow. But of course when it got printed — ‘Paul McCartney, asked for his definitive version of how he felt, said, “It’s a drag”“ — it looked so callous in print. You can’t take the print back and say, ‘Look, let me just rub that print in shit and pee over it and then cry over it for three years, then you’ll see what I meant when I said that word.’
“I should have said, ‘It’s the most unholiest of drags, and it might have been better. What I meant was, ‘Fuck off! Don’t invade my privacy.’ But I managed to pull something together, but unfortunately it was something that would add to the McCartney idiot myth, some soppy guy who doesn’t care about anything, ‘Oh, it’s a drag!’
“When I got home I wept buckets, in the privacy of my own home. I controlled it all during the day, but that evening when it was on the news and all the in-depth shit, and all the pundits were coming out, trotting out all their little witticisms, I did a lot of weeping. I remember screaming that Mark Chapman was the jerk of all jerks. I felt so robbed and so emotional.”
Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, 1997.
