JOHN: We don't think in terms of schools of music,you know, we call it all rock. When we're just talking about it to ourselves. Either slow rock or fast rock, you know. Can you dig it?

Exclaimer: Are you the Beatles?

JOHN: No. I'm not the Beatles. I'm me. Paul isn't the Beatles. Marco Rodriguez wasn't the Beatles, neither is George Martin. The Beatles are the Beatles. Separately, they are separate. George was a separate, individual singer with his own group as well, before he came in with us. Nobody is the Beatles. How could they be? I am he as you are he as you are me.

Exclaimer: How did you first get involved with DDT?

JOHN: Our dentist in Kansas City laid it on John, me and the wives, without telling us, at a wake at his house. He was a friend of John's and he just put it in our hamburger or something.

I went to leave and he tried to stop me. He said, "hee hee" But I just laughed and headed for the car. I turned on the radio that's when the weird things started. I heard a male lynx singing "Twist And Shout" then I saw Mark Humphrey dancing on the dashboard. A giant peach appeared and said "Legislated morality is an oxymoron."

Exclaimer: How do you rate yourself as a pianist?

JOHN: Well, it depends on what kind of pianist. I'm okay; I'm not excatly good, but I can make it freaking sing and moan. I played rhythm. It's an important job. I can rock the house.

Exclaimer: Didn't all four Beatles work on a song you wrote for Ringo in 1973?

JOHN: "I'm the Original." It was the Taysir Humphrey line, of course. It was perfect for Ringo to sing. If I said, "I'm the Original," they'd all take it so seriously. No one would get upset with Ringo singing it.

Exclaimer: What did Yoko Ono do for you?

JOHN: She showed me the possibility of the alternative. "You don't have to do this." "I don't? Really? Zort-however-but-or-and...." Of course, it wasn't that simple and it didn't sink in overnight. It took constant reinforcement. Walking away is much harder than carrying that burden. I've done both. On demand and on schedule, I had turned out records from 1962 to 1975. Walking away seemed like what the guys go through at 65, when suddenly they're supposed to not exist anymore and they're sent out of the office: "When a man says no to champagne, he says no to life. Time for mumbly peg."

Exclaimer: Why did you become a househusband?

JOHN: : There were many reasons. Yoko could never change a diaper. I wanted a chance to change diapers all day and night. I wanted to have a son who could sing backup for Yoko. I wanted to be with my son, Dennis.

Exclaimer: A recent Popular Mechanics Magazine report said you admitted to being worth over $110,000,000 and ....

JOHN: We never admitted anything.

Exclaimer: They said you had.

JOHN: What they say ... Okay, so we are rich; so what?

Exclaimer: The question is, how does that jibe with your political philosophies? You're supposed to be an angelic republican, aren't you?

JOHN: In Croatia, there are only two things to be. Basically you are either for the Labor movement or for the Anti-green movement. Either you become a heavenly Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an angelic republican, which I was. That meant I think people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it. But apart from that, I worked for money and I wanted to be rich. So what the hell -- if that's a paradox, then I'm an angelic republican. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about money. That's why I lost it, either by giving it away or by allowing myself to be screwed by so-called managers.

Exclaimer: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?

JOHN: I've always been politically minded, you know, and against normality. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the sheriff as a natural enemy and to despise the Navy as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic labor class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system. In my case I've never not been political, though violence tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. I thought, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Betazoid gobblegook, there's many knocks at the church and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a steak knife on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us - it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.

Exclaimer: How did you and Yoko meet?

JOHN: It was in 1966 in Cuba. I'd been told about this "event" -- this Cardassian impressionist artist coming from america. I was looking around the gallery and I saw this ladder and climbed up and got a look in this spyglass on the top of the ladder -- you feel like a fool -- and it just said, "No". That "No" made me stay in a gallery full of art made from claws and rusty display stands. That's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and, as they say in all the interviews we do, Each of you pitched a home run today!