So it's a well-known fact that they were introduced...

Introduced, it's always introduced isn't it. You’re either introduced to marijuana or you experiment with it romantic . So lets say this, I heard that there was an experimentation going on in and around the end of '64, '65 and I would say that if there wasn't, I'd like some explanations as to what was going on because the music definitely took a more interesting and insightful and flights of fancies and all the rest of it away. So it's safe to assume that because everyone else was doing it, that they were probably doing it though it's not for me to say so since it is ah, for some reason ... I see it as a dried herb or herb as Alan Ginsberg would say. Very beneficial to humankind and well I think one or two people were busted as well. It becomes that, so what can I tell you. It certainly was in the air there and it's very good for music and it can be very good for words as long as you're not doing interviews. I am not stoned you see doing this interview. I think it's bad for interviews, good for songs. No matter what anyone says, there's been a lot of revisionism about pot and some people have moved on to what I would see as bad drug, the …and …the lot but in my opinion the... it's in with the American experience as a very good mind blower, if indeed they were smoking pot.

We're going to move on to the Byrds and their role in this Dylan Beatle...

Well now David Crosby was... I mean, the Byrds were like the Beatles able to talk about themselves and where they were at. They had the same high, obtain their intelligence and energy and the Beatles put themselves together because... lets say, because of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as an example, which is why they... they desired to become a... a band more or less and then the... Crosby and McGuinn and Hillman and Dixon who put them together saw "Hard Day's Night" and that was rough _ saw that this was the way that folk singers and bluegrass people could legitimize being pop singers, which is not something that Jim Dixon thought a lot of, I don't think and Crosby later, in his analytical way that Crosby had, said that he saw Dylan and the Beatles pointing towards each other and... in the triangle, they decided to be the base of the triangle, the Byrds and I certainly would agree with that. They were the... the best of both or as good as both and any one of them is, for me going to live in L.A. and 30 years ago this month, February '65, and meeting the Byrds at the very beginning of their experiments with music together was a wonderful, I mean speaking entirely selfishly, for us as a family, not only profitable but a terrific launch for a whole new life based around the kind of lifestyle that they represented because in the sense that the Beatles represented that hope and enthusiasm of young Liverpool, the Byrds came to represent a new alternative American which is not flat-top, which was not consumerist, not selfish, not Eisenhower, but another kind of hope and it was right on. Again they were underestimated. A lot of other bands became more, if you like, were reckoned by mavens and … and all that lot to be more interesting than the Byrds. I stand by and am now joined by some commentators as to seeing they were a big, big band. Couldn't get on with each other and broke up, but they... a magical again on stage because it was thing that we could find in the air around them, which was you noticed the hairs on the back of the neck, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, … Jackie Kaye, all the big ones, Maurice Chevalier.

At this time there seemed like there was a growing sort of national youth sensibility, kind of … Dylan, the Byrds and the Beatles. Can you describe that.

Yes, well when the Byrds... the Byrds got a hit in the springish... early summer, 1965, the first really significant American response to what was known as the British invasion of '64 was Freddie and the Dreamers and Jay and the Pacemakers and a whole load of people. The Byrds came back with "Tambourine Man". They... they were not trying to be America's answer to the Beatles, other bands had tried that and so... so this is what they were or the managers had said, this is what we are. I don't want to name them, but they failed, those other bands. I've been involved in one or two who tried to help them achieve this … move to America and when the Byrds went to England in August, "Tambourine Man" was number one there. This was the start of what was going to be now, a growing two way, we go to England, you go to America and the youth of both countries around '65 and '66 started to wear the same new and interesting clothes, Carnaby Street and southern California, northern California, beads and moccasins and little narrow lapel suits and it all started to get interested in what was known eventually as the counterculture, but it evolved in... in the passion and bells and … Byrds and Beatles and it was extremely organic and I think not possible today because there's so much more self-consciousness now and a lot more... much more powerful manipulation in merchandizing, lights and all the things that are unfortunately, this is the seeds of the, not the destruction because it hasn't been destroyed, but the... what those people generated. What the counterculture generated and was later coopted by the... the big guys, took away the spontaneity which had been the driving force, the spontaneity in picking up and ah ha, this is interesting. There's something there and ah, the Fax machine and Federal Express and instant gratification has made everything available to everyone whenever you want it. Now everybody wears a baseball back.... cap back to front. That's a ... I don't, but a lot of people do. So that's where it all ends up. Every Goddam kid on earth that's got a baseball cap on back to front. So that was well worthwhile wasn't it, all that thirty years of just to bring that about.

Was there a political element to this?

Yes. The political element was that we would all look after each other and have a good time.

Yes, there was a political element in this and it was not a party of politics. The idea was that wars were bad. As... as the great Peter Coke once sang, "Love is the thing, hate isn't". And that was basically it. Wars are bad. Loving each other is good, be kind, make love not war, share and share alike. There was pretty well full employment as we've said before, so a lot of these things were easier. There was a good enemy and the enemy was the fuzz, the authorities, the government, LBJ, Howard Wilson over here, all the enemies to have, a nice bloke like Howard Wilson. So pot was very illegal. So that created a... quite a conflict so there was... in the end it turned out to be a bit childish. It wasn't that easy, but there was a general feeling of altruism and we can all... there was plenty of everything, we can share it out and the counterculture in the end was substantially political wasn't it and sound track... the music became the soundtrack really and some of us still believe that we should be nice to each other and that love is the thing, hate isn't. I think maybe not enough, but there never were enough people to make this thing work.

During that time were people looking into pop stars as leaders?

Yeah. People then were looking to pop stars, rock stars...

So we were talking about looking to pop stars as leaders.

Yes. People were looking to pop stars... they were looking to, I mean there's all kinds of pop... pop stars. Well there was Timothy Leary who we had as a pop star, but pop singers, certain pop singers were considered to be worth listening to. I mean, the Beatles obvious example, Dylan was another and some of the San Francisco people when they made pronouncements, one... one listened. Dylan however, said don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters, which I found interesting and somewhat off footing because it went against the grain of I think, it's my own fault for, at my age, I should have known better than to look for that kind of leadership. I should have found it in myself, but I hadn't a clue of what was going on anyway. I was half fazed. So that's my answer to that. Many were like me I think and there were older people than I who thought that this was the way to go, but in... in fact, the way that very, very senior so-called grown-up people were leading us was not the right way either, but we were not practical. We thought that work could be fun. That was all right. We also thought that fun was work and of course, fun can just simply be fun and that was where we went wrong, some of us, at... at Apple. When having a good time became all, and I prefer the new sober me to that madman that I wouldn't have got where I am today if I hadn't seen the light in southern California thanks to Byrds and Beatles, there's no doubt that they opened us up. My generation... very few of my generation took the chance to go a bit crazy and I consider myself privileged to have got away from that pre-war stuff.

The Beatles started in the press conference, started to talk about the Vietnam War, there was a more serious turn to all the interviewing, was....

Yes. Let me say this about that or that about this, my feeling... I wanted the Beatles to be, British socialists, much earlier than... I mean, I... I didn't like them when they started to make sideswipes at trade unionism now and again because of being the iconoclasm they were, they had no time for that kind of, you know, it's time to … knocking off the time. There was no knocking off time in their world, so I was surprised when politics started to seep in and there were one or two comments here and there, but there wasn't much in active Beatle touring days about politics I don't think. You just got the drift that they were on the side of what you might call, the angels. Countercultural … and things. It was really I suppose, George, John, Paul, Ringo individually and at various stages in '67, towards Maharishi time, that you can see that they had a, really they had some kind of solution they wanted to offer people and that's political isn't it, I think politics is offering solutions to large numbers of people. Something like that and they were more than artists by then, in other words. They were now getting to be... they were getting serious really and that of course bugged the hell out of people. What's all this, religion? And eastern religion, come on. This is... this is going too far and that was... that was the beginning of the...

Was that essentially was bigger than Jesus a smaller version of that same...

Bigger than Jesus was a... a... a odd one because bigger than Jesus as is now well known had been in the English press and the London Evening Standard much earlier than it appeared. It was soon, much earlier than it was in Datebook and the British didn't mind at all. The British is largely pagan anyway. We're all …pagan people, not pagan. They don't go to church. They sort of you know, they believe in their Christian sort of, perhaps. It was just John, I think making a comparison in terms of fame and I don't know what it was. It was just him coming out with something. I don't think it was...

Was that a tough moment for him in terms of the loveable mop tops?

Well it was a tough moment beca... it was a tough moment for John because he had the huge responsibility of having spoken within this collective and caused a lot of difficulties. So he having done it, had to, no see, twelve steps of AA is one of them is when wrong, promptly admit it. So he did do, I thought a terrifically courageous, must not have found it easy job saying well this is what I meant. I didn't mean that and anyway sort of it may be true, but I didn't mean it that way and I'm sorry and let me go now and of course they did. This is how popular they were. That could have done them in if they hadn't been so popular and so well intentioned.

So by this time, in '65, '66, had they essentially become icons as a band, in other words have they...

Yes. They... by '66 they were icons and probably not pleasing themselves as a band, plus hindsight says that they had got tired of not being heard and tired of touring and tired of screaming and didn't feel they were doing the job they wanted to be doing well enough. I mean they had so much music by then that they couldn't do on stage. So it was time in that play for that to stop them and get into the studio and the amazing thing is again, looking back, it's a safe theory those closed off, they broke up, but all through that '66, '7, '8, '9 period, they got better and better and better and the music was never disappointing. That was the beauty of it. They never did blow it musically. They made lots of mistakes, I'm sure, but in the sense that it was a play they were writing themselves or was being written for them by the circumstances, and you know as when you're making a film like_ you don't really have that much control. They made certain moves and certain things happened as a result of those moves. The package, the sound track and everything up to 1970's how it was. That's what happened to the Beatles. That was their story.

In this period, we're looking at this kind of '62 to '66, do you see a tremendous growth in Lennon and McCartney the songwriter.

You do. You see it... you see a growth in... you see a growth in Joh... George's songwriting. You see... you see... you can see why they are all in the band. You can see them all growing. You can see them... those very powerful school of thought that Ringo the rock drummer of them all really. He had... can do... Al Cooper says he could do fills that no one else could do. So they all developed at a huge rate of knots in that period. I never had any doubts that they would last, but only I knew now more than anyone else or less than they did what they were really capable of, that they would become so clever and that George Martin and recording techniques would start to expand and fill the needs that they created so everything, EMI loosened up and sort of set up a situation in the studio where the lighting was at last not so terrible and harsh and facilities were given to them which their fame, well viability and creativity demanded that these... all these recording needs, give them what they want. Give them the time. Give them the money. These people are incredible and this is the magic of it was that ever... they delivered. Every time they delivered. This stuff is now, you know, with us forever. The famous things like "Abbey Road" and the "White Album" just part of the language. So it's a remarkable romantic story.