But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.

My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.

The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.

If you say 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it ' well then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record I'm just going to cut the things that I like and whoever likes it likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

The people who are competing business-wise out there want what other successful labels and artists have. I don't want what they have I want my own path my own sound my own identity. Record labels care nothing about identity or artistic freedom they want good business.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

If I could set a world record it would be that I have 150 business partners all with thriving businesses of their own that started with nothing and I made the difference to make them all billionaires.

To keep the record straight it wasn't always John and Yoko. We've all accused one another of various business things we tend to be pretty paranoid by now as you can imagine. There's a lot of money involved.

I'm trying to get the record that I made at my birthday party last year trying to get that out and the lawyers are diddling around with it and it probably won't be out until next year. I don't know.

My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.