John Lennon Remembered

JOHN LENNON REMEMBERED

We remember dates for murdered icons. JFK assassinated on November 22, 1963; brother Bobby, the 6^th of June.  Julius Caesar stabbed on the Ides of March, and Honest Abe martyred on Good Friday.  John Lennon took his bullets on 8 December 1980, outside his home when a deranged fan tried to kill himself by killing his hero. And so it goes. 

Lennon would have turned 80 last October, and has now been gone for 40 years, or as long as his given term on earth.  Some say that a deceased lives on for as long as he or she is remembered by the living. Indeed, the former Beatle remains with us as long as his music remains heard on the radio and home stereos where even boomers’ kids know the words.

Born during the German air blitz of England on 9 October, 1940, John Winston Lennon was the offspring of his parents, Alfred and Julia.  Alfred lived much of his life as a tough, wayward seaman and later sailor during World War II for the merchant marine.  The effervescent Julia, a high-spirited and impulsive woman, possessed a delightful sense of humor and a pleasing singing voice.  Both parents played the banjo, though the music between them stopped after they divorced when John was a five year-old.  Alfred failed to see his son thereafter until the Fab Four found fame.

Julia was no stay at home mother, so her sister raised the wee lad to manhood.  His Aunt Mimi—a strong woman with a stereotypical British stiff upper lip—provided safe haven and a structured environment.  She reined in the growing child as best she could given her nephew’s inborn tendency for independence and rebellion.  Perhaps because of his unique environment/heredity juxtaposition, John grew up combative, yet dreamy and artistic.   He bucked schoolmasters and rote learning, but remained active with his art or reading books authored by the likes of Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde.

His loving aunt could only patch a fractured childhood.  John grew up with a chip on his shoulder, along with a drive to succeed, albeit on his terms.  He possessed innate grit and an inherited singing voice along with an artistic bent and a wit honed to a cutting edge.  He could be a ‘swine’ as the British would say, as he sometimes displayed an angry, jealous streak made flammable by drink.  His inborn talents along with his self-assertiveness to fend off childhood insecurities proved good fodder for an aspiring rock and roller.  Yet, given his poor scholastic record and independent nature, John could well have turned out to be something of an itinerant; obscurity proves far more likely than fame for artists and musicians of any stripe.  

The Beatle Beat.

Lennon found instant karma when meeting the equally fortunate Paul McCartney who provided ballast to the band’s fledgling ship at sea, while his mate provided the fearless steerage.  To John’s credit, his communal nature kept him open to a shared stage with his younger but talented partner, which proved a boon for both. Their axis powered the group, demonstrating the maxim that the best partnerships combine dissimilar talents.  The loosely wired, edge-walking Lennon needed to be reeled in; the tighter wound, disciplined McCartney needed slack.   Together, their lines proved taut and balanced.  

Oft overlooked, the Beatles’ rise to world fame—what Lennon quipped to be the toppermost to the poppermost—required a measure of audacity to mount their high wire act atop the world stage.  They demonstrated their pluck early on when the teen-aged group performed for an extended engagement at a nightclub in the seaport city of Hamburg, Germany.  The Beatles’ brash leader provided the needed pushback to the rowdy crowds as the band found their groove and honed their skills playing a hard day’s night, eight days a week.

Early Beatlemania clips reveal Lennon’s intrepid style both in body language and singing style.  Rock and roll requires an inner conceit, or ‘attitude’, which this Beatle possessed in spades.  With legs splayed in defiance, he sang with a voice that cried out with uninhibited primal force, yet at times conveyed a hint of vulnerability, indicia of his own internal angst.  In short, John exuded charisma.

A rock hard voice wrested covers from their owners as he made them his own. Twist and Shout and Money come immediately to mind. But it was their own Lennon & McCartney originals with their lyrical and melodic fusions that carried the day with songs that filled a catalogue for an unprecedented seven year run.

Lennon proved a rocker with his own tunes that ranged broadly from You Can’t Do That, Yer Blues and his protestor’s anthem, Revolution.  His soulful and poetic side found vent early with the balletic This Boy, and later dreamily as heard in Strawberry Fields, Across the Universe and his paean to his mother, Julia.

John’s voice was heard more often in the early Beatle days though to be sure, Paul McCartney was no sidekick.  As the Fab Four matured, McCartney grew to a more influential force within the band.  Paul’s overdrive work ethic wore John down, as did the rigors of overwhelming stardom that—as he put it—bored him during the Beatles’ final years. 

Beyond Beatles.

Prior to the Beatle breakup, John disdained convention when he married an intelligent, strong-willed, avant-garde Japanese-American named Yoko Ono.  Her edgy art and poetry intrigued Lennon, who found her to be on the same high frequency wavelength.  She later proved good with finances–something she acquired genetically or by osmosis from her father, a leading banker in pre-war Japan—which proved an invaluable asset given the headaches of dealing with hanger-ons and the unscrupulous who either openly had their hands out, or furtively inside the Beatles’ pockets.  Indeed, keeping tabs on the vast influx of money proved more difficult than making it.    

Many blamed Yoko for the Beatles’ break up, though George Harrison wanted out of the group celebrity cage as much as John did. In retrospect, the fact that the group stayed together as long as they did—given their intense seven-year fishbowl existence—proved almost as amazing as Beatlemania itself.  Nonetheless, many “fans” never forgave him for marrying a woman they called the Eastern Dragon Lady rather than a blonde trophy wife who kept quiet and John wedded to his fans.  For some, the John and Yoko union fostered enmity to such an extent that it tarnished their view of Lennon’s standing as a phenomenal musical artist.

After the band’s breakup, Paul remained content as an ex-Beatle; conversely, John distanced himself with the antithesis of a slick Beatle-like production with his first solo album, The Plastic Ono Band.  Devoid of layered walls of musical overdubs, this revealing record contained a wide range of songs from the haunting Mother and Isolation, the lyrical word play of Love, and the iconoclastic God.   His follow album, Imagine included songs as varied as its cathedral track of the same name, the ever relevant political swipe, Give Me Some Truth, and the country and western dobro driven tune Crippled Inside.  His solo work underscored that while Paul was the more commercially successful ex-Beatle, it was John who remained more interesting.

John proved how far he was willing to go out on the limb with Somewhere in New York City, a raw, political diatribe, swinging wildly, sometimes accurately.  He also proved he could walk the talk when he continued his political activism, particularly his opposition to the Vietnam War.

For his efforts, Lennon drew the honor of making President Richard Nixon’s enemies list.  Citing an old marijuana bust in England, the president’s henchman blocked John’s efforts to obtain a green card so he could reside in America.  The court ultimately saw through the façade as the government’s attempt to muzzle a political dissident, and granted the coveted green card.  The subsequent two-fingered peace/victory salute in the shadow of the statue of liberty remains the quintessential photograph of the liberated Lennon.

Fame and trying to live up to Imagine—who could?—took its toll.  Nor could it have been easy keeping pace with overachiever McCartney.  John split from Yoko, and then lived through the hell of his infamous year-long ‘lost weekend’ fueled by booze to block out his loneliness.  Lennon’s album, Walls and Bridges, reflected a burdened state of mind though his sparkling sax-driven vocal duet with Elton John in Whatever Gets You through the Night—“don’t need a sword to cut through flowers; a watch to waste your time; a gun to blow your mind”—revealed his resilient hipster-quipster side.  

John left his demons and drugs, and reunited with Yoko.  He paused to stay home—as he put it—to watch ‘the wheels go round and round’ while he raised his son, Sean, who was born on his father’s 35^th birthday.  Some thought that the erstwhile Beatle might have become his generation’s Howard Hughes when he disappeared from public view for five years. But even the rich and famous need the peace of hearth and comfort of family, as his last album, Double Fantasy attests.   John was shot dead three weeks after the record’s release.

Yet, Lennon’s spirit lives on, and not only in baby boomers’ memories, but their children’s as well.  Indeed, two of Gen X’ers’ favorite movies contain references to the rock and roll icon.  In Breakfast Club, the bitter assistant principal asks Carl the Janitor what he wanted to become when he was young, to which Carl replied: “I wanted to be John Lennon.”  In the closing moments of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the breezy Ferris soliloquizes about living for the moment, then says:  “To quote John Lennon, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I believe in me’. Not bad, but then again he was the walrus.”

In his day, John Ono Lennon defined ‘cool’.  He sang out about love and peace and imagined the best in us.  Lennon possessed his own demons and fell short himself in many ways just like the rest of us; however, he went down trying to constrain them the best that he could. 

Gone, but not forgotten.  Even today, 40 years after his death, one can listen to his seemingly prescient, posthumously-released song apropos to today’s loony world, in the John Lennon/Yoko Ono jazz-infused rocker: Nobody Told Me (there’d be days like these). ‘Strange days indeed.’