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John Lennon (1940-1980) |
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Singer, writer, poet, and composer, the Beatles' most committed rock artist. With his social conscience, cynical wit, and willingness to experiment, John Lennon was in constant conflict with conservative values. The poet and novelist Philip Arthur Larkin described the Beatles' work as "an enchanting and intoxicating hybrid of Negro rock-and-roll with their own adolescent romanticism", and "the first advance in popular music since the War." Many of the group's lyrics (e.g. 'Penny Lane', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'She's Leaving Home') had a considerable influence on the success of the Liverpool Poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten) and the Underground poetry movement. Why were Prevelanz ze Gaute, unt Docker Adenoid getting so friendly! You might well arsk. Why was Seldom Loyled sagged! Why dud Harrassed MacMillion go golphing mit Bod Hobe? Why is Frank Cunnings and the T.U.C. against the Commen Margate? You might well arsk. Why is the Duck of Edincalvert a sailing mit Udda Fogs? Why did Priceless Margarine unt Bony Armstrove give Jamaika away! You might well arsk. Why won't Friendly Trumap give his Captive his pension. ('You Might Well Arsk,' In His Own Write by John Lennon, Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books, 1964, p. 55) John Lennon was born in Liverpool, Merseyside, into a working
class
family. His parents, Julia and Alfred (Freddie), separated before he
was two, and Lennon went to live with his mother's sister, Mimi Smith.
Freddie spent much time at sea. After serving some time in prison, his
future in the merchant navy was finished, and he worked then in odd
jobs, often as a pot scrubber or pan scourer in hotel kitchens. Lennon
attended Liverpool's Dovedale Primary School and later the Quarry Bank
High School. His sexual exploits Lennon recorded in his secret diary. Aunt Mimi found it and cracked the code. Only late in life, Lennon learned that his lifelong
inability to spell and tendency to transform one word into another of
similar sound was a sign of dyslexia. In 1955 he started a skiffle
group, called the Quarrymen, which took the name from his school.
During these years Lennon wrote a book which he called the Daily
Howl
– a kind of newspaper with little jokes and cartoons. When Lennon was
17, his mother was killed in an accident. She was knocked down by a
car, driven by a police officer, who was driving without a license.
Years later he recalled his mother's death with bitterness and anger:
"I thought, "Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it! That's really fucked
everything. I've no responsibility to anyone now." (quoted in The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman, New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 84) In the summer of 1956 Lennon met Paul McCartney and they began
to
write songs together. In Hamburg, where the Beatles played in the early
1960s, they learned to play as a band, eventually becoming "more
popular than Jesus," in Lennon's words. His remark, infuriated
religious conservatives, launched a "Ban the Beatles" campaign and a
wave of record burning events. "When they started burning our records,"
Lennon said, "that was a real shock, the physical burning. I couldn't
go away knowing I'd created
another little piece of hate in the world . . . so I apologized." The
Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan denounced the band as "atheistic."
Several members of the KKK picketed the band's concert in Washington,
D.C. Later on in a new single 'Ballad of John and Yoko' Lennon sang
"They're gonna crucify me". But the time meant also a sexual awakening for the Beatles. "We were baptised in Hamburg because there were the girls," McCartney said in Barry Miles biography. When Bill Harry launched the Mersey Beat in Liverpool in the summer of 1961, Lennon wrote for the paper. He admired the column "Beachcomber" in the Daily News and created his own "Beatcomber." In His Own Write (1964), Lennon's first book, was
partly
based on material he had made while still at school. Its alternative
titles were among others The Transistor Negro, Left Hand
Left Hand (after Osbert Sitwell's Left Hand Right Hand) and
Stop One and Buy Me.
Lennon signed the contract in January 1964 and the book – with 31
pieces of writing and enough drawings – was published three months
later on March 23, 1964. Introduction was written by Paul McCartney and
the work was designed by Robert Freeman. By January 1965 it had sold
nearly 200 000 copies. (Source: John Savage,
introduction in Pimlico double edition, 1997) Lennon once said,
that he had always wanted to write Alice in
Wonderland. Another favorite was James
Joyce's Finnegans Wake, "so way out and so different."
A Spaniard in the Works, Lennon's second book, was
published on
June 24, 1965. It went through four impressions and sold 100 000 copies
within three month, not so well as the first. "There are some stories
and bits in it that even I don't understand," Lennon later revealed.
Young readers hailed the books as a new and inspiring way of writing,
but actually Lennon followed in the footsteps of the French surrealists of
the 1920s. The critic John Wain argued in the New Repubic that the
"first thing any literate person will notice on reading through Mr.
Lennon's book is that it all comes out of one source, namely the later
work of James Joyce." (Come Together: John Lennon in His Time
by Jon Wiener, 1991, p. 77) I hardly ever alter anything because I'm selfish about what I write, or big-headed about it. Once I've written it, I like it. And the publisher sometimes says, 'Should we leave this out, or change that?' and I fight like mad, because once I've done it I like to keep it. But I always write it straight off. I might add things when I go over it before it's published, but I seldom take anything out. So it is spontaneous. (John Lennon, in The Beatles Anthology, editorial team: Brian Roylance, Julian Quance, Oliver Craske, Roman Milisic, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000, p. 176) Meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, writer of The Science
of Being and the Art of Living,
helped Lennon to abandon booze and some drugs for a short time. In 1968
the Beatles flew from England to India, where they joined the maharashi
at his meditation center, which was built for rich foreigners. Indian
culture had already inspired the Beatniks of the 1950s. This tradition
was continued by a number of the hippies of the next decade who
considered India their spiritual home. The Beatles' pilgrimage was
widely commented by the media, especially when Lennon admitted, "We
made a mistake," when he returned back to England. However, during this
period the group wrote most of the White Album. After 1969,
which was the final year of Lennon's activities with the
Beatles, he grew closer to his second wife Yoko Ono, whom he married in
1969. Yoko Ono: raised in Tokyo by her wealthy Japanese banking family. She became the first woman admitted to study philosophy at Japan's Gakushuin University. In 1953 she moved to the US to study at Sarah Lawrence College. After dropping out she joined New York avant-garde movement. During the early sixties, Ono's works were exhibited and/or performed at the Village Gate, Carnegie Recital Hall and numerous New York galleries. In mid-sixties, she lectured at Wesleyan College and had exhibitions in Japan and London, where she met John Lennon at the Indica Gallery. Lennon separated from his wife Cynthia, with whom he had one child, Julian. Ono's best known solo album Season of the Glass appeared in 1981 and received much attention also outside avant-garde and critical circles. The couple arranged much publicity for peace movement by staying in bed while being filmed and interviewed, and their single with Plastic Ono Band 'Give Peace a Chance' (1969) became the "national anthem" for pacifist. John himself was no angel, he could be violent, provocative, mean – and he was far from a model father. "They want me to be lovable," Lennon had said in an interview. "But I was never that." In 1974 at L.A.'s Troubadour Club, after allegedly assaulting the manager of the Smothers Brothers and a waitress, he was thrown out onto the street. From 1968 to 1969 Lennon recorded Two Virgins, Life
With the Lions, The Wedding Album and Plastic Ono Band,
but generally agreed his best solo album was Imagine,
which appeared in 1970. In the 1970s Lennon emerged as a significant
political threat to the Nixon administration. He planned in the summer
of 1972 a concert tour to rouse the youth against the Vietnam war.
Parts of the FBI's Lennon file, dealing with his ties with anti-war
movement, was kept secret for reasons of "national security" until
2006. Following the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and
President George H.W. Bush's military effort to protect the
West's oil supplies, the United Kingdom's Radio One (the BBC's pop
channel) produced a list of 67 songs unfit for broadcast. Among them
was not only Lennon's anti-war 'Give Peace a Chance' but also 'Walk
Like an Egyptian' by Bangles and Roberta Flack's love song 'Killing Me
Softly'. When Mind Games appeared in 1973, John was not living
with
Yoko. He had moved to Los Angeles with May Pang, his wife's former
secretary. In 'Bless You' from Walls and Bridges
(1974) he
wrote: "Some people say it's over," and in 'Scared' he confessed:
"Hatred and jealousy / gonna be the death of me". By January 1975 John
and Yoko were living together once more. On the birth of his son Sean
(1975-), Lennon retired from music, and plunged in a self-destructive
life-style like Elvis Presley, whose 'Heartbreak Hotel' had made him a
rocker at the age of fifteen. Lennon used Thai sticks, or heroin, left
rarely his bed, and complained about television, his chronic
indigestion, or the soap in the kitchen. He read a lot, books about the
supernatural fascinated him, and the Egyptians, the Celts, the Vikings,
the Shroud of Turin, and Thor Heyerdahl's adventures. After a long period of hibernation, Lennon released with Yoko Ono in 1980 Double Fantasy which won a Grammy for the Album of the Year. John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, in New York. Paul McCartney received the news from a telephone call. He decided that the only way to cope with it was to work and he spent the day at AIR studios in London recording. "After his death, Linda and I went round to Yoko's and we all cried so hard, you know, we had to laugh. She wanted to get us something to eat and she mentioned caviar. We all said, 'Let's do it.' Her houseman brought it in, mumbling, and he backed out and there was the caviar tin with just a little bit in the bottom. Her servants had eaten it all!" (from Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles, London: Vintage, 1998, p. 595) John
Lennon's character continues to puzzle new
generations of fans – he was a troubled Jesus-like figure, icon of the
peace-movement with a violent temper, drug-using rebel, hard rocker,
and a song writer whose message wavered between "Goo goo g' joob goo
goo g' job" and "give peace a chance". Decades after the
publication of Lennon's ballad 'Imagine' (1971) The National Music
Publishers Association (NMPA) added Yoko Ono as its co-writer. Lennon
had acknowledged in an interview from 1980 that the lyric and the
concept came from Yoko. "But those days I was a bit more selfish,
a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution." (The Guardian, 15
Jun 2017) For further reading: The Beatles by Hunter Davies (1968); Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews by Jann Wenner (1971); A Twist of Lennon by Cynthia Lennon (1978); The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono, ed. by G. Barry Golson (1982); The Ballad of John and Yoko by Jonathan Cott and Christine Doudna (1982); Loving John by May Pang (1983); John Lennon: In My Life by Peter Shotton and Nicholas Schaffer (1983); John Oko Lennon 1967-1980 by Ray Coleman (1984); John Winston Lennon 1940-66 by Ray Coleman (1984); Lennon: Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman (1985); John Lennon: For the Record by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld (1984); The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman (1988); Come Together: John Lennon in His Time by Jon Wiener (1995); Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files by Jon Wiener (1999); The Songs of John Lennon: The Beatle Years by John Stevens and John Lennon (2002); Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon by Robert Rosen (2002); John by Cynthia Lennon (2005); John Lennon: All I Want is the Truth by Elizabeth Partridge (2005); John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (2008);The Beatles – All These Years: Volume One: Tune in by Mark Lewisohn (2013); Being John Lennon: A Restless Life by Ray Connolly (2018); Dylan, Lennon, Marx and God by Jon Stewart (2022); Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon by Robert Rosen (2022) Books:
Films and videos:
Selected albums / The Beatles:
Selected albums from 1968:
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