WHY JOHN LENNON?

(from a 1980 issue of Kicks Magazine)

Why John Lennon?

Like most of you, I suppose, I asked myself that question to no resolve as the television news reports rolled in, all those fragments of information forming an ugly scene I didn’t want to hear about. John Lennon, former Beatles lyricist, rhythm guitarist, and vocalist, and a solo artist with a unique integrity and social conscience, was shot down on a chilly Monday night in front of his New York City apartment building. He was later pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital four blocks away.

Why John Lennon?

When I first heard the news of the murder, hazy-headed and staring at the morning San Diego Union with eyes that hardly registered the newsprint, I wasn’t only incredulous, but strangely numb. Later, with the oncoming news reports and the radio stations playing old Beatles’ songs, the dam broke. I began to cry. There was a hollow part in what there was of my soul, and the emptiness hurt as though it had been made with a knife. For myself, a large part of my life passed away with the bullets that passed through John Lennon’s body.

In my ten or so years of writing rock criticism, I’ve tried to perfect what I conceived as a disinterested tone in my prose, a tone that would allow me to do as book, film, and theater critics have done for years: assess artists and their works as analytically as I could manage, probing into the reasons why a particular record was good or not solely on its merit as a work of art. All other considerations were irrelevant to my task of being a reviewer. Likewise, my reactions to the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Elvis Presley, and others were notably muted compared to those of my friends, many of whom gauged the quality of their own lives by the latest releases of their preferred rock stars. Though saddened by the losses, I usually shrugged and maintained my cool. “Too bad,” I thought. “We’ve lost a good guitarist, we’ve lost an interesting singer/songwriter, but let’s not get bent out of shape. Babies are being napalmed in Vietnam, so why don’t you cry for them?”

For Lennon, though, the tears flowed, and after a series of long phone conversations with fellow-traveler rock pundits, most of whom seemed to be choking on something, the emotional zigzag of my response came together. Something had died, all right, but it wasn’t just part of me; it was part of all of us. An epoch had closed, and those of us who’d succeeded in getting on the other side of the door found ourselves in a long hallway with high ceilings, with the light faint deep in the corridors.

Those of you reading this no doubt recognize the kind of moral self-righteousness in the way I’d qualified my response to the deaths of other rock stars. Mentioning Vietnam or starving Black children in America’s slums was the perfect rejoinder to anyone you were having an argument with, provided you could get the discussion to go your way and you were adept at the quick exit before your adversaries could counterattack. But the atmosphere of the time—the late ’60s and the early ’70s—and all the of-course conventions of the counterculture that many of us still cling to as a value system, was in no small part the result of what John Lennon had done, both with the Beatles and as a solo artist. More than the Rolling Stones, more than Elvis, even more so than Bob Dylan, John Lennon in one manner or another had virtually created the style, the sound, and the attitude that would shape the consciousness of a generation. With and without the Beatles, John Lennon had touched the souls of millions of people, young and old—millions who had never met and most of whom never would meet, millions within what we used to faddishly refer to as The Global Village who now feel a profound loss.

Lennon’s death marks more than the passing of a pop rock genius. True enough, there will be book upon book wherein critics, musicologists, and historians will deal with the considerable substance of his talent: his nasal, scratchy Liverpool accent that did more to redefine rock singing than anyone since Elvis; his gift for melody; his virtuoso knack for writing lyrics of an amazingly broad array of subject matter that could be poetic while never succumbing to the conceits of the page poet. Lennon’s legacy as an artist will stand the test of history indeed, but that is not the issue that confronts us.

What does confront us is the fact that Lennon’s death has symbolically killed what we thought the Beatles were. Since their breakup in 1970 after the release of Let It Be, their final album, the Beatles became an abstraction, a memory of an ideal time that looked more idyllic now that further history and the unfurling of more intricate realities have carried us from the moment. Beatles records continued to sell well, an international fan club circulated petitions in several countries that pleaded for the Beatles to reform (if only, as one woman put it at the time, to “give the world something positive and meaningful again”), “Give Peace a Chance” became an international peace anthem sung by George McGovern delegates, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! were shown endlessly on TV and in theaters, Beatles songs continued to be recorded, and “I Am the Walrus” even made its way into the nation’s elevators. More than any pop phenomenon at the time, the Beatles were the spirit, the very essence of what millions liked to remember about the 1960s: mind expansion with drugs, new freedom in sexual expression, a new moral criterion that put human life and the need for equality and peace above the dynamics of the capitalist war machine. Though no one could say that the Beatles were directly responsible for any of these things, their music and style at least defined the atmosphere, and as long as the Beatles were around, even in abstract, one could at least feel that the ’60s weren’t a waste of everyone’s time, that at least the decade had provided us with a sense of life that would remain viable through the onslaught of time.

People in my generation, the Vietnam generation, have, however, found the going as rough as a wild river. The American New Left is factionalized among various party lines, all arguing who’ll lead the proletariat to the palace gates. The counterculture has collapsed under its wishful thinking, reduced to holistic health groups and the cant of the “me” generation. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. And John Lennon is gone, taken from us through an act that was contrary to everything he ever sang about. The Beatles are gone, gone with the hopes that they might again reform and again give us something as elusive as hope.

Why John Lennon?

Nothing about this scene makes any sense, but one thing is for sure: it wasn’t just John Lennon getting those bullets. It was all of us.

The following Wednesday afternoon, I had lunch with a woman who told me what it was like in her office the day before. A friend of hers was filling out a job application form when he came upon the affirmative action questions. After filling out whether he was handicapped, a member of a non-Caucasian race, a woman, and other queries, he stopped and grimaced at the question asking if he was a veteran of the Vietnam War.

“That pisses me off,” he said, pointing at the form. “We of the Vietnam era.”

“Yeah,” said another man, standing to the side shuffling papers at a desk, “the era that ended yesterday.”

OZZY OSBOURNE,RIP

 

Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at age 76, and given his  history of consuming suicidal amounts of drugs over the decades, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did. He did, no argument, change the course of rock and roll , he created , with Black Sabbath, a sound and a lifestyle without intending to, he enjoyed what he did for a living, and he was not an intellectual, not a poseur. It was an , but what an act. Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t a force of nature—he was exactly who he was within a system that demanded and rewarded conformity, even among its artists and avant-gardists. His instinct to perform, drink, and embody the worst fears of what the world was becoming wasn’t rebellion—it was just a kid in a rock and roll band who couldn’t bring himself to mouth the party line of what the counterculture was (literally) selling. He felt more at ease singing Geezer Butler’s lyrics—fatalistic, doomsday-cadenced, dark, even malevolent. Ozzy was at home reflecting an attitude shaped by the hard-nosed grit of Birmingham, England. Born John Michael Osbourne in 1948, he grew up in Aston, a working-class district of Birmingham, in a cramped two-bedroom home with five siblings. His early life was marked by poverty, dyslexia, and brushes with the law, including a stint in prison at age 17 for burglary. Industrial towns like Birmingham do that to you—just as Detroit did to the MC5 and the Stooges. His music was a horror show based on already real horrors, even if it was the terror of waking up in a crappy city to get ready to go to a brain dead school program, a job that felt like a long jail sentence, and anticipating the punks on your way to the bus stop who could either slap you on the back or kick you the groin. No wonder the guitars were so loud, all that volume to drown out the screaming. RIP.

John and Paul

                                                            

Generations of those obsessed with the minds of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both during their time together as the super-charged songwriting duo in the Beatles and afterward, as solo artists, rivals, and “frenemies,” to use an ugly coinage. I know I did during the initial stages of music fandom, obsessing over the psychic lives of John and Paul and any other young music maker one thought elevated rock ‘n’ roll to what many considered High Art. Whether the radio was then populated with melodic masterpieces, an audio art gallery of a sort, is a different discussion. Yet the intense interest in Lennon and McCartney’s relationship continues to intrigue millions, across generations old and new, well into the 21st century.

It’s been estimated that 4,000 books about the Beatles have been written, and other informed sources place the numbers higher—in the hundreds of thousands. In brief, a staggering amount of research, interpretations, analyses, and biographies has been dedicated to scrutinizing every aspect of the Beatles and their music—though as the decades wore on and publications continued to appear, little new was revealed. A confession here: I’ve read about 20 tomes dedicated to the quartet in the half-century since their debut, and the later books seemed like reshufflings of old facts in the timelines, with an intellectual tone that was dry and flat recycling of stale bromides.

Could a rock writer reinvigorate interest in how the Lennon-McCartney songbook came to be? Intriguingly, significant notice is given a recent book, John and Paul: A Love Story Told in Songs, a beguiling history of the growing friendship and collaborative partnership between the titular songwriters, written with verve by non-music writer Ian Leslie. Leslie has written about psychology, culture, technology, and business for The New Statesman, The Economist, The Guardian, and Financial Times, and has authored three previous books on human behavior. His background in psychology combined with intimate and clear prose gives Leslie an edge over the vast array of books on the same subject. The author is effectively liberated from the tangled babble that often made considering the Beatles’ legacy more laborious than it should have been.

While the book doesn’t provide current information or undisclosed facts, Leslie carefully curates a wealth of previous works by other authors, establishing significant dates of meetings, songs, consequential events, and ties these moments to the composition and themes of the Lennon-McCartney oeuvre. John and Paul begins with their first meeting in Liverpool in 1957, bonding over their shared experience of absent mothers—John raised by his maternal aunt Mimi Smith and McCartney losing his mother at age 14—and their mutual love of American rock ‘n’ roll. Both fledgling musicians, the pair initially played covers of other artists’ songs. As their relationship deepened, they began writing songs together, composing “eyeball-to-eyeball,” as described in the book.

In a splendid touch, each chapter of the book is named after a relevant Beatles song, offering poetic commentary on the moments described while reinforcing the central subject: the love story between John and Paul that Leslie’s subtitle announces. Over time, Lennon and McCartney became a constant presence in each other’s lives, growing so comfortable with one another that the songs they wrote became increasingly personal—direct addresses of affection between them. Lennon and McCartney believed the bond would last forever, and in a rush of soulmanship and solidarity agreed to split authorship on all of their songs, regardless of individual contribution. Leslie skillfully weaves facts and interpretations throughout the book, providing the background to the songs while succinctly profiling the artists as they evolved as writers, musicians, and individuals who needed each other to feel whole. Though he doesn’t assert this directly, it might be seen that their agreement to share songwriting credit, regardless of contribution, was akin to a wedding vow. Lennon and McCartney understood each other in ways one might liken to the intimacy between a married couple.

To be clear, Leslie finds no evidence that Lennon and McCartney had a sexual relationship, though he does report a statement from Yoko Ono that John thought about having a physical relationship. However, he maintains that their friendship was a romance of the platonic sort, where the intimacy derived from shared experiences and depths of feeling was dynamic and often volatile.

Leslie builds his case persuasively while going through the documented facts of Beatle songs, interpreting, suggesting, hinting (at times) what influenced the style, and tone of the songs the partnership created, and he does a delicate examination about how the two regarded sweet and bitter facts of their love for each other, As I read further, I kept thinking about Montaigne’s 1580 essay On Friendship, where he argues that a friend is a true and unwavering companion, that it is a unique bond, and that the true bond was nearly exclusive between two men. He considered having multiple friends diluted the quality of the bond and insisted that such a bond was a reserved for males alone, as the souls of women were too weak to main the strength to maintain the friendship bond he described. Well, yes, but remember this was published in 1558, but one can take the basic definition of friendship and apply it to the densely populated dynamics of John and Paul’s lives together and apart.

The bond lasted, but not in ways neither John or Paul expected, as McCartney met Lisa Eastman and Lennon became enamored of artist Yoko Ono. In concise detail as to what happened, what was said and the effects on the Beatles as a whole, Leslie paints a picture of the partners feeling threatened, of being “replaced” as the principal focus of the other. Tension arose with the death of their first manager Brian Epstein, controversy within the group about Paul’s insistence that Alan Klein take over the money and business affairs of the Beatles as a going concern, the wild and willy formation of Apple, a company that would be a record label, an electronics firm, a film studio with nary an idea of how to go about setting up a corporation—much of what was a utopian vision of how Apple and all the enterprises it would sponsor collapsed under the weight of the chaos and lack of direction concerning business matters. Leslie moves through the breakup the Beatles, a result of the members growing apart in what they wanted to engage in and in musical ideas and also chronicles the angry attacks, snide remarks, attack songs by Lennon—the louder, angrier, and more insecure of the two—aimed toward McCartney while Paul remained mostly silent. Leslie talks about the tragedy of John Lennon’s assassination outside the Dakota Apartments in New York City by Mark David Chapman. The reader is aware of Lennon’s sad demise, but in addition to that part of the Beatles story there are events that make you optimistic, that maybe there is actually another way this could have ended. The book hints toward reconciliation, with McCartney showing up at Lennon’s apartment with a guitar, long phone calls, Lennon saying nice things about McCartney’s work as a solo artist, and recalling the joy he had as Paul’s collaborator. The hard facts of what was about to happen remind us of the shock. Soon after the murder, McCartney was swarmed by reporters wanting to get a response. The usually responsive McCartney, exhausted and shocked, could only manage a meager answer, “It’s a drag, isn’t it?”

The price of global celebrity is that millions think they know you better than you know yourself and have harsh standards about how the famous should respond to events and what they should say. Paul McCartney was raked over the coals for a cold, impersonal response and for not showing perceptible emotion. It’s obvious the reporters want to see a melt down to provide for better copy, but McCartney’s grief was real and profound, Leslie points out, and it took a while for the songwriter to offer a fitting tribute to his longtime friend.

Obvious, through the 426 pages, is that the bond between Lennon and McCartney held in the best of times when their friendship was ecstatic and creative, two young men discovering world together and feeling the exhilaration of pushing each other to take greater musical risks; the bond was there when they parted ways and became involved in other ventures. No matter how great the music of either John or Paul was in their solo albums, it was always the case that both were conspicuous by their absence in each other’s live shows. You always wondered what it would be like they were still working together, daring each other to do better. Unexpectedly, Ian Leslie cites Montaigne on page 388, the end of the drama of John and Paul. The writer cites Montaigne’s recollection of his friendship with writer and jurist Etienne de Boetie. At first meeting, Montaigne writes:

We sought each other before we met…from report we had each heard of the other…At our first meeting …we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another. 

This is a fine and succinct quote in that it frames Leslie’s nuanced speculation on the psychic connection between the songwriters. It serves to reveal to the world that the songs Lennon and McCartney were more than mostly successful bits of cleverness, an eclecticism for its own sake, but rather that their songs were personal expression, some of them no less than the existential surrealism of Dylan, the poignant Cheeverisms of Paul Simon, or the elegant confessions of Joni Mitchell. John and Paul emerge from these pages magnificently gifted and human, all too human. It’s the history of the Beatles through the inner of a deep relationship that had its magic moments and confounding depths. A romance, in other words, beautifully detailed in an enjoyable and compulsive read.

(Originally printed in the San Diego Troubadour, used with kind permission)