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.”