In December, 1980, I was playing at my high school concert band's winter concert when word reached me that John Lennon had been shot and killed by a deranged fan. Bleeding his life away outside his building, I have to wonder if Lennon understood what had happened. At 15, I was only dimly aware that Lennon was anything other than a member of the Beatles, had a prickly personality, and had recently released an album of new work that was, to my young ears, kind of middle-of-the-road pop that wasn't all that exciting.
Ninety miles away, at my future University alma mater, a mournful fan took a marker and scrawled through the tunnel-like passages in the arts building, "Why was John Lennon shot?" A frustrated critic answered his question at one point, in a much larger hand - "Who the fuck cares?"
Today is Lennon's birthday. Had he lived, he would have been 70 years old. In some respects, dying relatively young at 40, and murdered to boot, have shielded Lennon from a more critical eye. His surviving band mates, in particular Paul McCartney, managed to turn Lennon's death in to a windfall (although George Harrison did pen a marvelous tribute song in the mid-1980's). I do not think it unfair to say that Lennon's cult of personality, created and sustained by his massive ego combined with frail self-image, makes it difficult to make clear some things about who Lennon was and what he did.
He was a singer in a rock band. He was far more intelligent and witty than the average British working-class youngster, and was surprised by his own intelligence and wit. Having some talent at writing and arranging songs, combing not just rock and roll and R&B, but also show tunes and even British dance-hall music ("When I'm 64" is the best example of this) to create a succession of sounds over time that would be hard to pin down as "The Beatles' sound". With the exception of Ringo's drum sound, brought out by producer George Martin, there is really little unifying the Beatles catalog, musically. Consider "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Revolution No. 9" - if someone did not know they were done by the same band, would you believe someone who told you they were?
Lennon's post-Beatles career, such as it was, was an archetype of narcissistic self-indulgence - from drug addiction to the nonsensical wallowing in self-pity encouraged by his participation in Primal Scream Therapy, to the promotion of Yoko's middlebrow "art" to a far-too-publicized "retirement" that managed to accommodate not only his drug use, but time spent with a mistress, and more self-indulgence.
The emergence of Double Fantasy was hailed at the time as a marvelous return to form, yet we hear in the lyrics the same tired refrain - the most interesting thing John Lennon can think about is . . . John Lennon. The music is spare, as was his wont after the Beatles, but the melodies and harmonies were hardly anything more than rearrangements of earlier tunes. Lennon even advertised his on-going sturm und drang over his relationship with his former bandmates, first before the release of the album with a full-page-ad in the New York Times that was a meandering bit of verbiage that included a reference to "three angels" that may, or may not, have been George, Paul, and Ringo. He indulged in guessing games over whether he would tour or not. He claimed to suffer from stage fright, talking endlessly about how sick he was flying from Europe to Toronto for the Live Peace concert. Yet, if playing live made him physically ill, why talk about it? Why make people guess? Because the most fascinating thing about John Lennon was, for him . . . everything about him.
No one deserves to die young. No one deserves to die, leaving behind a wife and young child. Lennon's death left his two families - his first wife Cynthia and son Julian along with Yoko and Sean - without his presence. The far-too-public ghost fans have created is not sustained by the meager remnants left behind. While I certainly acknowledge the influence the Beatles had upon popular music of all kinds, the creation of the legend of John Lennon is one I refuse to sustain, because its most ardent believer was . . . John Lennon.
