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John Lennon was born on October 9th, 1940 during a particularly violent
air-strike from Hitler's Luftwaffe. He was raised by an Aunt after
his father was reported lost at sea during WW2 and his mother proved unwilling
to take care of him after remarrying.
Lennon became fascinated with rock and roll at an early age and formed a band
during high school. Called the Quarry Men, it was principally a vehicle for
performing "skiffle" as well as folk and late 50's rock and roll. During an
early gig, he was introduced to Paul McCartney, who, in turn, introduced him
to George Harrison and together they became the Beatals, Long John and the
Silver Beetles and, in 1960, simply the Beatles.
Together with McCartney, they wrote the most enduring music of the 20th century.
Early on in their friendship, they made an informal pact that all music from
either one would bear the stamp "Lennon-McCartney", a rule that was unbroken
even through their turbulent, last few years together in a band.
The Beatles enjoyed phenomenal successes in Britain beginning in 1963 and in
the US beginning in 1964, when they launched the so-called British Invasion.
Their successes enabled artists such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who
and others to break through to the US markets.
Lennon became a father for the first time during those early years in Britain.
He and his wife, Cynthia, had a son on April 8th, 1963 who was named John
Charles Julian Lennon. A musician in his own right, he is known today as simply
Julian Lennon.
He became a published author when Jonathan Cape published In His Own
Write on March 23, 1964. Lennon, together with Paul McCartney, became a
member of the most successful songwriting team of the 20th century. Even today,
they are still listed in the Guiness Book of World Records.
He was definitely one of the most outspoken of rock musicians, loudly
complaining of the conditions in that the poor and sick had to live while the
Beatles were filming "Help!" in the Bahamas. In 1966, he stated that the
Beatles were "more popular than Jesus Christ", igniting a controversy in the
US where the Beatles were at some points in fear of their lives while on tour
there and also prompting the South African Broadcasting Company, on August 8,
1966, to ban the playing of all records composed or played by the Beatles.
In 1966 he met Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery in London after previewing her
nine-day exhibition.
After manager Brian Epstein's death, the group found themselves having to take control of business dealings. It followed that career decisions, perhaps having had some input from Epstein, now fell squarely on their laps. McCartney began giving making decisions on the appropriate direction of the band, leading them into the ill-conceived and chaotically executed film project Magical Mystery Tour and taking the dominant role in most of their recordings.
Lennon reacted by withdrawing further from the Beatles and focusing on his relationship with artist Yoko Ono. He brought her to the 1968 sessions for The Beatles, the so-called White Album, breaking what Coleman called "a rigid, unwritten rule of the group: that their women would never be allowed in the studios." The other band members resented her presence and treated her coolly, alienating Lennon further. The resulting album, with its fragmented sound, heralded the disintegration of the Beatles into four individualistic musicians rather than a band.
The release of The Beatles was followed a week later by the release of Two Virgins, an album of avant-garde music Lennon and Ono had recorded in his home studio. The cover photo, which showed the couple nude, was banned in some countries and sold in brown paper wrappers in the United States. The music, an aural collage of electronic sounds, attracted much less attention. The Lennon-Ono relationship had become public. Lennon's divorce was in progress, and Ono suffered a miscarriage in November of 1968. They had also been arrested for possession of drugs, a hazard from which the Beatles had been considered exempt in spite of their public admission that they had used marijuana and LSD.
The Beatles' musical estrangement deepened and was documented in the movie Let It Be, filmed in 1969 as they worked on what was to be their last album. Their financial affairs were also in disarray: their company, Apple Corps, Ltd., was losing money rapidly, and Lennon said in an interview with Coleman in January of 1969 that "if it carries on like this all of us will be broke in the next six months." It was the business crisis that brought things to a head: Lennon invited Allen Klein, an American promoter, to take over as the Beatles' manager, but McCartney refused to sign a contract with Klein. Late in 1969 Lennon informed the others that he no longer considered himself a Beatle, but was persuaded not to make a public announcement until the group's financial position was stabilized. The breakup became public when McCartney released his first solo album in the spring of 1970.
Lennon had already moved on, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Yoko in 1969, releasing three singles, "Give Peace a Chance," "Cold Turkey," and "Instant Karma," and performing at the Toronto Peace Festival in September of 1969. He released his first real solo album, Plastic Ono Band, in 1970. The record, made in the wake of his primal scream therapy with psychiatrist Arthur Janov, was as much a therapeutic as a musical exercise. Riley, in Tell Me Why, wrote: "These confessional songs seek out the idealized state of childhood, the pain of individuation, the fragility of fantasies and the very real power of illusions. ... The soul-baring leanness of the sound embodies the crux of what rock 'n' roll is all about: a restlessness with the status quo, a hopeful dissatisfaction, and a gnawing sense of encumbrance that finds release as it expresses itself."
Lennon's next album, Imagine, was much more successful commercially, and the title song became the most popular song of Lennon's solo career. Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone, who considered Plastic Ono Band "a masterpiece," found Imagine a disappointing follow-up, faulting it for its "sloppiness and self-absorption." He wrote that Plastic Ono Band, "in its singing and instrumental work, was as much a triumph of artifice as of art. It managed to sound both spontaneous and careful, while Imagine is less of each. Even though it contains a substantial portion of good music, on the heels of [Plastic Ono Band] it only serves to reinforce the questioning of what John's relationship to rock really is."
Lennon was questioning that relationship, too. Freed from the confines of the Beatles' wholesome image--something he had resented and struggled against ever since Brian Epstein took the band out of black leather and put them in suits--he began branching out into other activities. Inspired by Ono's conceptual art, he made several avant-garde films and exhibited a series of erotic lithographs entitled "Bag One." He also began to speak out about politics, which had been another Beatle taboo. He had started to cross that line earlier with the song "Give Peace a Chance" and by returning the medal he had received when the Beatles were made members of the Order of the British Empire, partly as a protest against British support of America's war in Vietnam. He became especially outspoken after moving to New York City in 1971 and falling in with a group of prominent American radicals.
The radicals wanted Lennon to join the protests at the 1972 Republican Convention in San Diego. Lennon, who suspected they were trying to provoke a riot similar to the one at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, never intended to go. Nevertheless, rumors began to spread, and they were believed by some officials of the Nixon administration, who began a campaign to have Lennon deported as a convicted drug user. The FBI shadowed him, tapped his phone, and filled thousands of pages of files with notes on his musical and other activities. The case was finally settled in 1975 when a court declared that Lennon's British marijuana conviction was not grounds for deportation under U.S. law.
While Lennon was still under the influence of, as he wrote in Skywriting by Word of Mouth, "male-macho 'serious revolutionaries' and their insane ideas about killing people to save them from capitalism," he recorded a politically didactic single, "Power to the People"--which he recalled as "rather embarrassing"--and another album with Ono, Some Time in New York City. Rolling Stone's Stephen Holden called the record "incipient artistic suicide," while acknowledging that "John sings better than ever." Holden observed: "Some Time in New York City is ... entirely devoted to propaganda. But as propaganda it is so embarrassingly puerile as to constitute an advertisement against itself. ... The tunes are shallow and derivative and the words little more than sloppy nursery rhymes that patronize the issues and individuals they seek to exalt."
In 1973 Lennon and Ono separated, she staying in New York and he going to Los Angeles on what he later described to Playboy as a "lost weekend that lasted eighteen months." Drinking heavily, Lennon was thrown out of nightclubs and was a staple of gossip columns for much of that time. He also released three albums. The first two, Mind Games and Walls and Bridges, turned away from politics, back toward the musical territory of Imagine. While neither was particularly well received by critics, Walls and Bridges did bring Lennon his first American Number One hit, the single "Whatever Gets You Through the Night."
For his next record--which was to be his last for five years--he turned to legendary producer Phil Spector to make an album of old rock and roll songs. This was in part a legal obligation, part of an out-of-court settlement with Chuck Berry's publisher who claimed that Lennon had lifted the line "Here come old flattop" in "Come Together" from Berry's "You Can't Catch Me." To avoid a lawsuit, Lennon had agreed to record several Berry tunes, and he decided to fill out the album with other fifties classics. The sessions did not go well: Spector's eccentric, paranoid behavior, combined with Lennon's drinking, made the sessions prolonged, expensive, and unproductive. Finally Spector took the tapes and withdrew to his walled house with its armed guards and attack dogs and refused to give the recordings to Lennon. It took months to recover the tapes, and when Spector finally did relinquish them they turned out to be all but unusable. Eventually Lennon went into a New York studio to record ten songs in a week to complete the album. Rock 'n' Roll was released early in 1975 to lukewarm reviews and unimpressive sales, though a few critics, including Steve Simels of Stereo Review, considered it among his best work.
At about the same time Lennon and Ono were reconciled, and the Beatles were finally dissolved as a legal entity. Chet Flippo recalled in The Ballad of John and Yoko that Lennon later remarked to him that it was "the first time in thirteen years that he had not been under written contract to at least someone. ... It was his desire now to exert that freedom by quitting rock & roll." Quit he did, resisting calls for a Beatles reunion from fans and promoters; he always insisted that he had no regrets about the breakup of the band and no desire to look back, and he believed that his solo work was as good as, if not better than, anything the Beatles had done. He retired to his apartment in the Dakota building on Central Park West to raise his new son, Sean, and dabble in house-husbandry. "I'm a housewife who also has a nanny and an assistant and a cook and a cleaner," he told Playboy. "I wasn't a poor strugglin' housewife who had to cook three meals a day. ... [But] it wasn't a lark. The serious intent was to orchestrate what went into the baby's mind and body for at least five years."
Lennon's sabbatical came to an end in 1980 when, on a trip to Bermuda, he heard the music of the B-52s. "It sounds just like Yoko's music," he told Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone, "so I said to meself, 'It's time to get out the old axe and wake the wife up!" Lennon and Ono wrote 25 songs in the next few weeks, and were soon in the studio recording. The resulting album, Double Fantasy, was different from their previous collaborations: it was their first album of pop songs on which they received equal billing, alternating writing credits and lead vocals throughout. Subtitled "A Heart Play," it presented, as Rolling Stone's Holden wrote, "the Lennon's marriage as an exemplary pop fairy tale."
Double Fantasy received mixed reviews, with some critics expressing disappointment that the pop music trends of the late seventies seemed to have passed Lennon by. As Steve Simels of Stereo Review noted, much of the music on Lennon's comeback album was nearer to "what the industry calls Adult Contemporary" than to the cutting edge of rock. Nevertheless, the single "Starting Over" went quickly to number one, and Lennon and Ono continued to spend many hours in the studio working on their next record.
Upon returning home from a recording session on December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot five times by a self-described fan, Mark Chapman, for whom he had signed an autograph earlier that day. He was dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. Crowds gathered outside the Dakota as soon as the news broke, and many remained there for days, singing "Give Peace a Chance," "Imagine," and other Lennon songs.
Ken Tucker wrote in Rock of Ages: "Lennon's death was a crucial event in rock culture. ... [It] was the ultimate example of the era's fragmentation. All the media pundits repeated the same phrase--'the dream is over'--and it was: Rock fans were forever separated from the myth of the Beatles. There was nothing left but to face the future." Lester Bangs, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted that much of the grief was at odds with Lennon's own attitude toward the past: "John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. ... The Beatles were most of all a moment. ... It is for that moment--not for John Lennon the man--that you are mourning."
Stereo Review's Simels summed up that moment: "John Lennon was the coolest guy in the universe. Cooler than Elvis (dumb greaser!), cooler than Brando or James Dean or Lord Byron or Willie Sutton or Muhammad Ali or Cary Grant or Robert de Niro or Bruce Springsteen. Cooler than Elvis Costello even. ... He had wit, style, and songwriting genius. He invented the world's most exclusive men's club and made millions of dollars thumbing his nose at the Establishment. He gave countless people joy and in the process changed the world a couple of times. ... His finest work ... constitutes an achievement as personal and innovative and moving as can be found in the history of the music he helped shape."
