Posted on 12/07/2008 11:41:50 PM PST by andrew roman
Twenty-eight years ago today, John Lennon was murdered here in New York City. I remember that evening as vividly as anything in my life. I was a thirteen year old Beatle freak (a generation removed, but no less fervent) sitting in front of my TV (when I probably should have been in bed asleep) watching Monday Night football when Howard Cosell made the announcement on the air, somewhere around 11PM, that Lennon was dead.
As a young teenager who had only recently become a bona-fide Beatlemaniac, his death was a tremendous blow. To the tens of millions of people he touched with his music, his senseless killing was as devastating a loss as there could have been outside of losing a loved one.
I so adored the music of the Beatles that - at the risk of sounding painfully maudlin - I felt (at the time) like a little piece of me died that night.
Much has come and gone in nearly three decades, including my own set of “right turns.” I am, as ever, a steadfast conservative, a proud American - pro life, pro-military, a proponent of tax-cuts and smaller government, a strict-constructionist, a firm believer in God, happily married for seventeen years, father of two.
John Lennon, by contrast, was a liberal’s liberal - a genuine leftist who coined and popularized the insipid phrase “Give Peace A Chance” and asked us to imagine a world without a heaven or religion. His childlike - some would say childish - visions of a planet without borders and possessions (always an odd thing, I thought, coming from a man who loved his money and his toys) was beyond simple idealism. It was pure fantasy, void of all critical thought (as all hippie drivel was), without a scintilla of reality tied to it. He and his widow, Yoko Ono, were more than dreamers. They were, frankly, fools, given credence because of Lennon’s enormous celebrity.
It is a genuine shame that when the name John Lennon is mentioned, the images that are conjured up are almost always of his hippie-dippie, peace activist, bed-in era self, ever-epoxied to the side of Ono.
The fact is … that Jesus-Christ looking anti-war icon wouldn’t have attracted a fire engine had he been on fire if it were not for what he and his three mates from Merseyside accomplished during the years 1963-1968.
It is John Lennon, the songwriter, the Beatle, the man who helped transform popular music forever (with his equally genius partner, Paul McCartney) that I pay tribute to here.
Simply put, John Lennon either wrote or co-wrote some of the most memorable music in the history of human civilization. His sense of melody, timing and his ability to create an unforgettable “hook” has rarely been duplicated - save for his partner of many years, Sir Paul McCartney. During the early Beatle years, so many of the songs that are now considered pop music standards and classics came from John Lennon.
Long before there was the experimental, socially conscious, primal scream version of John Lennon with wire-rims and scraggly center-parted hippie hair, there was the brilliant mop-topped songsmith John Lennon - the one that will forever have his name uttered by human lips long after almost every other human being that has ever existed on this planet is forever forgotten. The music and melodies he and Paul wrote were as influential on the artists that succeeded them as any that have ever existed. John, Paul, George and Ringo - to this day - are the benchmarks by which others are measured.
From the Beatles first number one song in Great Britain, “Please Please Me,” to the far-ahead-of-its-time guitar signatures on the infectous “I Feel Fine,” to the unforgettably heavy “Ticket To Ride,” to the classic melody and harmonies of “Help!”, not to mention one of the most recognizable guitar riffs ever in “Day Tripper,” Lennon's genius, coupled with his prolific output, is something to marvel at.
On the album “A Hard Day’s Night,” the first and only Beatles LP to contain nothing but Lennon-McCartney songs, 10 of the 13 songs were either composed partly by Lennon, or completely by him - including the instantly recognizable and beautiful “If I Fell,” the harmonica driven “I Should Have Known Better,” the Wilson Picket inspired “You Can’t Do That” and the rockin’ “Tell Me Why” - all radio staples.
Let’s not forget that he co-wrote, with Paul, some of the biggest hit singles in music history, including “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “From Me To You,” “She Loves You” and “A Hard Day’s Night.”
1965 may have been his most amazing year of output. Along with “Ticket To Ride,” “Help!” and “Day Tripper,” he composed such timeless classics as “Norwegain Wood,” “In My Life,” “Nowhere Man,” “Girl,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” and “You’re Going To Lose That Girl.”
Damn impressive.
Equally extraordinary is his work on the "Revolver" LP from 1966, which was by that time becoming more complex and experimental - but non the less memorable. "I'm Only Sleeping" is one of my favorite songs of all - lethargic, melodic, dreamy - and one of the most beautifully haunting melodies he ever composed. It is also, by the way, one of the first recordings ever (if not ever) to employ a completely backwards guitar solo. And yes, I love the hypnotic "Tomorrow Never Knows."
Two of his contributions to the "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" LP are not only among his best ever, but are two of his most recognizable Beatle songs - “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “A Day In The Life” - both considered among the greatest classic rock tracks of all-time.
Indeed, I may not have believed for a second that all we needed was love, as he sang in the summer of 1967, but I still loved the song - particularly the line, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.”
“I Am The Walrus” is one of my favorite recordings of all time, incidentally.
I just wanted to take a moment - as a musician of twenty-five years myself - to say, from a musical perspective, thanks to John Lennon - a wonderful musician cut short in the prime of his life, a Dad and husband, a thoroughly flawed human being (as we all are) who would have despised the martyrdom many have attached to him.
He was no savior.
He was sometimes the walrus.
He was a hell of a songwriter.
That’s the Lennon I pay tribute to today.
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Great musician, never agreed with his politics though.
Lennon was a phony. Everyone knows that he and Paul wouldn’t have amounted to jack if it weren’t for Ringo.
;-)
Well, how about that. In fact, I do remember where I was when I heard the news, although I wouldn’t say it was a vivid memory, but hey, what is anymore?
I’m a little put off by this guy’s attempt to embrace Lennon at arms length, as it were. A catalogue of his musical output amounts to nothing if your soul isn’t stirred by the opening chords of IMAGINE.
Your mileage may vary.
There’s a book called “The Last Days of John Lennon”, written by Fred Seaman, who was Lennon’s personal assistant for the last two years of his life, and who thus knew the real life John Lennon during that time.
In the book, Seaman says that, during the 1980 presidential election season, Lennon told him he remembered meeting Ronald Reagan in 1974 at a U.S. football game, how Reagan explained the rules of U.S. football to him, a native Englishman, and how favorably he was impressed with Reagan as a person.
He also recalled to Seaman, with some bitterness, about how he attended Jimmy Carter’s inauguration party in January of 1977, and how Carter refused to meet him, despite his wishes, and how miffed he remained at that.
He finished by saying to Seaman, according to Seaman, that he supported Ronald Reagan for President because Carter had made the U.S. look weak.
So it could very well have been that Lennon was coming to conservative principles, or coming back to the conservative principles that he’d been rebelling against all his life, at the end of his life. If only he’d have lived on, we could have known for sure.
Lennon in his later years was no doubt in the category of “shut up and sing”. (Well - in his later years most of his “music” was pretty bad IMHO - so maybe just “shut up” would work too.)
And for those of us Freepers that can only disparage John Lennon - perhaps “shut up and listen” is good advise sometimes - at least on the anniversary of his death, and let us reminisce about thinking about little Susie in 5th grade while listening to “I want to hold your hand”.
I recall many years later riding on a chairlift with a pretty young stranger that introduced herself as Rita. When we got to the top of the hill I realized I was humming “Lovely Rita, meter maid....” I hope she didn't hear me as that would have been a bit embarrassing!
Later that morning one of our instructors, an E-7 by the name of, I kid you not, Sgt. Rock, told us that Lennon had been killed. His words were more to the effect that--"They shot the bastard...." My thought at the time was what was the world coming to, that now the artists were being killed.
For all his warts, cheap politics and bubble-headedness, he was a songsmith that to this day has not been repeated with such a magnitude.
I wish he were alive today, to hear what he had in store for the rest of us, musically speaking that is. Same with Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and a host of others that lost their lives too early, some by their own fault, and others by no fault of their own.
Ah, a Porter Wagner fan not doubt.. :)
I have to shake my head at the people who view the world through a screen of partisan politics, which is NOTHING like sticking by one's conservative principles. Simply acknowledging that someone who doesn't share one's politics did indeed make a huge contribution to music history doesn't make one a commie symp--it just means you have ears and a working brain.
I had a friend who was completely devastated by the killing. I on the other hand wasn’t a Beatles fan and failed to see any difference between Lennon’s death and any other murder.
Porter Wagoner? No, not really.
My taste in music is far too broad and eclectic to describe here, but it does include Country, Rock, Heavy Metal, Opera, Symphonic, Sacred, Tone Poetry, Classic Oriental and various forms of aboriginal chants and incantations.
My comment was meant to indicate that I think of virtually all the Beatles music, in general and Lennon’s in particular as crap.
Lennon was real. He was a son of the working class, and he was first and foremost a no-bullshit guy who wanted the world to be straight up honest. It's no surprise to me that he and Reagan would get along well, while he and Carter would not see eye-to-eye. Reagan was real, Carter was fake.
I personally believe that it was Yoko Ono, the avante-garde artist and ardent socialist, who swayed Lennon to leftist activism. He was, in those days of experimentation with mind-altering drugs, very suggestible, and I think she basically told him what to do. Among other things I blame her for breaking up the Beatles, so that John would pursue her artistic path rather than the band's.
Left to his own, and not murdered, he -might- have shown his conservative roots later in life. If he could rid himself of Ono.
"Imagine" a world without his tripe.
I see why you left "rock and roll" off your list. The Beatles were kings of rock and roll.
Lennon was a great songwriter, a decent musician, and an a$$hole otherwise. ‘Imagine’ does not inspire me and never has. I find myself changing the channel when it comes on. And I made quite a few bucks playing Beatle music back in college. The end-of-the-game years for the Beatles was very obvious in their music from that time. It was discordant in message and shrill lyrically. Somewhere around ‘Rubber Soul’ was their zenith.
Speaking as a Christian, I have to say that Lennon is just a small part of the problem that pop music culture has socially and now politically imposed on us.
Communists and libertine atheists have always used art to bring their message to the public, never more so than in the case of rock and roll, which they appropriated early on (from the late 1950’s onwards) in order to influence the younger generation and their successive generational offspring. We have just seen the supreme and terrible fruits of this in the election, (with more teenagers involved in the election process than ever before) of an Obamination to the White House, a candidate wholly endorsed in seamless support from the pop music and youth culture establishment. Whether Lennon was his own man, duped, or softening into a conservative at the time of his death is irrelevant. In his time he willfully fed just as much poison into the system as Che Guevara, and the pop media and the kids and the ongoing leftard media machine loved and still love him for that. At fifty years old, I, a typical once average pop-crazed rock fan am now sickened as I look back at the damage to our nations and to my own life that too much time listening to pop music has caused in the past fifty years. On a scale of worth to society, Lennon’s creative output counts as zero. It’s all dross that’s been used as the building blocks of the counterculture.
It’s no good simply saying “Yeah well, but it was good music, though”…. Because look where ‘good music’ has brought us!
If we want to reclaim conservative society and kick out the liberal leftist atheist filth from the positions of power they’ve stolen from us by means of their long term strategy of building a new society using pop music and culture as their insidious communications medium, then we’re going to have to make some personal sacrifices, including ‘good music’, because ‘good music’ is part of the problem. I would personally like to see any memorial of Lennon bulldozed into non-existence, and if you value your country, so should you. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t have a decent conservative society but also have a little bit of rock and roll stirred in, because it’s like stirring cancer into a healthy body. I’m not innocent of this myself, but as I grow older, it’s a point of view I’m increasingly having (and able) to accept as the only logical way forward.
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Knew him well, did you?
I like the beatles, though in my childhood mom and dad brought us up on the sounds of English best export—the Rolling Stones!!!!!Rock Music is what it is—a few minutes of pleasure to escape reality.......
Alic Cooper said it best when describing politics and Rock and Roll:
“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”
> Knew him well, did you?
Never met him. However, there are plenty of good sources for information besides the rock-n-roll hype and PR crapola.
- There is his early formative life prior to the Beatles fame, which is well documented in numerous biographical sources.
- There is the huge body of his work -- music, lyrics, prose, graphic -- from which one can derive his philosophy of life pretty darn well.
- There is is later life (post-Beatles) as a father and house-husband.
- There are numerous interviews where he talked frankly about his beliefs.
I think my assessment is well supported by the above. The things that fly in its face are the Beatles PR machine, and the time 1970-1975 or so when he was under Yoko Ono's spell and/or doing massive drugs, and not very creative. I am of the opinion that the real John Lennon was the one that appeared when he was being creative, and doing what he himself wanted to do.
Your opinion may, of course, be different.
To paraphrase an old saw, “In the world of the blind, the astigmatic, myopic one eyed man is king.”
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1. Nonsense. Lennon wrote of a communist style utopia while living his life=style that portrayed the exact opposite "philosophy of life". At the time of his death he owned eleven apartments in the Dakota - eleven of them. At the same time, a mere mile and a half uptown, thousands of his fellow NYers were living in the type of urban poverty that doesn't exist today. His spreading of his wealth - zero. IMAGINE that.
2. Father and house husband? You are kidding, right? Maybe his first family might disagree with that, or do they not exist for you the way they stopped existing for him?
I lived around the corner from the Dakota for years. I'd see Lennon frequently, not just on the street but in an after hours spot called TRAX on W 72nd and Columbus. He looked and carried himself more like a scared doper than anything else...including a Working Class Hero.
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Then you write that...
" I am of the opinion that the real John Lennon was the one that appeared when he was being creative, and doing what he himself wanted to do."
The "real" John Lennon was who he was every day of his life. We all are our "real" selves all the time.
All Beatles Music is crap, but Tone Poetry is good? Ha! It goes to show, we all have likes and dis-likes. One could call the Beatles, the Isle of Brit Aborginal Chants.. But hey, I like the Beatles and Yma Sumac!
By Tone Peotry I was referring to compositions such as “Tapiola” by Jean Sibelius.
Their music was no better or worse than anyone elses that came before them. They were also only popular for just a few years.
He should have imagined a bullet proof vest or body armor.
Was stationed in upstate New York at the time and from the way the radio was playing his stuff for days it seemed to many of us that the entire state of NY was blaming itself for Lennon’s death.
I have read that in his last few years Lennon was coming around to the fact that throwing money over the fence and hoping the poor people get some wasn’t working.
I acknowledge and defer to your greater familiarity.
I would have thought rap was called tone poetry. Like I said, we all have likes and dis likes—thats why there are different kinds of music for all our ears. The past few years I have migrated toward a lot of the electronica-trance. Beats elevator music.
Doesn’t change the value of his music...still some of my favorite stuff.
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