John Lennon's first wife Cynthia Lennon dead

foxnews.com ^ | Leora Arnowitz

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

“Baloney. Come Together, Norwegian Wood, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, Tomorrow Never Knows, Help, Strawberry Fields Forever, and many more classics were primarily written by Lennon. As for his career nosediving after the Beatles, well, Yoko.”

What you say may be true. I was simply quoting McCartney when they did an interview together on national television. When McCartney said that, Lennon nodded in agreement.

What in the world did Yoko Ono have to do with his lack of writing skills? That befuddles me.

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

Please see post # 21.

[pepsi_junkie]

The interview you cite would be interesting to hear/see. Everything I've ever heard Lennon say implied he thought he was a genius and Paul could be an equal when he wasn't writing what he considered throwaway junk like Obla-di-Obla-da. He never struck me as a humble man who considered himself in the shadow of Paul.

As to the influence of Yoko, my interpretation of Lennon's career after she came along: He married Yoko and indulged her avant garde performance artist baloney. Her shrieking in the background of political statement songs, crazy attention stunts like bed-ins and naked album cover gimmicks all followed.

Before Yoko, by all accounts Lennon was an antisocial, aggressive a-hole to most people. I guess Yoko made him happy, that (mostly) went away. Good for him.

But she alienated him from his greatest collaborators and influenced him into a path that not many people really wanted to hear. And I guess he just stopped having fun with it through this period because he walked away from making music for years in the 70s. Maybe I give her too much credit for his failings but there it is.

[Old Teufel Hunden]

I’ve read and seen a lot of interviews and never heard of such a thing as what you describe. That seems completely out of character for John as he was not a humble man. Even if it were true (and from the mountain of evidence I have read it’s not), I don’t see John Lennon sitting there nodding meekly as Paul explains he wrote everything the Beatles did. If that were the case why give John the credit? Why not written by Paul, John, George and Ringo? What you say makes no sense from what I’ve read about the Beatles.

The complaints I have read about John and writing is that he thought a lot of Paul’s songs were better than his and wished that he could write some of the things that Paul wrote, not just I am the egg man goo, goo goo jub....

As for not writing a lot of stuff after the breakup, as I mentioned he did have a lot of songs right after the breakup (Imagine, Mind Games, Mother, Power to the People, Give Peace a Chance, Happy XMas the War is over (and so this is Christmas song), etc.). He was also involved in a lot of political stuff but he did pump out quite a bit of music in the early to mid 70s. Then he went into retirement once Shawn Lennon was born to raise him. He was just coming out of retirement and had released Double Fantasy with a bunch of hits on it when he was shot and killed. I imagine if he would have lived he would have had as many big hits as Paul did as a solo artist. As it was, he had quite a few.