Now I get Jesus. What it was like to have your hero taken away from you before his time. Martyred by a society that didn't understand him.
John Lennon wasn't God when he was alive. But in the ensuing twenty five years since his death, that's what he's become. A man who listened to his inner tuning fork, who wasn't worried about what SOCIETY told him to do, but what was right.
They don't know how to do it right in the U.S. Everything's too commercialized, too sensationalized. To get the skinny, you've got to go to the BBC, where subjects are given respect. I was stuck in traffic on the 101 when I pushed the button on my XM tuner to discover a ten hour special on John Lennon.
Was John Lennon arrogant?
He said he was just speaking the truth. He was like a kid, unconditioned by society. When he saw something he didn't like, he railed against it. He told the story of going to a hospital for the underprivileged in the Bahamas while filming "Help". When he got to the state dinner that evening, he confronted his hosts with the squalid conditions and when they didn't give a satisfactory response to his protestations, he started acting out. Insulting them. Clanging his silverware. After all, it's not about manners, but PEOPLE!
We don't have rock stars like this anymore. If they're not checking their SoundScan numbers, they're checking their stock portfolio. Their music doesn't come from the heart, but the head. Lennon's genius was his came from both.
Funny to hear the tracks of yore. "It Won't Be Long", which was seen as an album track back then, sounds like pure joy today. Sure, canonize "Never Mind The Bollocks", but that pink-jacketed record has not one tenth of the energy and emotion of the lead-off track on "With The Beatles".
With digital transfers you can hear all the words now, and the inflections. We played the vinyl so much that it was clouded in a sea of noise. But, within those mixes was a living, human being, speaking his truth. "A Hard Day's Night" might have been a movie, but the title song is not a trifle. It's the world-weary tune of someone who's been at the top and is doing his best to continue to surf the wave, not even sure why he's doing it anymore, other than it's expected of him.
Then there was the aforementioned "Help". John, in his interview with Jann Wenner from 1970, asked, didn't anybody GET IT? That he was asking for HELP, some RELIEF from the onslaught. Delineated so well in this documentary. More than a gig a day. From the hotel room to the car to the gig to the car to the hotel room to the airplane.
Then they hit "In My Life".
I guess everybody's youth is special.
But not everybody had the Beatles.
I wouldn't quite say we were asleep, but we were kind of mindless. Kind of like today. Kids are getting shot in Iraq, but nobody seems to notice here back home. Everybody's still worried about his possessions, getting high. But, the Beatles were a smack to the head that you didn't expect. It's like they invented a new kind of orgasm. And we were THERE!
John Lennon wouldn't be quite the hero if he hadn't been gunned down. Some of the sheen had already rubbed off. But that's how you become a religious figure, by being here for such a very short time.
If John were still with us today, I'm not sure what message he would be sending.
I hope it would have the energy of "Instant Karma".
But the era is different. By 1970, we were tired. The sixties had worn us out. We were ready to be sunny. Ready to believe in OURSELVES again, after realizing we couldn't believe in the government, or the Beatles for that matter.
Maybe he'd be singing "Gimme Some Truth". God, we need that in the era of Fox News, in a time when the Administration is on an endless disinformation campaign.
But what I'd expect John Lennon would be playing is something akin to "Come Together".
There was not a lot of advance notice for "Abbey Road". We kept hearing the band was breaking up. And, all these years later, the record is remembered most for Paul McCartney's second side and George Harrison's "Something". But what drew us in, what truly resonated, was "Come Together".
Oh, it wasn't a radio thing. Everybody bought the record the week it came out. We were sitting in the high school library and somebody started pounding out the rhythm on the table. And Gary Fialk started singing the "shhh" part. And then maybe it was Marc Goloff who filled in the rest of the instrumentation. And, when we had the intro nailed, at the proper moment, we all started to sing, quietly, under our breath.
"Here come old flattop, he come groovin' up slowly
He got ju-ju eyeball, he one holy roller"
We weren't worried about the librarian, weren't worried about making noise, this was more important than discipline, than decorum, this was OUR LIFE!
That's what singular John Lennon did. He brought us all together.
We could use some of that right now.
If only the Evangelical Christians. And the punks. All those with tattoos and nose rings. If only there were something we could all agree on, believe in together.
That's what the Beatles were.
And, make no mistake, the Beatles were John Lennon's band. After all, he was two years OLDER than Paul McCartney. And, at that age, two years make all the difference.
"There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone, and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all"
It's hard to keep going. With my father gone. My ex-wife too. You get older, and it's an endless series of losses. It gets harder and harder to figure life out. Maybe that's why John Lennon retreated into the Dakota. Because everything society told him he should want, what he worked so hard to achieve, didn't fix his problems.
Unfortunately, John Lennon was unable to bask in the glory of his own work. As the creator, he could not be touched by his genius, he could only give.
Listening to the tunes today, my life flashed by in my mind. Not only the night of his death, when I was arrested for driving under the influence and locked up in the drunk tank, but also those days in the sixties, when I had hope.
You can't lose hope. John Lennon gave us hope. That everything could work out if you were just yourself. That you didn't have to play the game, that you could make it on your own terms. And that's why we won't let his memory go.
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