Discovering McCartneyism-Lennonism
“Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.” - JL
One of the greatest discoveries I ever made as a kid was during a trip to Vancouver in 1970. It involved a Beatles album. Back home in Ontario, I’d heard the Fab Four’s early stuff on my older sister’s 45’s; “Love Me Do,” “Help,” “Ticket to Ride”, etc. But their 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour eluded me until this trip, when I discovered a cousin’s scratchy copy.
A compilation of singles, b-sides and original material, Magical Mystery Tour wasn’t considered a “real” Beatles album by purists. I didn’t know, and I wouldn’t have cared if I did. What I recall is watching dust motes drift in a shaft of sunlight in my aunt’s living room while four guys from Liverpool flew me away on a vinyl disc.
“Penny Lane” and “Fool on the Hill” were amazing; but it was the offbeat songs that really captured my imagination and fired my enthusiasm. I had no idea what “Strawberry Fields Forever”referred to, but in retrospect I was transported by the song’s altered time signature. “I Am the Walrus” was even more indecipherable, but I delighted in its word salad and elfin chorus (“Expert textpert choking smokers, Don’t you think the joker laughs at you, Ha ha ha hee hee hee ho ho ho”). I had never heard anything like this before in my young life.
For a 10 year-old kid from the suburbs in Southern Ontario, the album seemed like something from another time or another world. Too young for the politics of the sixties, I was old enough by the early seventies to groove to its music. Marxism-Leninism was for those protesting US imperialism; for me there was McCartneyism-Lennonism.
The Beatles didn’t exactly ride the crest of a historical wave. The wave rode through them, and they released its energies through song. And John Lennon was the Big Kahuna, the guy hanging 10 on the roiling breaker of sixties psychedelia. By the time my Beatlemania hit full stride in my late teens, I had come across “Tomorrow Never Knows” from their 1966 album Revolver, in which Lennon sings over a music track played in reverse, while reading lines inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead via Timothy Leary. (“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / It is not dying…”)
The song still sounded fresh when covered a decade later by electronica guru Brian Eno and Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. It still sounds weirdly timeless…and why not? It’s about timelessness, after all.
After the Flea Circus
“I don’t intend to be a performing flea any more. I was the dream weaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an
hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.”“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”
Speaking of things temporal, Lennon was both of his time yet transcended it. A talent this massive magnifies the possessor in the public eye - and John was a guy with a mammoth ego to begin with. A feeling of immortality clung to his image and music, and that’s why his violent death struck so many so sharply. His singer/songwriter shamanism commanded the global imagination of millions, yet it couldn’t protect him from the obsessive attention of one fan. When the Liverpudlian proved to be all too mortal on December 8, 1980, thousands milled about in New York’s Central Park for days afterward, weeping and playing his songs.
Of all the anecdotes about John Lennon, my favourite involved the comedy show Saturday Night Live. In April of 1976 the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, appeared on national television holding up a cheque made out to the Beatles for $3,000. All they had to do to claim it was to re-form briefly as a group and perform three songs on the show. Michaels likely didn’t expect a serious response. But as it turns out, the two frenemies knew all about the producer’s pitch, in real time.
“Paul and I were together watching that show,” Lennon said in a 1980 Playboy interview. “He was visiting us at our place in the Dakota. We were watching it and almost went down to the studio, just as a gag. We nearly got into a cab, but we were actually too tired…He and I were just sitting there, watching the show, and we went, ‘Ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if we went down?’ But we didn’t.”
The most striking thing about that anecdote is the “what if” scenario. Would the choice to appear on SNL have taken the ex-Beatle on a different route along fate’s garden of forking paths, away from assassin Mark David Chapman?
Lennon’s been gone for four decades now, but we still have his music and film clips to remember him by. While some have accused Yoko of a supposedly ghoulish exploitation of her husband’s memory, she has actually shown restraint and taste in the licensing of all things Lennon. (When was the last time you heard “Imagine” used to pitch something? In fact, Yoko donated its use to Amnesty International. )
I say the more of the man, the better, so his talent and enthusiasm is resurrected for a generation of listeners raised on paint-by-numbers rap and bad electronic dance music. From the nineties-era Beatles Anthology series (pricey reliquaries containing rediscovered fragments of St. John ) to this year’s remastered and multi-disc version of Lennon’s first solo album, the hunger for more Beatle material is fed by obliging marketers.
Magical Misery Tour
“My defences were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.”
Lennon was also a terrific wit. Yet stories of Lennon being sarcastic, abusive, and even violent to friends, strangers and the women in his life are not hard to find. He was a particularly nasty drunk, according to witnesses of his infamous months-long “lost weekend,” away from Yoko in LA in the mid-seventies.
In 2016 his son from his first marriage, Julian Lennon, told the Daily Telegraph, "I have to say that, from my point of view, I felt he was a hypocrite. Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces—no communication, adultery, divorce? You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself.”
Lennon himself acknowledged this. “I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman,” he said in a 1980 Playboy interview. “I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace.”
As a line from Tibetan Buddhism puts it, “the bigger the front, the bigger the back.” Lennon’s art was inseparable from his person. How does one effectively disentangle the two, as appalling as the creator may have been at times? Lyrically, Lennon was as unafraid of revealing his dark side as showing his light; and the contrast enabled him to move from the self-loathing pyrotechnics of the White Album’s “Yer Blues” to the vulnerability of Imagine’s “Jealous Guy.”
But like the trickster figures in mythology, the singer/songwriter managed some embarrassing blunders. As the Beatles spiraled into bickering, legal wrangles and a permanent split, Lennon collaborated with his avant-garde artist wife on various experimental efforts, including the album Two Virgins. (I once had the opportunity to listen to the this mess, which holds up favourably to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music for sheer sonic fan abuse.)
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” at least according to poet William Blake, and Lennon certainly didn’t shrink from piloting his psychedelic yellow Rolls Royce toward fame’s slippery slopes, including the obligatory celebrity heroin addiction. John shared kicking the habit in the 1969 thrash-guitar workout, “Cold Turkey,” and joined Yoko in exploring psychiatrist Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy. Echoes of his magical misery tour are heard on the brilliant 1971 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. “Mother” is a howl of pain about childhood separation, “Working Class Hero” is a bitter denunciation of British class barriers, and “Love” is a gentle hymn of connection.
All You Need
As I type, I’m listening to the 1967 clip of the Beatles recording “All You Need Is Love.” John and his bandmates are in casual psychedelic finery, with flowers and confetti scattered on the studio floor. The guitar-wielding Lennon sits on his stool, wearing granny spectacles and a handlebar mustache, chewing gum as a bugle strikes up the opening bars of “La Marseilles.” Perhaps the opening was meant to cue the audience that this is going to be another anthem – as indeed it was. The song begins with one word repeated over and over: “Love, love, love…” Lennon and McCartney had burned off the boy-meets-girl wrapping of past songs. This was a song about the flame itself.
The Beatles were first among sixties bands to deliver songs about agape (love for all) rather than eros (love for another).
The eldest Beatle didn’t just sing about peace; he was an active force for it. With millions watching, John and Yoko performed “Give Peace a Chance” live in 1969 from a Montreal hotel room, joined by chanting luminaries such as Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers and Allen Ginsberg. In December of 1972, Lennon recorded Happy Xmas (War Is Over) with the Harlem Community Choir. John and Yoko accompanied the song’s release with a global scattering of postcards and billboards reading “ War Is Over (If You Want It).”
It seems impossible that Lennon’s global shout-out to peace, recorded with great enthusiasm from a bed in Montreal and echoing on radio stations across the world, didn’t play a role in raising global consciousness, if only by a notch or two. And changed the world in the process, if only by a notch or two. That sort of thing gets the attention of powerful interests.
Promethean Fire
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”
Away from Yoko in Los Angeles in the mid-seventies, Lennon partied hard with pals Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr and a cast of others. It was his last hurrah as a wild man. John returned to the Dakota in New York City for a five-year stint as a househusband, raising his son Sean and “baking bread.” During that period, the public clamored for his return to music. His fans wanted to know if he still had it. Could the culture hero who brought Promethean fire to the suburbs in the sixties do it all over again in the eighties?
By 1980, Lennon returned from his self-imposed silence with the album Double Fantasy. Although some of the songs were weakened by pristinely playing sidemen, the consensus was that Lennon still had it. Tracks like “Watching the Wheels” and “Woman” were up there with his finest Beatles work. This was a joint effort from John and Yoko; his tracks alternated with hers. To skip Yoko’s rather interesting vocal stylings, you had to pick up the needle and move it to the next track. The trickster from Liverpool had done it again.
In interviews from this period, the former Beatle believed that his phone was being tapped, and that he was being tailed by black cars he believed were from the FBI. One interpretation of this high-level of interest is that with Reagan newly installed as president, US policymakers were nervous with Lennon’s re-emergence as a public figure given his previous involvement in the peace movement and various left wing causes a decade earlier.
Indeed, released FBI files reveal there had been a high level of agency interest in Lennon only a few years earlier. Some speculate that his 1971 song “John Sinclair” was the spark, eventually leading to the Nixon administration’s efforts to deport him. (The activist Sinclair was given 10 years in prison for selling two joints to an undercover officer. The song, performed by Lennon at a benefit for Sinclair, contained the lyrics, “If he’d been a soldier man/Shooting gooks in Vietnam/If he was the CIA/Selling dope and making hay/He’d be free, they’d let him be/Breathing air, like you and me.”)
The depiction of a naked dancing Nixon on the cover of Lennon’s 1972 album, Sometime in New York City, probably didn’t help the musician’s bid for naturalization. In fact, John and Yoko had intended to shadow Nixon’s ‘72 reelection campaign by putting on concerts in cities where he was scheduled to appear. The couple nixed the plan because of apparent death threats.
Shining On
“When real music comes to me – the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding – that has nothing to do with me, ‘cause I’m just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium...those moments are what I live for.”
Lennon’s biggest hit as a solo artist was, of course, “Imagine.” It still gets more rotation on the radio than any other of the ex-Beatle’s other solo recordings, to the point of overkill. The central message is clear: imagining is the first step in changing the world, with the self as base station for transformation. The singer/songwriter ended up rejecting all gurus, all isms, especially the hagiography that surrounded himself and his bandmates. St. John was actually no saint at all, and he was the first to say so. He was a flawed human being like all the rest of us, doing his best to figure out the world and his place in it.
“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Muhammad and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.”
Many years ago, Lennon’s musical enthusiasm was mirrored in the spine-tingling excitement of a 10 year-old listening to “I Am The Walrus” in his aunt’s living room. Not to lean too hard on the spiritual wa-wa peddle, but the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek word entheos, which means a God within. And perhaps that’s why John Lennon’s music still moves us, young and old – because it strikes that deepest chord, the light inside us all.
Revised version of a piece originally in Common Ground magazine, Dec. 2004
Wonderful illustration at the beginning of this blog, Geoff. I presume it is your creation. John Lennon and the Beatles are a human phenomenon and I appreciate who they are and were - however, my fandom of that time went for Bob Dylan - at the time, I felt he said it all. I do wonder if Lennon's assassin was just a crazy on his own, or if there were darker political forces who wanted to out him.