Why Lennon lives on

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday August 14 2005
The Observer

John Lennon was the voice of a generation, yet now many
young people cannot identify a picture of him.

On the western edge of New York's Central Park, a sun-dappled
mosaic circle on the ground contains the single word 'Imagine'.
This is the still, calm centre of Strawberry Fields, a
rechristened corner of the park that has become a mecca for
the curious and the faithful who come daily in a constant
stream of murmuring devotion to remember John Lennon, the
city's most famous adopted son.

Today, like every day for the last 14 years, the 'Imagine'
site is tended by a native New Yorker called Gary, a
41-year-old self-appointed keeper of the Lennon flame in
ragged ponytail, baggy shorts and faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
'John came to me in my sleep and told me to do it,'
he says, when I ask why he has covered the circle with petals.
'I do it every day, man. I've done it with rose petals and leaves.
I've done it with pumpkin seeds and pine kernels. One time, when
I couldn't get no flowers in the winter, I covered it with
bagels and green bananas. I think,' he says, without irony,
'that John would have liked that.'

Gary bids me sit on a nearby park bench beside his wife,
who shares his devotion to the late Beatle. 'I'm a hippy, man,'
he says, as if that explains everything, even the bagels. 'I used
to be a regular guy, watching the Monday night football game,
until Howard Cossell came on and told the world John Lennon was
dead. It was too much to take in. Then, years later, John visited
me in a dream and I've been here every day since.'

It is almost 25 years since Lennon was shot dead in front of
his wife Yoko by Mark Chapman, a deranged fan, on the doorstep
of the nearby Dakota building where he lived. It happened on the
night of 8 December, 1980, shocking the world and provoking scenes
of silent, numb grieving among the New Yorkers who had taken Lennon
- the toughest, mouthiest, most cynical, and therefore the most
New York Beatle - to their bosom when he was finally granted full
residency after a long legal battle with US immigration.

As Chapman nears the end of his prison term (he was sentenced
to life but has so far made three unsuccessful parole requests
since becoming eligible in 2000) there is little sense that Lennon
fans in New York have forgiven him for his senseless slaying of the
man who wrote and sang the two most enduring odes to pacifism and
eternal optimism; 'Give Peace A Chance' and 'Imagine', the latter
having now attained the currency of a humanist hymn. 'It would be
safer for everyone, including Mark Chapman, if he stays inside,'
the barman in my New York hotel had reasoned the night before when
I brought up the thorny topic of Chapman's mooted release. 'He would
not last a week on the streets of New York.'

At the 'Imagine' shrine, though, on this humid Sunday in late
July, the talk tends towards the hippy-dippy as Lennon pilgrims
of every age queue to have their picture taken beside Gary's ongoing
artwork. 'It's kind of Buddhist,' ventures one pale and model-thin
teenage girl to another as they stare at the petal-strewn shrine.
I ask them what Lennon means to them. They look bemused. 'He was the
first pop singer who got shot, right?' says the taller of the two,
as if there has been a slew of rock and roll assassinations since.
'He was in the Beatles!' says her friend, 'We learnt about them in
school.' It is my turn to look bemused. 'You learnt about the
Beatles in school?' They both nod. 'When we did the Sixties,' says
the tall one. I feel suddenly ancient as it dawns on me that the
Sixties are now as distant to these girls as the Thirties were
to me at their age.

Do they listen to Beatles music? 'Um, not really,' says the
taller of the two. 'We like 50 Cent - 50 Cent rocks!' They
stroll off, bobbing and nodding to the thump of an invisible
hip-hop beat, the Beatles, the greatest pop group the world
has ever known, a vague historical artefact in their already
overcrowded teenage minds.

It seems that the legend of the Beatles, whose greatness was
of such sustained singularity and inventiveness that nothing
since in pop music has come close, may finally be fading. In
a recent survey by OMM, The Observer's music magazine, 56 per
cent of the music-mad 16- to 24-year-olds polled could not put
a name to a photograph of Lennon. Perhaps, as the baby boomer
generation that spawned him slips into late middle age,
his iconic status too is under threat.

And yet, three years ago, Lennon was the only musician to make
it into the Top 10 Greatest Britons voted for by BBC viewers,
taking his place alongside Churchill, Darwin and Shakespeare.
And back in 1999 his most well-known - and, some would say,
most asinine - song, 'Imagine', was voted the nation's favourite
pop lyric in another BBC poll. As the 25th anniversary of his
death approaches, Lennon is destined once again to be feted as
arguably the greatest rock star of them all, a position that
only the equally iconic figures of Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley
have the historical clout to contest. His commercial resurrection
is already under way in the unlikely environs of Broadway where
a multimillion dollar musical, called simply Lennon, has just
opened with the blessing of Yoko Ono. If it signals Lennon's
late commodification by the showbiz mainstream, it shows too,
in its hamfisted way, how Lennon and his songs defy this kind
of reductionism. 'He's too big for that kind of treatment,'
as Paul McCartney succinctly put it recently.

Among today's pop stars, Lennon remains one of the touchstones of
greatness, both as a songwriter and social commentator. U2's
Bono, lead singer of the biggest pop group since the Beatles,
and one of the few contemporary rock stars to run with Lennon's
notion of the rock lyric as slogan, as a catalyst for capturing,
then igniting, the public consciousness, acknowledges him as
his prime influence. 'I remember listening to the Imagine album
when I was 12,' he tells me from a car en route to a
U2 concert in Madrid. 'It changed the shape of my bedroom, it
changed the shape of my head and it changed the shape of my
life. It just widened the aperture so much it was as if I was
seeing the world for the first time. I learnt off the lyrics
to 'Just Gimme Some Truth' and that, in a way, was the template
for all that followed.'

What Bono admires most is 'that daring-to-fail courage that
often backfired. Even though he had a mouth full of spite and
spleen, he always had a deep vulnerability and a huge heart. He
was a true artist insofar as he wasn't afraid to fail.'

It was the mouth full of spite and spleen, though, that
undoubtedly led Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis to worship
Lennon above all others, Liam once claiming that 'John Lennon
and Johnny Rotten were the only two that mattered in rock and
roll'. Likewise, Primal Scream, a group named in homage to the
self-exorcising therapy invented by Arthur Janov that Lennon
underwent prior to writing his first, and most rawly confessional,
solo album, Plastic Ono Band. 'As a singer he's up there with
Jerry Lee (Lewis) and Little Richard in my book,' says lead
singer Bobby Gillespie, who has just finished recording a
version of Lennon's scathing 'Just Gimme Some Truth'. 'But there
was also this fierce instinctual intelligence at work in his songs,
and in his whole attitude. That's a lethal combination. It gave
the Beatles the edge they needed. He was the abrasive one, the
one you could never quite be sure of.'

It seems then that, even as he is fading into folk memory
like Elvis before him, Lennon lives on, too, though in a
different, perhaps more meaningful, way. Despite the ubiquity
of his most softcore and impossibly utopian ditty, 'Imagine',
as the ultimate Desert Island Disc choice, despite the
mainstream's collective memory of the Beatles as the ultimate
tousle-haired, all-grinning epitome of Swinging Sixties fabness,
despite the happy-clappy inanity of Lennon the musical, there
is something about the least-loveable Beatle that resists our
attempts to posthumously canonise him, something to do with
what that never-quite-abandoned abrasiveness and unpredictability.

Of all the new breed of British pop stars who emerged in
the Sixties, Lennon was the one who harked back most to the
Angry Young Man archetype of Fifties writers like John Osborne
and Keith Waterhouse. His anger was undoubtedly class-based,
a working class Northerner's response to the stultifying
conservatism that held sway in the Fifties and early Sixties.
It ran deeper than that, though. Born John Winston Lennon during
a German air raid on Liverpool in 1940, his childhood was materially
stable but emotionally uncertain. His father, Fred, a seaman, was
only a fleeting presence throughout his youth, and his mother,
Julia, perhaps overwhelmed by responsibility, entrusted her son's
upbringing to his now fabled Aunt Mimi.

His mother's death, in 1958, left the teenage Lennon traumatised
to the point where he never spoke of it, though his anger at the
world was increasingly vented against those he perceived as weaker
and more vulnerable than himself, particularly the disabled, whom
he mocked relentlessly in his jokes and his fitful writings. Though
he would later cloak that anger in an often cynical sense of humour
and a gift for surrealist word play, Lennon was easily the most
volatile British pop star, at least until that other John - Lydon
aka Rotten - came spitting and scowling out of north London
squat-land in the late Seventies.

He also possessed in the early Sixties' the first credible white
rock'n'roll voice - what the late Beatles historian Ian MacDonald
memorably described as 'that brassy Northern roar, flecked with
bluesy moans'. You can hear echoes of his style in every disaffected
rock singer since, from the guttural whine of Kurt Cobain to the
more obvious Lennonesque signature that Liam Gallagher stamps on
every Oasis song.

'In a very real way, Lennon was the first modern pop star,'
elaborates the music writer and historian of punk, Jon Savage, who
is currently writing a history of youth culture. 'He had the anger
and drive of the misfit, the outsider, that is such a key element
in the defining pop music of the last 50 years. He grew up in a
Liverpool that was nowhere really, and in a postwar environment that
did not suit his personality, nor value his particular kind of
natural intelligence. That drive was unstoppable, though, and it
helped the Beatles break down all those doors, and create that tidal
wave of energy that swept all before it.'

While the Beatles are generally accepted as the greatest pop
group ever by critics and public alike, Savage sees their importance
as much more than simply musical. 'I don't think it's overstating
the case to say they almost single-handedly kick-started the
eradication of Victorianism in Britain. Put simply, the Beatles
didn't just change pop music, they changed everything.'

It has been 35 years since the Beatles' great adventure ended
not with a bang but a protracted whimper, their messy and protracted
break-up signalling the death knell for all they stood for: the
bright, brief flaring of pop as the defining cultural determinant
of the second half of the 20th century, and the attendant, and
equally brief, flowering of a radical, countercultural community
whose rise and fall was soundtracked by their songs. In short,
the Beatles were pop in excelsis: young, innocent, and cool,
then brilliantly, beautifully ambitious, every record a leap of
faith and experimentation, waited for with bated breath by an
audience that grew with them, and came to expect nothing more from
them than inspired pop perfection.

Because of that, Lennon was the first rock star to grapple with
the often emasculating contradictions of the job: the tricky
tightrope walk between celebrity and street credibility; the
conundrum of how to sing with conviction about rebellion and
injustice while inured to both by lavish and indulgent lifestyle.
'John Lennon offered an insoluble paradox,' wrote George Melly in
one of the few trenchant pieces published in the immediate wake of
Lennon's death. 'His huge fortune reduced the value of his
gestures (he and Yoko once arrived in a white Rolls Royce to
fast on the steps of a church), and yet without his fame those
gestures would have passed unnoticed.'

From the early protest folk of Dylan to the grand philanthropic
gestures of Live Aid, that same paradox has been played out
again and again with the same uneasy undertow: can the
self-centredness and egoism of celebrity really be aligned with
genuine political idealism? The political Lennon did his best,
and more than most, to straddle the contradictions of his celebrity.
In the early Beatles days he was a natural iconoclast and rebel,
constantly undercutting the clean-cut image insisted on by their
manager, Brian Epstein. As MacDonald pointed out in his final
book, The People's Music, Lennon's onstage persona - 'legs planted
wide ... knees bent, grinning lasciviously as he strummed' -
was 'defensive to the point of belligerence'. In nearly every bit
of early footage of the group playing live, Lennon is the one
undercutting the established performing ritual, mugging for the
cameras, pulling silly faces and acting the monkey between songs.
It is as if he already senses - and wants to alert us, the audience,
to - the absurdity of his calling.

Though they were all natural wits, Lennon was easily the edgiest,
most unpredictable Beatle, the one, as MacDonald puts it, 'who
first knocked the door of propriety off its hinges'. It was Lennon
who famously quipped during the Beatles' Royal Variety Performance
in 1963: 'Will all the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?
The rest of you just rattle your jewellery.' It was Lennon who sent
back his MBE. And Lennon, too, who, at the height of Beatlemania,
offered in interview the offending words, 'We're more popular than
Jesus now', a self-evident truth that precipitated an orgy of record
burning and recrimination across the American heartlands.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Lennon who first tired of the
prison of the Beatles, embarking with his usual all-consuming
zeal on a new adventure, celebrated in a Beatles song, 'The Ballad
of John and Yoko', in 1969, even as its very public acknowledgement
signalled the group's end.

In a way, though, Lennon had begun retreating from the Beatles - or,
at least, their confining celebrity - at the very height of their
popularity. In the mid-Sixties, after the group had stopped touring
to concentrate on their groundbreaking studio performances, he would
retreat between sessions to the big house in Weybridge he shared with
his first wife, Cynthia, and their young son, Julian. There, he
existed in a state of protracted domestic enervation, either staring
out of the window in a stoned haze or playing with the expensive
gadgets that littered every room.

'John's record for not speaking, just doing nothing and not
communicating to anyone is three days,' wrote the Beatles' first
biographer, Hunter Davis in 1968. 'I'm an expert at it,' Lennon told
him. 'I can get up and start doing nothing straight away. I just sit
on the step and look into space until it's time to go to bed.'

Lennon's retreat inside himself was precipitated by his regular
intake of LSD, which he took almost daily throughout 1967. His
mental state was fragile going on psychotic, and for a while he
thought himself the reincarnation of Jesus. Yoko, as he constantly
reminded the world when it blamed her for the break-up of the Beatles
and his marriage, saved his life. After they met at one of her
experimental art shows in London she became the new focus of all
his energies, replacing even McCartney as his creative foil.
Tellingly, his nickname for Yoko was 'Mother', and in a very real
way her smothering devotion provided the all-consuming emotional
environment he had craved since the loss of his mother.

Yoko, as MacDonald notes, 'pulled John out of self-absorption,
introduced him to political art'. The results of this newfound
late radicalism were mixed. They famously spent their seven-day
honeymoon in bed for world peace, while the world's media beat a
path to their Amsterdam hotel room, mistakenly believing they were
going to make love on camera. The 'bed-in' was mocked relentlessly
in the British press, where John and Yoko provided consistently
entertaining copy as pop's reigning odd couple, but there was an
underlying air of surrealism and even self-mockery in many of their
pranks that went unnoticed.

In the early Seventies, Lennon embraced a more confrontational,
and, given his commitment to peace, contradictory, radicalism. It
produced some of his finest post-Beatles songs, including the
anthemic 'Power to the People' and the incendiary 'Attica State',
but led to some ill-advised liaisons with the more extreme end of
late-Sixties/ early Seventies' activism, most notably the Black
Panthers and the Yippies - basically radicalised hippies seeking
anarchist revolution. He even turned up, with Yoko in tow, at a
'Troops Out of Ireland' anti-internment rally in London in August
1971, where, unbelievably, he held up a placard that read, 'Victory
to the IRA Against British Imperialism'. This, just a few months
before 'Imagine' was released. (The following year he released
'The Luck of the Irish', a hamfisted protest song that included the
non-ironic line, 'If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd wish
you were English instead'. It was outdone in its radical posturing
only by McCartney's 'Give Ireland Back to The Irish', Wings'
debut single from the same year.)

Lennon, then, more than any other pop star before or since,
was a mess of contradictions. It is easy in these post-ideological
times to poke fun at his invariably short-lived commitment to a
variety of often seemingly paradoxical causes, just as it must be
difficult for a teenager of today to even imagine a time when a
rock star could be so politically active as to be perceived as a
threat by the FBI. But Lennon was that rock star, even if he
admitted later, with his characteristic candour, that he had
never really been convinced by any of the causes that claimed him
as a figurehead.

The cruellest irony of his sudden and brutal death was that
it occurred at a pivotal moment when Lennon seemed finally to
be making peace with the world, and, more pertinently, with
himself. He had come though his fabled 'lost weekend', which
began in 1973 when Yoko threw him out because of his drinking
and philandering, and continued over several wild, bottle-strewn
months, often in the company of celebrated rock reprobates like
Keith Moon of the Who and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson.

Post-reconciliation, though, John and Yoko seemed stronger, more
committed to each other than to their joint career as artistic
provocateurs.

'He was calmer and more focused than I had ever seen him,' says
photographer Bob Gruen, who befriended Lennon in what were to
become his final years in New York. 'His whole thrust in life
was towards the notion of family, towards his wife, Yoko, and
their son, Sean. That was the message he was about to take to
the world - that after all the questing for the big answers he
had found real peace and love at home.'

Whether or not this would have made for great music is hardly
the issue here; Lennon, like McCartney, had by then made more
than enough great music, had redefined the parameters of pop
music like no other songwriters. What Lennon might have found,
though, had he been allowed to grow up finally, and grow old
gracefully, was the kind of peace and contentment that had eluded
him for most of his short, angry inspired life.

'Though he was a hero to many, his whole point was not heroic,'
says Bono. 'He hadn't always been the man he wanted to be, yet
he kept struggling to redefine himself and to find himself. His
real strength was his raw honesty and vulnerability. This was
the guy who sang "Help", don't forget. He dared to bare his soul,
and he dared to fail. That takes real courage.'

Perhaps it's time we remembered John Lennon for what he really
was: not just the first and greatest pop star but also the most
vulnerable and messed-up. The iconoclast who dared imagine what
global fame, useless of itself, might be used for. The upstart
who stole the world, and tried, in his impulsively tough and
compulsively tender way, to make sense of it. And, most courageous
of all, to change it.

'John Lennon: The New York Years' by Bob Gruen is published on 1
October by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited