by Joseph Levendusky
My youth was marred by four tragic assassinations. When I was four, John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the same day my Irish grandfather Jim O’Shea died. My father broke the news to his children at the supper table, while the radio news rehashed the details of JFK’s murder.
I was eight when Martin Luther King was shot to death in Memphis. There was rioting and arson in the neighborhood where I went to school and my grandmother walked me to school past National Guardsmen with M-1 rifles.
Only two months later Bobby Kennedy was shot in LA while running for President. I learned the news the morning after, when I came down to the kitchen for breakfast and found my mother crying in front of the radio. Long have I believed that if MLK and RFK had lived, we would be living in a vastly different United States today.
I was twenty-one on the December day in 1980 when Lennon was shot. A roommate told me the news when I came home from work. I felt like I had lost a brother. John had expressed so much of how I felt about the world. Coming on the heels of the election of Ronald Reagan (aka Ronald Ray Guns), the sworn enemy of all that was youthful and progressive, this was the coup de gras. There seemed to be little hope left that our generation could make a more just, more peaceful world, and a healthier planet.
Lennon was a role model for me. He was a contrarian, a non-conformist and a loveable wiseass. Apart from his music, he tended to deliver his thoughts in short, tart quips. Wiseasses perform an essential function in human society, often giving voice to uncomfortable truths that most of us expend considerable psychic energy avoiding.
Lennon, like others of his ilk (think George Carlin), often perform the public service of letting air out of over-inflated senses of self-importance. At the Royal Variety Show in 1963, with the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in attendance, Lennon, with charming cheekiness, introduced Twist and Shout thusly, “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.” He had intended to say “fucking jewelry”, but Paul McCartney and manager Brian Epstein talked him out of it at the last minute.
When John was informed by a reporter that many “consider your haircuts un-American”, he responded, “Well that’s very observant, because we’re not American, actually.” Asked to comment on criticism of the Beatles’ statements opposing the Viet Nam war, John retorted, “You can’t just keep quiet about anything going on in the world unless you’re a monk. Sorry monks—I didn’t mean it!”
Responding to those who had branded him a cynic, John told Look magazine in 1966: “I’m cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I’m not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That’s why I really don’t want to be labeled a cynic.”
But John’s most infamous quip was his suggestion that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Largely ignored in Europe, the statement set off a furor in the American Bible Belt which contributed to the Beatles decision to concentrate on studio work, rather than touring. Later he expanded on his thoughts, “I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They’re all saying the same thing — and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said — the basic things he laid down about love and goodness — and not what people say he said.”
Hours after Bobby Kennedy died, Lennon told a talk show host, “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. . .I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends. . .I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”
There is quite a bit to unpack in that quote and John’s words must be taken in the context of the times. This was 1968, the year when nearly 17,000 young Americans would lose their lives in Viet Nam. J Edgar Hoover’s FBI had many civil rights and anti-war leaders as well as many ordinary Americans under surveillance. The environmental degradation caused by industrial progress was just entering the public’s awareness. We had lost not only Kennedy, but also Martin Luther King that year.
Lennon was an idealist who was aware of his dark side. His troubled Liverpool youth left him with deep scars that at times resulted in less than exemplary behavior. Listening to Working Class Hero it is easy to imagine the bleakness of life in the industrial North of England in the 1950’s.
Two very different women had a great influence on John in his early years. His father Alfred, a merchant marine, was largely absent. His mother Julia nurtured his artistic side, but was unable to raise him. She put him in the care of her sister Mimi. A no-nonsense Englishwoman, Aunt Mimi and her husband George Smith gave John a stable home. Mimi often advised John to focus on pursuits other than music, “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.”
It was Julia who bought Lennon his first musical instruments and taught him the rudiments of music on ukulele and banjo. John adored her. But when John was seventeen, Julia was struck and killed by an automobile while walking home from a visit to the Smith household. John was devastated and several years of out of control behavior followed. McCartney’s father warned Paul that the Lennon boy would get him in trouble. Years later John would pay tribute to his mother and muse with the song Julia on the Beatles “White Album”.
Like bandmate George Harrison, John was a searcher. As a group, the Beatles dabbled in Eastern music and spirituality. While George continued to find enlightenment through spirituality, John eventually found something outside of himself in his relationship with the self-possessed avant guard artist Yoko Ono. John explained to Newsweek in 1980, “I was a working-class macho guy who was used to being served and Yoko didn’t buy that. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights.”
The couple made of their lives and their anti-war advocacy a work of performance art. Their Bed-ins for Peace, a clever riff on a sit-in, were meant to leverage the publicity attending their marriage to promote the cause of peace. Staged in hotel suites in Amsterdam and Montreal John and Yoko spent seven days in bed receiving celebrities and the press and discussing peace. Such theatre delighted many and befuddled many others. Lennon quipped, “If everyone demanded peace instead of a new television set, then there’d be peace.”
In the late 70’s, after a five-year silence following his infamous “lost weekend”—a debauched interlude which lasted about eighteen months—Lennon re-emerged in the public view with the release of the Double Fantasy album, made in partnership with Ono.
In part, the album answered questions about what he had been doing while out of the spotlight. The rock and roll bad boy had morphed into a sensitive new age guy. He was recommitted to his marriage to Ono and had been caring for their young son Sean. He had spent his days baking bread and changing nappies, coping with inner demons and mending relationships.
As evinced in the music of Double Fantasy, he devoted considerable energy to exploring his inner being as a grown man, far removed from his turbulent youth and the stress machine that was the Beatles’ public life. As a young man, I found this inspirational. Zenlike, John sang, “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
After that, it was soon over. We never got to the late chapters of the story. The book ended in the middle. Forty years on, tens of thousands each year make their way to Strawberry Fields, a memorial to Lennon in the small corner of Central Park where John enjoyed whiling away time. “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.” John may not have been the first person to say that, but he likely was the most famous.
In 1972, the US Government was attempting to deport John Lennon. Lennon had been living with Ono in the United States for a year, and the Government claimed that he had been admitted to the country improperly. There was also a guilty plea back in England in 1968 for possession of cannabis. At the time that was a more serious legal problem than it is now.
The backstory was that President Richard Nixon was running for re-election. It would be the first election in which eighteen-to-twenty-year-old Americans would be permitted to vote. Opposition to the Viet Nam war was at a crescendo. Lennon’s simple dirge, Give Peace a Chance, had become a well-worn hymn at anti-war demonstrations. Nixon feared that Lennon had too much sway with young voters and ordered the deportation effort.
Artists as diverse as Joan Baez, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Gregory Corso, Leonard Bernstein, Jasper Johns, John Cage and Tony Curtis were among those who petitioned the court in support of Lennon.
It was well known that the move to deport John Lennon emanated directly from the Oval Office. In 1975, a three-judge panel ruled in favor of Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, writing that, “Lennon’s four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream.”
It was then that a reporter asked John, “Mr. Lennon, do you feel any antagonism toward the people who have attempted to have you deported?” John replied, “Absolutely not. I believe time wounds all heels.”
Bed-in for Peace (Photo: Eric Koch)
Lede photo of John and Yoko by Jack Mitchell CC SA-4
LINKS:
The Beatles, “rattle your jewelry” Twist and Shout, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S3x8w3SoX4
The Beatles, In My Life, Rubber Soul, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBcdt6DsLQA
The Beatles, I’m Only Sleeping, Revolver
The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever, Magical Mystery Tour, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Epue9X8bpc
The Beatles, Julia, White Album, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZip_br_v3w&list=RDTZip_br_v3w&start_radio=1
The Beatles, The Ballad of John and Yoko, non-album single,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-1OgNqBkVE
The Beatles, Don’t Let Me Down, Rooftop Concert, London, 1969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtzkaL2t_Y
The Beatles, Revolution, live, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw
The Beatles, Across the Universe, Let It Be, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90M60PzmxEE
John and Yoko Plastic Ono Band + Harlem Community Choir, Happy X-mas (War is Over), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_kj60DIq2M
John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, Working Class Hero, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMewtlmkV6c
John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8
John Lennon, Oh Yoko! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itk-ndTnNWc
John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, Instant Karma, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLy2SaSQAtA
John Lennon, Give Peace a Chance, Original Bed-In Film, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftE8vr0WNus
John Lennon, Nobody Told Me, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuuhsqA95iA
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Power to the People, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Epue9X8bpc
John Lennon, Watching the Wheels, Double Fantasyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXR2LYeFBI
John Lennon, (Just Like) Starting Over, Double Fantasyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZCxyOcvp5A
John Lennon, Beautiful Boy,Double Fantasy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90M60PzmxEE
John Lennon, Woman, Double Fantasy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF6e-NmwmnA