Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Not since the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 had Americans gathered in such numbers to share this shock and dismay, but the event precipitated similar outpourings throughout the world. It was as if all the turmoil from Lennon’s era rushed back to fill the countercultural void created by November’s election of Ronald Reagan as president. By the evening of December 9, the network newscasts had gathered up reports from around the globe and channeled the grief on display at symbolic locations like Mendips in Woolton and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Radio stations played “Imagine” nonstop, and for the first time, the music rang nostalgic in preposterous ways—at once comforting, reassuring, and utterly absurd. Every familiar gesture seemed portentous, prophetic yet unimaginable, especially in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” when Lennon sang: “The way things are going they’re gonna crucify me!” It could never be true, and it was too true to take in all at once.

  Late-night TV tributes interviewed Beatles authors and rock scribes; few found anything worth saying. At the Philadelphia Spectrum, two months into his tour supporting The River, Bruce Springsteen argued with his E Street Band about whether to go onstage at all. When he did come out, he told the audience: “The first record that I ever learned was a record called ‘Twist and Shout’ [cheers], and if it wasn’t for John Lennon, we’d all be in some place very different tonight [cheers]. It’s . . . it’s an unreasonable world and you have to live with a lot of things that are just unlivable, and it’s a hard thing to come out and play. But there’s just nothing else you can do.” And with that Springsteen kicked off “Born to Run,” turning his breakout anthem into a volatile mixture of rage, regret, and canceled hope. On bootlegs, you can hear a riotous conviction buried in the sound that somehow the music might reverse history, or lunge toward some kind of meaning where there didn’t seem to be any.

  In the first of many new ironies, Yoko Ono now found herself sympathetic. A wave of feeling went out to her, and to Sean, combined with a peculiar celebrity worship hitting a new pitch. In Toronto, thirty-five thousand people gathered in the freezing snow for a candlelight vigil on Tuesday night. By Thursday, wire services from Florida and Utah reported two suicides related to Lennon’s killing. Ono responded in a quote to the New York Daily News: “People are sending me telegrams saying ‘This is the end of an era and everything.’ I’m really so concerned. This is not the end of an era. ‘Starting Over’ still goes. The Eighties are still going to be a beautiful time. . . . It’s hard. I wish I could tell you how hard it is. I’ve told Sean and he’s crying. I’m afraid he’ll be crying more. . . . But when something like this happens, each one of us must go on.”5

  She announced that Lennon’s body was being cremated according to his express instructions, and the ashes would be scattered in the Atlantic. As a memorial, she asked for ten minutes of silent prayer in his honor at 2 P.M. on Sunday, December 14. “John loved and prayed for the human race,” she said. “Please pray the same of him. Please remember that he had deep faith and concern for life and, though he has now joined the greater force, he is still with us here.”

  On Friday, Yoko issued a longer statement in block capital letters, unveiling as a mother consoling her son a very different picture from her persona up to this point:

  I TOLD SEAN WHAT HAPPENED. I SHOWED HIM THE PICTURE OF HIS FATHER ON THE COVER OF THE PAPER AND EXPLAINED THE SITUATION. I TOOK SEAN TO THE SPOT WHERE JOHN LAY AFTER HE WAS SHOT. SEAN WANTED TO KNOW WHY THE PERSON SHOT JOHN IF HE LIKED JOHN. I EXPLAINED THAT HE WAS PROBABLY A CONFUSED PERSON.

  SEAN SAID WE SHOULD FIND OUT IF HE WAS CONFUSED OR IF HE REALLY HAD MEANT TO KILL JOHN. I SAID THAT WAS UP TO THE COURT. HE ASKED WHAT COURT—A TENNIS COURT OR A BASKETBALL COURT? THAT’S HOW SEAN USED TO TALK WITH HIS FATHER. THEY WERE BUDDIES. JOHN WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF SEAN IF HE HAD HEARD THIS. SEAN CRIED LATER. HE ALSO SAID “NOW DADDY IS PART OF GOD. I GUESS WHEN YOU DIE YOU BECOME MUCH MORE BIGGER BECAUSE YOU’RE PART OF EVERYTHING.”

  “I don’t have much more to add,” Ono concluded, requesting a ten-minute worldwide vigil on December 14 at 2 P.M. (EST). She signed it, “Love, Yoko and Sean”6

  That Sunday, December 14, in front of St. George’s Hall on Lime Street, more than thirty thousand Liverpudlians gathered and joined in singing “Give Peace a Chance,” just up the block from Charlotte Street, where Lennon once cadged 45-rpm singles from Brian Epstein’s NEMS store. More than five thousand people had waited throughout the night in the rain. A bandstand featured local groups and Beatles records, which caused a fracas when the soundtrack was inexplicably switched to another channel, with one hundred people reportedly injured. But by evening the crowd went quiet for the vigil at 7 P.M. (2 P.M. New York time). In Melbourne, Australia, crowds began gathering at 6 A.M. Like the crowds in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square, as well as in Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and, indeed, around the world, those in Central Park fell quiet to honor Ono’s wishes. At the end of ten minutes, “Imagine” began playing on the public-address system, and the crowd slowly dispersed over the next hour as a light snow started to fall.

  In dozens of countries, people made pilgrimages to gather with friends, families, former band mates, lovers, and music industry colleagues. Sheryl Lester, twenty-eight, brought Shelly, her six-year-old daughter, to Central Park. “We lost more than John Lennon,” she told the New York Times. “We lost our adolescence. So everybody is here more or less to mourn.”7

  Lennon’s death carried pointedly different meanings from the political losses of the past, or the celebrity deaths yet to come (Princess Diana, George Harrison, Michael Jackson). In part, this deranged fan’s bullets made everybody feel both guilty and culpable, as if those Ku Klux Klan threats from 1966 had somehow wafted their way across time to Lennon’s doorway. Another layer of feeling drew from the noblest sentiments he expressed (in songs like “The Word,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Give Peace a Chance”), about how the audience that the Beatles had created and challenged—once a beacon of hope in the midst of generational upheaval—had fallen prey to the same chaotic forces it once resisted.

  The whole scene made the Beatles and the sixties feel both closer and much farther away than a mere ten years; as music blared from bandstand speakers in New York, reporters noted the gathering’s resemblance to a peace march: “Mostly they heard Beatles’ songs, including a few that had been rallying calls a decade ago. When the crowd realized that a number called ‘All You Need Is Love’ was beginning, it surged with a charge almost electric in its intensity,” Clyde Haberman reported in the New York Times. “It was as though an anthem had been played. Suddenly, thousands of hands flailed the air, forming a sea of ‘V’s’ with their fingers—the familiar peace symbol that many had not flashed in a long time. And they sang.”8

  In the next issue of the New Yorker, Jonathan Schell pursued another irony:

  The one activity of the mourners—prayer for Lennon’s soul, suggested by his widow, Yoko Ono—was both silent and invisible. The silence seemed to create a space into which the strong emotion felt by Lennon’s generation—and by many who were not of his generation—could rush. In fact, in that quiet interval the generation itself, with its old message of “Peace” and “Love” held aloft again on placards, magically reappeared in public for the first time in years, after losing itself in the general population for a while. In a noisy and distracted age, a silence had proved more eloquent than any number of words could have been.9

  This moment of silence, Yoko Ono’s inspired request, worked as a balm in a frenzied atmosphere.

  After her initial statement to the press, Ono fell silent. Reports soon emerged that she had donated a million dollars to the city of New York to maintain a Strawberry Fields memorial garden in Central Park, across the street from the Dakota, where fans now gather every year on October 9, Lennon and Sean’s birthday, and December 8.

  Rolling Stone’s tribute hit newsstands like an existential punch line just before New Ye
ar’s 1981. Annie Leibovitz’s cover photograph, at once spontaneous and conceptual, captured a naked and reverent Lennon, eyes closed, curling up to kiss Yoko, who wore a chic black turtleneck atop blue jeans, her gaze fixed just beyond the frame. This visual eulogy, with Lennon’s bare knees hugging Ono’s womb, froze his image in humbled salute. Taken just hours before his death, it seemed as if Lennon were apologizing from the afterlife for every man who had ever acted like a jerk to a woman. (“Oh, it was really great,” Lennon told David Geffen, “I got undressed and wrapped myself around Yoko.”)10 With this photograph, the explosions at the end of “A Day in the Life,” or “Remember,” turned startlingly visual. Lennon heaved a silent but conclusive exclamation point from the hereafter.

  At first gradually, and then very quickly, death smoothed over the annoying contradictions and prickly outbursts in Lennon’s persona. It was almost as if he hadn’t really died until that picture showed up, and then his death was far too real, too immediate, too out of reach to fully comprehend. There was nothing casual, or cynical, about this pose—it was at once lighthearted and deadly earnest, honest and yet disarmingly unself-conscious, revealing far more about Lennon, John and Yoko’s relationship, and their ideas about themselves, than anything on Double Fantasy. After the requisite double takes, it sponged up the viewer’s grief and made Lennon’s life, death, and music seem both vivid and enticingly remote.

  This celebrated picture became Lennon’s farewell—the kind of stark, unapologetic image he and Yoko excelled at as early as their naked cover to 1968’s Two Virgins. As Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981, the image began to echo down into rock history. All the quandaries gathered up in Lennon’s music filtered through this last, exhibitionist pose, revealing all his dysfunctional upbringing more dramatically than any audio journal, or hit song, possibly could. Now Lennon kissed his wife good-bye from the cover of a magazine he’d helped to launch, as “Woman” and “Imagine” overtook “(Just Like) Starting Over” as radio elegies.

  This final Freudian diagram of Lennon’s dependence, and reverence, for his wife also works as a cunning visual pun. Although routinely cited as one of the most famous magazine covers ever, Leibovitz’s photograph remains widely misunderstood. “That famous pose, that was John’s idea,” Bob Gruen says. “Naked and curled up against a fully-clothed Yoko, that was his play on the guy who always gets photographed in his clothes with some naked girl crawling all over him, the Playboy routine, you know. He wanted to do the reverse, he wanted to turn that macho idea on its head, he wanted to be her prize.”11 Above all, the photo pulled a sly punch: mere mortals could have posthumous hits, only a legend could choke a pose like that from death itself.

  “(Just Like) Starting Over” had held the number one position on Billboard’s charts since early November and was still there the day Lennon was murdered. But mixed Double Fantasy reviews now gave way to a rash of testimonials, critical tributes, and celebrity quotes. Unlike the earlier Village Voice review by Geoffrey Stokes, music editor Robert Christgau defended the album in his obituary, articulating the complicated goodwill greeting the record now that it began selling fifty thousand copies a day: “John Lennon learned not merely to make do with his compulsions but to make something fairly miraculous out of them.” Any Lennon fan, Christgau insisted, needed to deal with Yoko Ono, if not on aesthetic terms, then political terms at the very least. “The marriage itself, first of all—neurotic, but also, as we used to say, liberated, with male and female roles confounded, not just reversed.”

  In today’s culture, the idea of a rock star devoting himself to fatherhood seems downright normal. Back in 1980, however, in the wake of the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Lennon’s stance had a radical influence, and snubbed clouds of macho rock-star mythology. “Stay-at-home fathers who can afford live-in help rarely attend to parenting with John’s care and intense devotion,” Christgau argued. It’s hard to emphasize how progressive Lennon’s fatherhood was, even after all the liberal positions he had taken in letter and song: to be a self-declared “househusband” in 1980 was to be that rarest of men, the kind who not only advocated but lived a new feminism. Being Lennon, he couldn’t stop bragging about it, of course. But in Lennon’s case, the impulse had humble origins, a desire to make good with this son where he had failed with Julian, and perhaps as well a response to the abandonment he himself had suffered as a child.

  Like a lot of critics, Christgau pointed out how many of the late interviews featured a talkaholic Lennon, who both “credits Yoko with saving his life and finds it difficult to let her get a paragraph in edgewise.” In death, Ono’s presence acquired genuine public sympathy for the very first time. Whether you cared for her art or not, her pain was palpable that first week. “Anyone who wants to dismiss Yoko,” Christgau continued, “with her astrology, her peace-is-here-if-you-want-it—as a paramystical crackpot should find me somebody else who can manage fortune like she was playing chess, learn to sing rock and roll, and make a genius happy all at the same time.”12 In a twisted way, the culture’s neuroses around death raised the art of marriage between two such fierce people into something sacred. They had been loud, obsessive, wacky, offensive, flaky, even tiresome; but now one final photograph fixed them in history, as much avatars for their era as reflections of it.

  As Yoko and Sean grieved, staffers old and new emerged from the seventh-floor apartment, taking journals, cassettes, letters, files, many, many private artifacts and keepsakes, in the hopes of selling them on the black market. Robbed of a husband, and a father to her son, Ono was painfully betrayed again by the loss of many precious personal emblems in the chaos after the killing. One of Lennon’s last personal assistants tried to protect the late Beatle’s journal by sneaking back into the Dakota and retrieving it, claiming Lennon had made him promise as much. “Fred Seaman was an opportunist: he kept the journal,” Jack Douglas says of this last assistant, who wrote a book. “Seaman knew a shitload of stuff, he was right there at the center of their lives for a long time. But all that stuff they said he stole, it wasn’t like that at all. John used to get so much stuff, people would send him appliances, gadgets, pots, everything you can imagine. John would simply say to his assistants, ‘Hey, you want this?’ John used to just give it to him. Then, after he died, Yoko started asking for receipts and written confirmation of John’s gifts, and that’s just not how it worked.”13

  Douglas speaks with great sympathy and forgiveness about these events, even though he claims to have suffered lengthy harassment, mostly as a result of other staffers’ behavior. “Of course, after he [Lennon] died it all went very weird,” he goes on, understating the cosmic funk that descended on the Hit Factory. “Yoko got really paranoid and thought I knew too much shit, and anybody who knew a lot of stuff, she wanted destroyed, or at least made sure that when their book came out no one would believe it. [Yoko] kept fucking with me about six months after Lennon’s death. I mean listen: I forgive her, she was upset, she was grieving, and she paid, more than anybody else, Yoko paid. I always respected her music, and enjoyed working with her immensely, especially sessions like the Approximately Infinite Universe. But she surrounds herself with the worst of the worst, and she’s so ready to believe the stupidest rumors about people she’s trusted, it’s just insane.”

  Lennon lore sat atop Beatle lore as the myth ballooned into veritable fiction and intrigue over the years.

  After the enormous outpouring of feeling generated by the memorial gatherings, tribute records soon followed, including “All Those Years Ago,” George Harrison’s maudlin 1981 single that marked the first recording with Harrison, Starr, and McCartney harmonizing since 1969.14 There were plenty of buried tracks to raid: Bryan Ferry shed all his ironic detachment for blatant hero worship with “Jealous Guy”; Sean’s godfather Elton John plucked imagery from “Dear Prudence” to write “Empty Garden.” In Liverpool, Adrian Henri, a Merseyside scribe made famous by 1967’s best-selling The Mersey Poets, turned in a fragil
e tribute that offered a fan’s exhausted remorse in the wake of the summer 1980 race riots in Toxteth. Henri’s words caught the lingering grief many Britons felt at how Lennon had “crossed the road” (the Atlantic Ocean). The poem closed with an image of “the inevitable stranger” dangling in the air, a question mark puncturing any sense of consolation: “You do not cross the road to step into immortality / At the dark end of the street waits the inevitable stranger.”

  Almost three decades later, in 2007, Sean Lennon reached out to meet Jack Douglas. “I was at his show,” Douglas reports, “and I got invited to go out with him afterwards, and I was supposed to go out with all of his friends.” Before the concert, Douglas ran into Bob Gruen, who invited him over to Yoko Ono’s table. Later that night, Douglas went out with Sean’s friends to a restaurant and got a message that Sean was held up and couldn’t make it. Ono later invited Douglas to work on the elaborate Lennon Signature reissues in 2010 to commemorate his seventieth birthday, and appear in the PBS American Masters documentary LENNONYC.

  One of drummer Bun E. Carlos’s favorite memories after the Lennon sessions was hearing about Sean Lennon attending a show through some roadies: “We heard all kinds of secondhand stuff, of course, after that. But one time, Sean showed up at one of our sound-checks in 1988 or 1989, and hung out with roadies. They told us later he was saying, ‘I can’t believe my dad was cool enough to record with Cheap Trick.’ We had a laugh about that. ‘You know, kid,’ we thought, ‘you kinda had it backwards.’ ”