John Lennon\'s strange sort of immortality, now 25 years long

[davepeck]

John Lennon\'s strange sort of immortality, now 25 years long

Steven Winn

Thursday, December 8, 2005

He was shot and killed, 25 years ago today, by a mad fan who thought he\'d sold out and become a phony. On this Dec. 8, hundreds of biographies, broadsides, candlelight vigils, documentaries, reconsiderations and a Broadway musical later, John Lennon remains in the culture\'s magnified crosshairs. And still we can\'t quite get a fix on him.

Almost anyone of a certain age, now as then, has an opinion; a construct; a shadowy, imperfectly mapped place where Lennon lives and how his music -- even if we only experienced it as a backdrop, as I did -- helped place us in the world and simultaneously question that place. "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Imagine." "Beautiful Boy." "I Am the Walrus." "In My Life." "Mother." "Help!" The titles of the songs -- everyone has his own private playlist -- are enough. They summon things, take us back and remind us what we took forward and what we left behind. They stop time and expand it.

Popular music inevitably becomes the soundtrack of our youth. Lennon, of the Beatles era and beyond, was that and something more, an artist who seemed to both describe and drive experience, to anticipate as well as celebrate, whether it was puppy love, politics, drugs, marriage, dissatisfaction, parenthood, despair, contentment or the conundrum of celebrity he addressed. He was at once knowing and naive, incisive and baffled, contradictory, inspired, vain, generous, uncertain, fully flawed. He was, in other words, alive.

And then, suddenly, when we hadn\'t thought much about Lennon during his long retreat into househusbandry or whatever that was from 1975-\'80, there it was: How displaced we felt, how unfinished, when he died. It\'s the wound that didn\'t ever heal, which is why we keep turning back to Lennon while he, endlessly discussed and ever elusive, seems to slip from our grasp.

Other popular musicians get summed up and sent off on a raft of tributes, biographies, box sets and celebratory star-vehicle films, where even the demons take on a kind of retrospective glow. "Ray" (Ray Charles) and "Walk the Line" (Johnny Cash) are the latest examples of the genre. Lennon has certainly had his share of attention and then some, before and after death. Make that the understatement of the day. But it\'s somehow fitting that he also got an odd, diffident musical about him in which he was played, in the show\'s San Francisco tryout earlier this year, by nine different actors of both genders and various races.

It didn\'t work. It felt both pompous and vague. The musical, with various revisions, bombed on Broadway. Blame it, as much has been blamed, on Yoko; she was the unseen hand holding all the cards. But you knew what the show\'s creators were driving at: Lennon was somehow bigger, or differently shaped, than the standard biopic or musical tribute measure.

One life wasn\'t enough to contain or explain him, which has fascinated, confused and angered people over the years. How could that adorable, influential, dominant Beatle wind up noodling away at performance art with Yoko? How could someone so patently talented write the mediocre songs on "Sometime in New York City?" What was he doing all those years up there in there in his Dakota enclave? How could a sorry nonentity like Mark David Chapman end it all?

Long before the great maw of entertainment journalism, cable television, image management and the Internet opened to its current, all-consuming dimensions, Lennon seemed to sense, warily and cannily, its appetite. He was, as many commentators and critics have said, both victim and master manipulator of his own image, whether he was being turned into a Teddie-cute Beatle by Brian Epstein, stage managing the bed-ins for peace with Yoko or meticulously recording his every thought, move and meal in his diaries.

Lennon laid the foundation for everything from Madonna\'s art of perpetual self-creation to Michael Jackson\'s public spectacle of self-destruction to Bono\'s purposeful political activism. Many of the aspects of today\'s celebrity culture -- its power to transfix, trivialize, degrade and do good -- stem from Lennon\'s singular career.

None of this would have surprised him. In his "last interview" with Playboy, which appears in the book "All We Are Saying," Lennon told David Sheff that by his mid-30s, "I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it and the so-called pain of the artist was always paid for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock \'n\' roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was great. But then I found I wasn\'t free. I\'d got boxed in." If it was a trap, he understood how to live inside it, with all its limitations and liberations.

As Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times five years ago, at the 20th anniversary of the artist\'s death: "Lennon created and cultivated a public persona that was so well defined and copiously documented that it resists attempts to make him into either a saint or, as the revisionists have it, a dysfunctional layabout." Not that that has kept journalists, critics and meta-critics from sifting and resifting the evidence. There are books about every phase and aspect of Lennon\'s work and life, from his unhappy childhood to his complicated relationship with Paul McCartney, his droll drawings, his final days, even "The Mourning of John Lennon." And they\'re still coming. A fat new tome, Paul Spitz\'s recently published "The Beatles," argues that previous books about the Fab Four depend on a simplistic and reductive original narrative.

Anyone who remembers that Monday night in December of 1980, where they were and how they heard what had happened outside the Dakota in New York, has a stake in Lennon, a sense of broadly shared loss that intensifies the private connection many people felt to him and his music. You didn\'t need to be a rabid or even casual fan. You might have stopped listening to his music or thinking about him, but he was still a presence, an aura that radiated through the culture. He had changed some things, set others in motion, and meanwhile tried to live his life. And then, at age 40, he was gone.

Now, a quarter century later, a sense of persistence and sudden absence remains. We know him, through his music and the paradoxical, intently studied puzzle of his personal life, and we know him not. Lennon is everywhere and nowhere, a maker of infinitely adaptable anthems ("Imagine," "All You Need Is Love," "Give Peace a Chance,") that seem almost creatorless and a complex, faceted, self-scrutinizing artist who died too young.

Last week, and not because the 25th anniversary of his death was coming up, Lennon and the Beatles kept turning up. In the "Sing-It-Yourself \'Messiah\' " at Davies Hall, conductor Bruce Lamott quoted a line from "Sgt. Pepper\'s Lonely Hearts Club Band": "You\'re such a lovely audience/We\'d like to take you home with us." My colleague Mick LaSalle, in a review of Eminem\'s new CD, called the rapper "the closest thing to John Lennon since John Lennon." Billy Crystal, in his solo show "700 Sundays," invoked the black-and-white TV miracle of seeing the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

We don\'t just remember Lennon now. We remember how we remember him, what we feel now about our own feelings when we first heard a song or saw him in concert -- that last time in Candlestick Park! -- or wondered what he was up to, what the next album might be and what it meant. No answers, then or now. Only the long tunnel of recollection, lit by a softly glowing light. Imagine that.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/08/DDG9QG409R1.DTL

[kyndkate]

Fitting tribute.

[kindm's]

Great read.


I think this article shows he was human. With flaws and triumphs, good and bad. Nobody is perfect we all have skeletons in our closets we all have weakness and strength.

It is surprising that to be human and real in the public eye causes so many folks on the outside looking in to become confused by what the person stands for. When all that person is doing is being human. Not some prescripted persona that we have way too much of today.

Lennon and Garcia. Artists who have chnaged peoples lives forever. For better or for worse they changed peoples lives.

[Mamalakabubadaya]

December 8, 2005
Floral, Musical Tributes for Lennon 25 Years On
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:26 a.m. ET

LIVERPOOL, England/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Liverpool and New York prepared to honor pop icon John Lennon on Thursday with floral and musical tributes and a candle lit vigil close to where he was shot dead 25 years ago.

In a ceremony in the center of the northern English city where Lennon was born and raised, fans and officials will create a shrine beneath a statue of the legendary Beatle, gunned down in New York by a fan in the presence of his wife Yoko Ono.

Later in the day, the city holds a memorial service for the man who created some of the best-known tunes in pop and is considered one of the most influential songwriters of all time.

In New York, hundreds of mourners are expected to gather at the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park and light candles at 10:50 p.m. EST (0350 GMT Friday), the time Lennon was shot.

Friends in Liverpool remembered Lennon with fondness, but also felt he distanced himself from them after meeting Ono, the woman who many fans blame for breaking up the Beatles in 1970.

``You couldn\'t approach John at the end, and looking back it was from the moment ... he met Yoko Ono,\'\' said former friend and fellow musician Billy Kinsley, who knew Beatles Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s.

``It was sad. He was my hero from when I was a 15-year-old kid, and he was always approachable, always said hello, and had a little chat. But after he met Yoko, that went out the window completely.\'\'

His assessment of Lennon and the Beatles as musicians, however, has never changed.

``It really did make a big impression on me seeing the Beatles on that first night at the Cavern, because it just changed my outlook,\'\' he told Reuters in a makeshift recording studio in his garden, recalling the night in February 1962.

``I thought \'My God, I have just seen the best thing that I could ever see\', and since then it\'s been downhill because I\'ve never seen anything as good as the Beatles.\'\'

DEVOTION

Kinsley will perform ``Beautiful Boy,\'\' which Lennon dedicated to his second son Sean on his ``Double Fantasy\'\' album, at a memorial service in Liverpool later on Thursday.

In New York, Ayarton Dos Santos will be at the ``Imagine\'\' mosaic, named after one of the Lennon\'s most famous songs, just as he has been nearly every day for the last 13 years to arrange petals, acorns, apples and bagels into a peace sign.

``It\'s all about peace, love and happiness. It\'s for brother John,\'\' Dos Santos, 41, said.

``You come here, you feel his spirit. His spirit is so alive in here,\'\' he added.

Yet the man who brought a generation such pleasure with seminal tracks like ``Strawberry Fields Forever,\'\' ``Give Peace a Chance\'\' and ``Imagine,\'\' also caused pain to those who loved him.

Both his first wife Cynthia and their son Julian recently voiced their sense of rejection when Lennon left them for Ono.

Cynthia told Reuters earlier this year that she and Julian were ``airbrushed\'\' from the Beatles\' story and that Ono made it clear she did not want her in New York after Lennon\'s death.

In a statement on his Web site, Julian added: ``I have always had very mixed feelings about Dad. He was the father I loved who let me down in so many ways ... it\'s painful to think that his early death robbed me of the chance for us to know each other better.\'\'

Ono\'s spokesman Elliot Mintz said he had received more than 500 requests for interviews with Lennon\'s Japanese-born wife.

``It\'s just too painful for her to discuss,\'\' he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-lennon.html?pagewanted=print

[Todd]

merging to here  in T-minus 10 mins.....Cobb, where you at???

[davepeck]

peck\'s got this bitch under control. more like 1 minute! holla!

[Mamalakabubadaya]

whoops lol...well, i can\'t help it if i\'m a retard sometimes..gotta get my act together and read more .info

i guess i\'m sort of a newbie?

[jking]

i remember the day he was shot. i wore a black arm band to elementary school for the rest of the week. when i showed up to class, my teacher asked me, "has somebody you love died?" and with utmost contempt and embafflement i replied, "yeah, john LENNON...."  she was a bit surprised that i knew who he was or that i cared about the man, but once i started listing off my favorite songs and albums, i guess she figured out that i was quite serious. sgt. pepper\'s was the first album i ever owned, and it was a couple years before i owned anything but beatles and solo lennon albums. sure, he was human, but what a great message he had. i\'ve always wondered how amazing a lennon/marley album would\'ve been.....


(edited for clarity)