THE BEAT GOES ON: John Lennon

When I worked mostly as a rock journalist interviewing musicians, I used to play a game, ending every conversation with the age-old question, Who was your favorite member of the Beatles and why?

The answer, according to tradition, is supposed to reveal as much about the person being asked as it does about the relative popularity of John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

Lighthearted people or champions of the underdog would choose Ringo Starr; seriously spiritual or dark-minded types would choose George Harrison; silly girls who cared only about who was the cutest chose Paul McCartney; and intellectuals or those who were too cool to care invariably chose John Lennon.

As it turned out, the overwhelming majority of musicians I asked chose Lennon, too. They generally saw Lennon as the leader of the Beatles (something I never quite understood, having always seen the group as at least a partnership between Lennon and McCartney, if not a democratic quartet), the most musically and artistically creative, and the most politically progressive and outspoken. And for these reasons, they chose Lennon as their favorite.

That Lennon was the most popular among musicians seems somewhat counterintuitive. He was the least musically talented member of the group—the least fab of the four. Much to his own dismay, he had an unappealing singing voice, and as a result he constantly prevailed upon producer George Martin to layer it with post-recording effects that added more heft and more color. Lennon’s melodies couldn’t hold a candle to McCartney’s—a fact that Lennon turned around and used against his bandmate, dismissing the author of the Beatles’s best-loved tunes as a pop hack, as revealed in Philip Norman's recent, exhaustive biography, John Lennon: The Life. While Lennon may have written more of the “serious” or politically minded songs, he was no Bob Dylan—in awe of whom he lived—and he was no better a poet than McCartney, for that matter, either.

Some may credit Lennon with the group’s more inventive musical experiments, but Lennon would later disavow recordings such as “A Day in the Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” claiming they were overworked, overfussy productions by an overeager George Martin. George Harrison was the better guitarist and vocalist, and no slouch of a songwriter either, and if Lennon was nominally the bandleader by virtue of having founded the original group, the Quarrymen, which eventually morphed into the Beatles, the general consensus is that it was Ringo Starr who was the glue that kept these four unlikely partners together for the relatively short decade they remained a working band.

Nevertheless, it’s been to Lennon that the vast majority of credit for the Beatles’ commercial and artistic success has devolved, and he remains the most praised and beloved of the Fab Four. McCartney is the butt of jokes to this day, seen as something of a pop lightweight in spite of his phenomenal achievements with the Beatles and in his subsequent career with his band, Wings, and as a solo artist who still sells out stadiums and arenas—an aging clown who provides tabloid fodder for his post-Linda McCartney dalliances with his various wives and girlfriends.

While it tells all—Yoko Ono apparently gave him her full cooperation, offering startingly revealing and candid insights—Norman’s biography is not a tell-all in the sense of dwelling on the baser sides of Lennon’s personality (although any exhaustive biography of the man can’t ignore the veritable treasure trove of unflattering incidents to report), nor is it a hagiography.

Norman does an excellent job of laying out the details of Lennon’s life, from childhood to his death by an assassin’s bullet in 1980, without coming across as judgmental. As a Beatles chronicler of long-standing—his books include Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation—Norman knows this material backwards and forwards, but he’s not out to exploit the memory of someone for whom he obviously has great and deep respect.

Nevertheless, a reader is still left puzzled as to why this man is held in such awe by musicians, why he was and is considered so great by the vast majority of Beatlemaniacs, and why time and revelations of his mostly despicable and pathetic character have not tarnished his reputation nor called into question his very dubious achievements.

Lennon, as it turns out, was a nasty, arrogant, and vindictive phony—while playing the working-class hero, he was, in fact, the most upper-class of the lot—whose rise to worldwide fame would have been impossible on his own.

This most unpleasant man was a boorish homophobe, racist, misogynist, and anti-Semite. He treated his wife, Cynthia, like dirt, basically abandoning her once she gave birth to their son, Julian, in spite of the pain he experienced when his own parents abandoned him as a child.

He took great pleasure in hounding the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, who in spite of his success in making the Beatles the biggest band in the world was always reminded by Lennon that to him he was nothing more than a “queer Jew.”

Other than Epstein, Lennon seemingly moved in a world devoid of Jews—rather odd for one in the entertainment business, one of the few sectors of the economy where Jews were welcome and had a noticeable presence and impact both as artists and businessmen.

Yoko Ono herself allows that Lennon’s homophobia was in large part fueled by inner torment over his own homosexual longings, even suggesting that whatever bond he had with McCartney—which appears to have been strikingly tenuous, as, according to this biography, the two were hardly ever together, basically living separate personal and creative lives and only uniting to record and occasionally to perform—was based on a repressed erotic attachment to his fellow mop-top.

And in spite of his love for and marriage to Ono, Lennon was unabashedly racist, even to Ono herself—before meeting her family, he asked her if they were all dwarves (in fact, Ono’s father was taller than Lennon).

If Lennon had left a legacy of greatness, perhaps his misanthropy could be excused as the price of insecurity on the part of an artist always doubting his own worth.

Unfortunately, Lennon’s insecurity about his true worth as an artist—and this art school graduate saw himself more as an artist than a rock musician, his projects, including the Beatles and his political activism with Ono throughout the 1970s, being works of public art on a mass scale—was justified.

His solo work never lived up to the promise of his collaboration with the members of the Beatles; even songs that became generational or sociopolitical anthems, like “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” were really just simplistic, naïve nursery rhymes that flew in the face of his otherwise cynical, acid view of the world.

The ending that befell Lennon at the hands of a crazed fan was truly horrific, one that, remarkably, Lennon sensed was his destiny fully a decade and a half before he was shot dead outside his New York City apartment building.

That Lennon inspired such depths of emotion is undeniable, and that this mouthpiece of pacifism should be felled by the ultimate violent act is both tragic and ironic.

Yet Lennon had already died a thousand small deaths in his own life, killing the souls of those who knew and loved him best and failing the millions who looked to him as some sort of cultural leader.

No one can fault John Lennon for being a mere mortal. But one can express befuddlement over the huge disparity between the life and work of the man and his public image and influence. [JULY 2009]

Editor-in-chief Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning music critic. George was his favorite Beatle.

THE GOODS

John Lennon: The Life
By Philip Norman
Ecco
www.eccobooks.com