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John Lennon in His Own Write

Shot down in his prime at 40, John Lennon died in some sort of intense energy, just as he had lived. We might have expected it.

Lennon was a master singer-songwriter and a political activist, a hero to many and a villain to others. What is the real legacy of this man?

Lennon's influence from 1963 - '70 as a Beatle was profound. It was brought about by a combination of prodigious talent, aggressive self-promotion, and technological opportunities. The ability of a single musical act to have the vast reach that the Beatles enjoyed was only made possible by technological advances – satellites, recording techniques, advances in shipping technologies, air travel, even new printing technology aided the Fab Four.

For example, in 1967, the Beatles recorded 'All You Need is Love' in a London studio, watched live by millions of people all around the world in the first ever global telecast, Our World (see video of the recording at June 25 in the Book of Days). Fortunately, it was also a great song (yet another Number One), though almost everything they did had the stamp of greatness on it. They never seemed to let their fans down and kept getting better and better.

However, despite that song, and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and a phenomenal 31 Number One Beatle hits (in Australia), John Lennon's intellectual star shone most brightly in the decade following the 1970 acrimonious demise of the band. It was then that full vent was given to the acuity of his mind in combination with his musical gifts.

His influence was profound in the realm of the personal/political. The song 'Imagine' represented much of what Lennon was saying, and it became a standard. However, some of his best work, written and recorded in his first few years as 'former-Beatle John Lennon', did not sell as well and is not so well known.

Such songs as 'Woman is the Nigger of the World', 'Luck of the Irish' and 'Attica State' brought an overtly leftist political dynamic to pop music. The album Some Time in New York City was fiercely alternative and made Lennon many enemies, such that Sean Lennon, his son, claimed that his father might have been killed by the CIA. It seems a paranoid conclusion to draw, and it is not a theory I subscribe to, but certainly Lennon was a target of the Nixon administration and investigated by the USA's FBI and Britain's MI5 spooks. He had the same drug convictions as George Harrison, but he, and not George, was refused a Green Card by the US Immigration Department.

Did John Lennon deserve to be the subject of a huge FBI dossier as revealed by Jon Wiener, a history professor at the University of California and author of a recent book about the Lennon files, Gimme Some Truth? Most Lennon fansites and the press in general have been united in condemnation of the watch that was kept on Lennon during his very political phase.

Lennon closely identified himself with the Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary Party, and it was alleged he donated 46,000 English pounds to them. He also gave an interview to Red Mole, the Marxist magazine edited by Tariq Ali, and allowed himself to be photographed wearing a Red Mole T-shirt. For a time his sympathies were clearly with the IRA, and supported that terrorist organisation at the time they were wreaking havoc with their bombings of innocent civilians in Ireland and the UK.

In the light of some of his activities, Lennon's pontifications on peace seemed at the time, to this writer (though a Lennon fan), profoundly hypocritical. He claimed publicly that he regretted the lyric in 'Revolution' that said

"When you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,
you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."   

This was around the same time that Mao Zedong entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's greatest all-time mass murderer - estimates of the deaths attributed to Mao and his Communist Party vary from 30 million to 100 million and more. Did John Lennon ever write a song such as 'The Luck of the Chinese', or did he return his MBE to protest the 50 million murdered (according to Gorbachev some years later) by Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union? We heard not a word from him.

In 1968 he changed the lyric in 'Revolution',

"When you talk about destruction,
Don't you know that you can count me out"

to "count me in" on the second version (on the White Album). Should we be surprised that a pro-Marxist-Leninist intellectual, with a following of millions of young people, had a dossier assembled by the security service of the democratically elected governments of Britain and the United States? At that time the Soviet Union (according to recently released KGB files) was waging proxy wars throughout the third world, and practising thermonuclear blackmail.

John Lennon's legacy is thus a complex and somewhat sullied one. His song lyrics brilliantly portrayed psychological and spiritual means of disengagement from self-disempowerment and religious cant ('Imagine'; 'God'; 'Mind Games'; 'Intuition'; 'I Found Out'; 'Watching the Wheels') and provided an alternative perspective on macro-political issues ('Attica State'; 'John Sinclair'; 'Working Class Hero'). The trouble is, he fell silent on the most bloodthirsty regimes known in human history, while affecting a 'progressive' stance. It is at least as unforgivable as if, 30 years before, he had supported the Nazis and Fascists in Europe.

We can't overlook, either, Lennon's pronouncements on affluence, such as "Imagine no possessions/It's easy if you try". Hollow words, produced as they were for the toiling masses, from the magnificent halls of Lennon-Ono mansions in English shires and American upstate woodlands. Of course, he enjoyed enormous, unprecedented authority, if not power, and his critics and lampoonists were drowned out by millions of youthful cheers. His authority obviously fogged his mind and pandered to his gargantuan arrogance and ego, the same ego that has him on film punching Paul in the arm, for a joke, at more than one press conference, as the less-brilliant McCartney tried to field media questions. Nice guy … not.  

Then there were the drugs – his own polyaddiction, including dependence on heroin. He wrote 'Cold Turkey' but said little that was wise or critical of excessive LSD, alcohol and marijuana consumption. His drug and alcohol abuse left a wasteland in his career for several years in the 1970s, when the best album he could do was the uneven Walls and Bridges, though I place 'Mind Games' from this period as one of the most intelligent and deeply soul-stirring songs I've heard. One wishes he would gimme some truth about drugs.

He was a moron in some ways, old Johnny, getting thrown out of a nightclub, drunk and sporting a tampon on his head, with Harry Nilsson whose cirhossised liver packed up and went south a few years later. However, Johnny gave us a new way of seeing the power of individual responsibility, and what's more, individual power, especially through electronic media. The working-class boy from Liverpool, probably by virtue of the godlike status he was awarded (like no one else in history), through electronic means, stumbled upon a way of changing ideas through mass communication. He was the first great memeticist of our age. He spread memes (idea 'viruses') like some crazy escaped hospital patient. No one has used their personal prestige and authority in such innovative ways, and he leaves us dismayed with other superstars who squandered their opportunities.

The man was a damn genius – a songwriter for all time and an immortal rock artist, with some stupid, dangerous ideas and some profound, great ones. I choose to try to be honest to myself about ... both.

Above: The recording of 'Give Peace a Chance' at Montreal, June 1, 1969   More

See also the recording of 'All You Need is Love'

 

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