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

by Tim Riley

  Slowly, over years of Beatle reissues and a thriving bootleg market, which created a grip on the Internet, a larger symbolism to Lennon’s loss came into view, and continues to form our impressions of him. You can sense it in the way that a critic like Mikal Gilmore began his Lennon essay for Rolling Stone in 2005 with these words: “It has been nearly thirty years, and it can still stop your mind.”15 Or the way the cultural historian Anthony Elliott laid out the thesis of his provocative The Mourning of John Lennon: “It is one of the rich ironies of Lennon’s life that he experienced so much loss and mourning and then came to represent mourning, came to symbolize the struggle to mourn, at the level of our general culture.”16 Or when Rosanne Cash sang “I wish I was John Lennon, free as a bird,” in her song “World Without Sound” on her Black Cadillac album from 2006. The loss Lennon had expressed through songs like “No Reply,” “Yer Blues,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Cold Turkey,” and “It’s So Hard” finally came to express his audience’s loss for the man himself. Fans gathered at annual festivals where sound-alike bands competed for attention: ex-wives, siblings, cousins, ex–Apple staffers, and photographers shared stories; and soon the children of these fans jumped into the Beatle world without any direct experience of the band itself.

  It took decades for most outside the music industry to catch on to the material’s staying power. Academia didn’t start offering courses in Rock History until the millennium, and the publishing industry still concentrates on breezy personal memoirs, like Pattie Harrison’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, a best seller in the summer of 2008.

  Establishment recognition began with George Martin’s knighthood in 1996, alongside the American conductor André Previn, which simply extended formal respectability to Martin’s work as the highbrow producer behind the popular band. Paul McCartney finally got the royal nod in 1997, alongside Elton John, British conductor Roger Norrington, and jazz singer Cleo Laine, but five years after the musical Cats composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. Such distinctions came to reflect the respectability of rock ’n’ roll in royalty’s eyes, even though McCartney had long since become the richest man in show business. Even after Michael Jackson betrayed their friendship to purchase Northern Songs in 1985, McCartney oversaw diverse holdings that included Buddy Holly’s publishing, among others’.

  Dealing with rock ’n’ roll continued to be a major royal conundrum: on the one hand, Prince Charles depended on acts like McCartney, U2, and Oasis to anchor his annual charity concerts; on the other hand, the crown awarded McCartney a knighthood but not Lennon, Mick Jagger (in 2003) but not Keith Richards, David Bowie (also 2003) but not Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin). It wasn’t until politicians were forced to catch up with Britain’s huge boomer voting bulge that Prime Minister Tony Blair declared their rock heroes a piece of “cultural” identity and praised the British contributions to the world’s creative industries. As he left office in 2007, Blair, instead of talking about the Iraq War or his status as George W. Bush’s “poodle,” expounded on how much British identity had changed during the boomer era. If Britain could no longer claim to be an imperial power, it could at least lay claim to a new cultural empire, with significance far beyond its borders. In this new British worldview, the sun never set on the British imagination.

  Nobody suffered more than Ono or Sean or Julian, but a burden of tremendous complexity visited Paul McCartney, who forged ahead with a solo career while watching his best mate and musical intimate ascend to something beyond even the myth of Beatle John—something like the Prince of Peace, or rock’s Great Martyr, a towering omen of all the danger and resentment that fame courts even when it speaks the language of togetherness.

  Where Yoko handled widowhood like a savvy pro, Paul McCartney faced unreal expectations about how a former band member should best salute his fallen brother. Following Lennon’s death, McCartney put out two critically acclaimed albums, Tug of War in 1982 and Pipes of Peace in 1983, both produced by George Martin, that grappled with his status as the Beatle left behind. The title song to the first record recounts what anxious competitive threads formed the Lennon-McCartney partnership. “Here Today” became his more explicit tribute, a variation on “Yesterday,” which acquired new meanings simply because of its theme (he had already written a song called “Tomorrow,” on Wild Life). In an odd twist, “Yesterday” became the Beatles’ own farewell to Lennon, even as McCartney insisted, inaccurately, that Lennon had never contributed to the number. The song acquired mystical overtones: it was very hard to hear any version of Lennon and McCartney’s most recorded song, the centerpiece of their publishing fortune, without thinking of John, the Dakota, and the masses who gathered in his memory. Tug of War, however, rode an excruciating hit single, “Ebony and Ivory,” which reminded people how effete McCartney could be at his worst. Pipes of Peace featured two duets with Michael Jackson, “Say Say Say” and “The Man,” which followed their hit “The Girl Is Mine.”

  McCartney’s use of the word “saint” in his Two Virgins dedication has grown more poignant since Lennon’s assassination. As a rock star, Lennon did his best to flee sainthood. Knocking your songwriting partner about for sainthood status is comic; to survive your “sainted” partner in a knighthood goes beyond anything even Lennon might have imagined at his most surreal. Whatever else you might think of his music, McCartney has had to walk through his later career in Lennon’s shadow, “the cute one” who submitted to show business where his partner repeatedly renounced it.

  McCartney knew better than anybody the sort of saint Lennon most decidedly was not, only now he had to pretend about Lennon, even endorse his sainthood, lest he be disrespectful of the dead. This became a terrible bind for McCartney, who already carried a great degree of anxiety about his standing in the Beatle pantheon and his image as a cartoon “romantic” next to Lennon’s “cynic.”

  In 1996, when releasing Anthology 2, McCartney stopped the press run the week before release to change the song order. Overthinking the final track sequence, and tired of his “cute” persona, McCartney insisted that the set move “I’m Down” up to the third slot to avoid a front-loading of Lennon tracks. And when he collaborated with Elvis Costello on some songs for material that appeared on 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney had to swallow reviews carping on about how much better his writing seemed when he worked with a more capable wordsmith than himself.

  Onstage, McCartney slowly reincorporated more and more Beatle material, at first the lesser classics like “Lady Madonna” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face” for the Wings Over America set, then “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” at 1985’s LiveAid concert, and over the years, a shopworn “Drive My Car” at the Super Bowl in 2007, and a raving, madcap “I Saw Her Standing There” at the Grammy Awards in 2009. He performed best when he took on grief as a theme, as in the 1999 album he released after Linda McCartney died from breast cancer in 1998: Run Devil Run. It’s a streak through some favorite oldies, and two sparkling originals, which conveys manic loss and desperation, as well as a confidence about how necessary the music can be. In a career typified by crashingly banal work like “Getting Closer” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” it sounds as if McCartney could have made this album the day after he recorded “Oh! Darling.”

  Part of any fan’s homage came in the form of the pilgrimage to Liverpool, which gradually resigned itself to Beatle tourism. Julia Stanley Lennon’s unmarked grave in Allerton Cemetery remains among the less traveled sites on the circuit. She never formally married Bobby Dykins, so when her eldest daughter, Julia Dykins Baird, went looking for family records, she was surprised to find them listed under her famous older stepbrother’s surname. Julia’s plot sits in section 38, number 805, and is often decorated with flowers or trinkets. She was buried there on July 21, 1958, six days after her death.

  The payment of £13 7s. and 6d. was made by Norman James Birch and W. F. Williams, on August 20. Few who know the Lennons can figure out who these two men were. They m
ay have been landlord partners for 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, Julia’s official address, or simply wards of the state looking after a legally unmarried traffic victim with little savings. The second page of Julia Lennon’s burial certificate contains the following addendum: “Purchaser, Norman James Birch, 120a Allerton Road, Liverpool, Garage manager,” as if to indicate that the payee would be the neighborhood contact should more expenses need to be traced to Julia Lennon’s name. (Was she simply friendly with the local mechanic?)

  The sprawling Allerton Cemetery lies south of the Allerton Golf Course Lennon walked through to visit McCartney’s house, and the local Beatle tour guides all know where to look when asked. It’s easy to imagine the young Lennon visiting this spot on his own as a teenager. That same public library shelf contains all the admittance and release records for the Blue Coat Orphanage, where young Alfred Lennon, born December 14, 1912, was signed in by his mother, Mary McGuire, on January 27, 1915. The next entry for Alf appears on April 7, 1924, when he was released at the age of eleven. There seems to have been no contact between Alf and Julia after Blackpool in 1946, when John raced after his mother and returned with her to Liverpool.

  Cultural tensions continued to shape Lennon’s persona long after his death. Liverpudlians, especially, have an anxious relationship with Yoko Ono. She makes generous donations to local charities, appears at many grand openings and local functions, such as the dedication of Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport in 2002. Ono also helps oversee the National Trust’s conservancy of Mendips, which sits on the same tourist bus route as Paul McCartney’s Allerton house and Strawberry Field. A live-in Beatle scholar stays abreast of research with many like-minded fans and gives personable tours of Aunt Mimi’s home three times a day, six days a week.

  On the other hand, until Paul McCartney married Heather Mills in 2002, Yoko Ono was the number one Beatles villain, and the myth of her “breaking up” the Beatles is one of the band’s more persistent fictions. An early McCartney PR fumble came when he refused to attend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s third annual ceremony in 1988, at which Mick Jagger inducted the Beatles. George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Sean and Julian Lennon all attended. McCartney sent a message reading: “After twenty years, the Beatles still have some business differences which I had hoped would have been settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.” McCartney did appear to induct John Lennon as a solo artist into that hall in 1994, and then lobbied hard to get his own solo spot there five years later.

  During this same phase, McCartney approached Ono about a proposed reunion project between the remaining Beatles, and asked her if Lennon had left any song demos behind. She gave him Lennon’s demo tapes for two unfinished songs, “Free as a Bird,” and “Real Love,” for the 1995 Anthology project, produced by Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne. “Free as a Bird” became the lead track. “Real Love” sounded thinner, its sentimentality gapingly unironic.

  When the band launched its Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, Love, in 2006, the launch featured the two remaining ex-Beatles, and the missing figures represented by their wives. The project sprang from George Harrison’s friendship with Cirque’s French Canadian founder, Guy Laliberté. Ono and McCartney squabbled as only intimate in-laws could, but they also struck deals like this, the larger Beatle fortunes compelling accord. As if realizing Lennon’s biggest fear—appearing in Vegas with the Beatles as an oldies act—they figured out a cheeky way to burnish the band’s myth with an exorbitant cash-generating engine without the Beatles having to pick up their instruments. Love now plays fourteen times a week at the Mirage Hotel, to capacity crowds who pay up to $150 a ticket for the chance to hear the remixing job George Martin supervised as one of his last projects. The soundtrack, a mash-up of Beatle tracks created by Martin’s son Giles, returned the band to the top ten, giving them the status of being the sole rock act to score that honor in its fifth decade of existence. The show features a thin coming-of-age narrative based on a wartime childhood told through gymnastics, tightrope walkers, and rollerblading.

  Lennon may never have cracked that exasperating Beatle riddle—the constant reunion questions, the sense that he worked in the shadow of his best younger work and that no matter which windmills he tilted at, his audience usually fixed on the most trivial. By now, perhaps even McCartney has learned that it’s not wise to try. But in another way, Double Fantasy (and Milk and Honey, its leftover tracks, including, “Nobody Told Me,” a charming answer to the Shirelles’ “Mama Said”) posed a convincing countermyth about how marriage and parenthood presented the best chance for happiness in the Beatles’ wake. By admitting defeat to a show-business legend that was always bigger than celebrity, Lennon seems to have found a stillness worth singing about.

  Perhaps, in some atavistic ways, his dilemma reflected a very familiar bind, like the one his parents had set for him that summer day in Blackpool, 1946, when Alf put it to his five-year-old son to choose between his mother or a new life in New Zealand. Lennon had already survived the toughest test any five-year-old could muster, and like any sane kid, he chose twice: first his father, then his mother. He knew exactly what he wanted—both parents, with the certain wisdom born of his experience that at some level, either was essentially out of reach.

  This wasn’t a choice, but a trap Lennon internalized. The dilemma created emotional roadblocks, but also a profound creative universe that buoyed him through his wildest experiments, darkest free falls, and most elliptical drug rants. This Blackpool trauma doesn’t explain everything in Lennon’s messy life, but it does inflect most of his intimate encounters, his glaring insecurities, and how certain inscrutable choices seemed, for him, entirely reasonable. Fame was nothing compared to the Gordian knot his parents tied him up in. With the Beatles, he believed the best and worst about himself, sometimes simultaneously, and this almost instinctively pushed rock ’n’ roll toward art. In so doing, he used fame’s shifting media mirrors to toy with his elastic persona, recording songs too poetic to be contained by an era obsessed with the giant now. If ever a muse might redeem a messy character, it was John Lennon’s. And if one song could be said to redeem his retreat, it would be the deliriously elegant “Beautiful Boy,” where he caught the meaning of it all gazing back at him through his own five-year-old son’s eyes.

  Selected Bibliography

  These titles comprise all this text’s primary sources. All record chart positions are taken from two registries for consistency: for the U.S., Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles 1955–1990, and for the UK, The Complete Book of the British Charts: Singles and Albums (Warwick, Kutner and Brown, 2004).

  Ali, Tariq. Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. New York: Verso, 2005.

  Ashton, David. “The Time Capsule: Stories—Age Concern England.” Home/Care Services for Elderly People: Health, Home, Pension & Insurance Cover for Over 50s/Age Concern England, http://www.thetimecapsule.org.uk/TimeCapsule/1960s_D55D7B9D222E4780A856A8F10B4CBAD9.htm.

  Babiuk, Andy. The Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four’s Instruments, from Stage to Studio. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2001.

  Badman, Keith. The Beatles: After the Break-Up 1970–2000: A Day-By-Day Diary. New York: Omnibus Press, 1999.

  ———. The Beatles Off the Record 2: The Dream Is Over. New York: Omnibus Press, 2000.

  Baird, Julia, and Geoffrey Giuliano. John Lennon, My Brother: Memories of Growing Up Together. London: Jove, 1989.

  Baird, Julia. Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon. New York: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2007.

  Baker, Nicholson. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

  Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Edited by Greil Marcus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

  Barrow, Tony. John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me: The Real Beatles Story. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. />
  Beatles, The. The Beatles Anthology. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000.

  Beatles, The. The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. Edited by Alan Aldridge. New York: Delacorte, 1969.

  Benson, Harry. Harry Benson: Fifty Years in Pictures. New York: Abrams, 2000.

  Best, Pete, and Patrick Doncaster. Beatle! The Pete Best Story. London: Plexus, 1985.

  Best, Roag, with Pete and Rory Best. The Beatles: The True Beginnings. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

  Blaney, John. Listen to This Book. Guildford: Paper Jukebox, 2005.

  Boyd, Pattie, with Penny Junor. Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.

  Bracewell, Michael. Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music. New York and Washington, D.C.: Da Capo Press, 2008.

  Bramwell, Tony, and Rosemary Kingsland. Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006.

  Braun, Michael. Love Me Do: The Beatles’ Progress. New York: Penguin, 1964.

  Bromell, Nick. Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000.

  Brown, Peter, and Steven Gaines. The Love You Make—An Insider’s Story of the Beatles. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

  Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

  Carlin, Peter. Paul McCartney: A Life. New York: Touchstone Books, 2009.

  Carr, Roy, and Tony Tyler. The Beatles: An Illustrated Record. New York: Harmony Books, 1975.

  Christgau, Robert. Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973. Expanded ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.

  ———. Rock Albums of the Seventies. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1981.