IMAGINING JOHN LENNON

 

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, you

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one...

        —From “Imagine” by John Lennon—

 

Tomorrow will be the fortieth anniversary of the murder of musician and songwriter John Lennon. For many people of my generation or a little younger, I’m sure that it doesn’t seem that long ago, because Lennon has remained a relevant pop icon throughout the years since his death. Nearly as relevant as he was over the course of his brief but extraordinary life. Perhaps even more so. Every time we hear his name mentioned or hear one of his songs, we remember the surreal and senseless tragedy of his death, but we also celebrate his dual contributions to music and to peace.

Many of us probably even recall where we were when we heard the news. In my own case, it’s not hard. I was in Argentina, where I had been living for seven years by that time. I was working as the general news editor of an English-language daily, the Buenos Aires Herald. We had been through a lot in the four years since a 1976 military coup, whose reign of terror would continue for another three years. We had reported on hundreds of political assassinations, disappearances, torture and abuse. We ourselves were under threat and seen by the government as enemies of the state. And, two years later, we would still have The Falklands War “to look forward to.” And yet, the news of Lennon’s murder left us stunned. We ran it on the front page with a picture of the façade of The Dakota—the nineteenth-century apartment building at Seventy-Second and Central Park West in Manhattan, where John lived with Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, who was five at the time.

The following day I would be turning thirty. John was just a decade older, having been murdered two months after his fortieth birthday. So I easily recalled the very beginning of his musical career, when he and three other lads from Liverpool burst onto the pop scene in perhaps the most surprising phenomenon in the history of popular music—The Beatles.

Typical of my seemingly innate non-conformist attitude toward just about everything, I immediately reacted against the craze known as “Beatlemania”. And the more kids who said, “You don’t like The Beatles? What’s wrong with you, weirdo?” The more I doubled down. Their songs were, I felt, dumb and repetitious. They only seemed to know three chords, E, A and B. And, to my mind, Ringo Starr sucked as a drummer. I had grown to incipient adolescence spending hours listening to my mother’s 78rpm swing, jazz and blues records. That was the music I wanted to play, and the whole Beatles craze was anathema to me.

But while I was learning to play the drums, I got an offer to join a band that a talented little rock and roll guitarist and singer from my town named Dave Emerson was forming. It was an honor to get invited by him. But what about my dreams of being a big band jazz drummer?

I talked it over with my teacher whom I pretty much worshipped. He had played with Red Nichols, Les Brown, Hugo Winterhalter, and with Arturo Toscanini when he was conductor of NBC Symphony Orchestra. I said, “Some guys are offering me a chance to form a rock band with them.”

I thought he would say I shouldn’t waste my time, that rock and roll was crap. Instead, he said, “Good!”

“But I don’t want to play rock and roll,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s bad music. I want to play the good stuff.”

He said, “Danny, there’s no such thing as bad music. Only bad musicians. Learn to play it all and try to play the very best you know how no matter what it is you’re playing.”

So my sense of guilt about “giving in” to rock was lifted off my shoulders, and I ended up having a great time with that small-town rock band that included, besides Dave as lead singer and lead guitar, rhythm guitarist Steve Combs (with whom I’m still friends), bass-player and all-around nice guy Joe Metzger, who was a little older and drove us to our gigs in an old station-wagon, and keyboard player Ron Raup, who was a classmate and close friend of mine all through grade school and junior high, before he moved away to Chicago with his family. Ron, I should add, is a successful former music industry executive, who is now retired.

Dave was the one who led us all into the Liverpool sound and pushed us to woodshed music by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as an eclectic repertoire of works by other pop artists, from Simon and Garfunkel to Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde and from The Mamas and the Papas to The Surfaris. By the time we got Daytripper down pat, with Dave singing the lead wailing the opening phrase on his Rickenbacker hollow-body and Steve and I singing backup, I’d changed my mind about The Beatles. It was fun and it helped me develop the performance chops I would need when, only a few years later, I finally got the chance to play the local area nightclub circuit which had been my original goal.

Of course, like all small-time musicians, I dreamed of one day playing the nightclub and studio scene in New York, LA, Chicago and maybe even Paris. But that dream wasn’t in the cards, even if I did land a few random commercial gigs with some great musicians while I was stationed in Los Angeles with the Seventy-Second Army Band, and a few others in Europe when I was stationed there with the Thirtieth Army Band. But that didn’t keep me from playing with some fantastic combos and big swing bands over the decade that I made a living as a professional musician. And already by the time I graduated to that stage at age barely sixteen, rock and roll and commercial jazz were crossing over and it was next to impossible, unless you were with a Dixieland band, to play a job without its including arrangements of several Beatles tunes.

But it wasn’t just the nightclub circuit where you heard the music of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Even the very biggest names in swing were diggin’ it, like Buddy Rich’s big band arrangement of Norwegian Wood that blew us jazz types away <https://youtu.be/m2ZDfVSoqoM>. Pete Castricone, who was a musician and arranger with Rich’s band before getting drafted, was with me in the Seventy-Second in LA, so we got to play that one with the stage band, along with other Beatles arrangements that he created. And Rich was by no means the only one. Jazz and blues greats Count Basie, George Benson, Ramsey Lewis <https://youtu.be/ITTtH8i-eTc?list=PLlxVBW6Gu8_GOyLIXd0_SXuNFOK-jnmwx> , McCoy Tyner, Chick Correa, Grant Green, Quincy Jones < https://youtu.be/2QuYBa_LyTo > (despite once calling the lads from Liverpool “the worst musicians in the world”), Ella Fitzgerald and Wes Montgomery, among others, all saw the genius in The Beatles’ body of works and paid tribute to it by adding their own.

Thanks largely to Lennon and McCartney, the Fab Four from Liverpool, who could have proven a flash in the pan, endured because they developed. Using the incredible resources that they were racking up on the back of their initial fame, they didn’t settle for continuing to just “do what worked.” Instead, they delved into different genres and different cultures and progressively created ever more complex yet exceedingly pleasing sounds. They incorporated orchestral accompaniment, East Indian influences, other rhythms and broader instrumentation. And they just plain got better all the time as both musicians and music creators. Songs like Eleanor Rigby <https://youtu.be/HuS5NuXRb5Y?list=RDzhvZazALhyA>,  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Come Together, With a Little Help from My Friends, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Penny Lane, for instance, crossed over into new territory from the originally simple Beatles hits, not only in terms of their musical richness, but also, frequently, because of the dramatic and sensitive poetry that they enclosed.

But The Beatles were more than a rock band and a pop music phenomenon. They were part and parcel of the cultural sea-change that was the nineteen-sixties: The age of protest, when people massively called for an end to war and for peace to rule the world, when the Flower Children embraced all races and creeds and posited that, beyond everything else, what we shared, and the only thing that could save us from extinction was LOVE. Love of our fellow man and woman, of our nature, of our environment and of our global community.

If The Beatles were iconic in the evolution of pop music, John Lennon was a pop culture icon in his own right. He embodied not only the art and music of those times but also became a personified symbol of the peace movement. That was why his violent death was rendered even more tragic than it otherwise might have been if he had simply been “another rock star.”

After nearly a decade and a half of wild success, the band broke up in 1970. By all accounts, Lennon, who was older and had always been looked up to by the other members of the group, had other things in mind. From then until 1975, he undertook new departures in his music, in partnership with his wife, Yoko Ono. And then in 1975, he decided to take a break to raise his and Yoko’s new-born son, Sean. He hadn’t been the best of fathers to Julian, his other son with former wife Cynthia Powell, and had only recently renewed his relationship with the boy, who was now twelve. Perhaps he simply wanted to do better by Sean. Just before his death in 1980, he and Yoko had come back into the limelight with the release of a new album called Double Fantasy.

It was a copy of that very album that a twenty-five year old fan asked John to sign at around 5pm, on December 8, 1980, as he and Yoko were leaving The Dakota on their way to a recording session. Lennon graciously took the time to give the autograph. There’s even a photograph documenting that moment when John met the fan, Mark David Chapman, face to face.

John and Yoko were brought home from the recording session in a limo at about a quarter to eleven that night. As they got out of the car and started to walk through the archway of The Dakota, a young man stepped out of the shadows, pulled a .38 Special and fired five shots at close range, two of which hit Lennon in the back and another in his shoulder. The shooter was “the fan”, Mark Chapman, who had lain in wait after getting John’s autograph, until the star returned home.

A police cruiser that someone called rushed Lennon to the nearby Roosevelt Hospital ER, but he was declared dead on arrival less than fifteen minutes after the shooting. Perhaps Chapman had saved the sixth round in the revolver for himself, just in case. We’ll probably never know. But he made no attempt to flee the scene. When police arrived, Chapman had moved off to the side and was there reading from a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He made no move to resist when officers took him into custody.

Chapman was the typical sick loser who commits this sort of act. He had been a Beatles “fanatic” more than a fan. So he had issues with the band’s break-up (for which he may have blamed John). But he had other axes to grind. He had recently become a born-again Christian and, suddenly, he was ambiguous about his Beatlemania, and particularly about his obsessive admiration for John. In his new evangelical frame of mind, Lennon’s lifestyle was unacceptable as were some of the lyrics to his latest songs, which had utterly incensed Chapman. One song that had crazed him with rage was Lennon’s God:       

God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain

I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality...

Another source of his outrage was perhaps the most famous of any of Lennon’s songs, Imagine, which preaches the universality, the brother and sisterhood of Humankind, over and above country, religion culture or creed—“the world as one”. For a paranoid personality like Chapman’s, that saw enemies everywhere, a call to “love thy neighbor”, no matter who that neighbor might be, may well have been beyond his understanding and made Lennon the enemy, a former hero who was now betraying him with his multiple foes.

It has been suggested in movie lore and elsewhere that The Catcher in the Rye is a book flagged by law enforcement when seeking to discover and arrest magnicidal assassins and serial killers—an idea that must have appalled the book’s ever quiet, reclusive and peace-loving author, J.D. Salinger, who died in 2010. But there’s just something about the book’s troubled adolescent main character and narrator, Holden Caulfield, that would appear to speak to the wildly skewed sense of injustice that such felons seem to feel. Perhaps it is that Holden’s naked, cynical frankness sparks a sense of identification in them, in the same way that they might interpret (or misinterpret) any passage of the Bible to justify their crimes. Holden has an almost endearing innocence about him, but is, at the same time, openly resentful and distrusting of the adult world. His almost violent revulsion and keen nose for what he calls “phonies” is, perhaps, the Salinger character’s most emblematic trait, and translates as his unforgiving rejection of hypocrisy. And this is what would appear to appeal to psychotic criminal personalities who view themselves as crusaders against anything that clashes with their highly limited and prejudiced world view. Chapman indicated to investigators that the book was his “manifesto”. He is even reported to have considered having his name legally changed to Holden Caulfield.

Whatever the case may be—and much to Salinger’s chagrin, I’m sure—Chapman, although the most notorious, wasn’t the only killer who had an apparent weakness for The Catcher in the Rye. After John Hinckley Jr. shot and tried to kill President Ronald Reagan in 1981, investigators found a copy of the book in his motel room. And when Robert John Bardo murdered actress and model Rebecca Schaeffer, he was carrying a copy of the novel with him.

Originally from Decatur, Georgia, Chapman had been working as a security guard in Hawaii prior to murdering Lennon. It seems probable that he went to New York specifically for the purpose of murdering Lennon since it was no random whim. He had been planning it for weeks. But it wasn’t the only magnicide he had in mind. Investigators alleged that he was also planning on killing Paul McCartney, and Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, as well as President Reagan. This last had an apparent link to Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life, since he would later admit that he had tried to kill the president to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed, but also that he had been inspired by Chapman.

Chapman’s defense was to be innocent by reason of insanity, but the court didn’t allow it. He later pleaded guilty and was instead sentenced to twenty years to life on a second-degree murder charge with the stipulation that he would undergo psychiatric treatment while incarcerated. Although he would have been eligible for parole in 2000, his release from prison has been denied eleven times in the twenty years since then.

Often criticized for having a “naïve” global view for constantly preaching world peace, John Lennon’s philosophy was clearly based on a concept contained in every major religion and philosophy: Do toward others as you would have them do toward you. Rather than naïve, that approach is basic and places the individual above any and all other orders and authorities in society. He was saying, above all else, it all starts with you. It all starts with me. And let’s each approach the other in peace.

Or as John said in Give Peace a Chance:

Ev'rybody's talking 'bout
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m

All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Hit it
C'mon, ev'rybody's talking about
Ministers, sinisters, banisters and canisters
Bishops and Fishops and Rabbis and Popeyes and bye-bye, bye-byes

All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Let me tell you now
Ev'rybody's talking 'bout
Revolution, evolution, masturbation, flagellation, regulation, integrations
Meditations, United Nations, congratulations

All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance

Ev'rybody's talking 'bout
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare Krishna

All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance...

In a recent BBC interview a long-time friend of Lennon’s said that John was a complicated character. That he admitted having a quick temper, having been abusive to some of the women in his life, of being jealous and petty. He realized, in other words, that he was a flawed human being like all the rest of us. But the valuable message that he tried to bring to the world throughout the latter part of his career and life was that there is no higher authority, no higher spirit than our own. Each of us, he felt, should stop trying to live up to some “higher standard”. We should make the highest standard our own and place it at the service of others. In short, what John Lennon was trying to tell us through his music and his activism was that we should just be ourselves. More concretely, it’s simple: Just be you...but try to be a better you.

“Love is all you need.” And that, perhaps, more than anything else, is his legacy to an adoring world.