Just before dying, the ex-Beatle had turned a new leaf.
Just before dying, the ex-Beatle had turned a new leaf.
I t was 40 years ago today that news broke — during a football game, for many Americans — that John Lennon, ex-Beatle, half of the most successful songwriting partnership in musical history, had been shot outside of his New York City apartment building, and had died shortly thereafter. At the time, only the doctors who tried to do the impossible by saving his life would have known that “All My Loving,” a Beatles song, played on the radio of the hospital to which he was taken just as he was pronounced dead.
As a lifelong Beatles fan, and a compassionate human being, I wish John Lennon had not died that day. But unlike other fans, my life is not long enough to have stretched back to December 8, 1980. I was born about 13 years later and thus do not share the same visceral memory of shock and sadness upon hearing the news that so many do today. In a strange complication to his own memory of Lennon’s death, my father, to whom I owe my Beatles fandom, did not read the news that day (oh boy), either.
My father was a 1L studying for his first law-school exam, buried deep in his notes out of an anxiety driven both by the looming test and by the general atmosphere of competitive paranoia among new law-school students. If not for that, he says he would have watched the football game during which the news broke. But since he didn’t, in a time without smartphones or the Internet, he remained ignorant of the news until the next morning, when he began to sense “the buzz you feel when something major has occurred.” Despite being urged by his instructor before the exam to focus on the task at hand, my father says he was “very shaken” and believes to this day that his “performance on that exam was impacted by the events of the previous evening.”
It was a highly singular journey that catapulted four Liverpool boys into such international stardom that the second-oldest of five Irish-Catholic kids raised in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, could end up so powerfully affected by news of a Beatle’s death. It need not be rehashed in full here. One need only know that, by 1980, Beatlemania had come and gone. The Beatles (John, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, in case you somehow don’t know their names), had spent their 20s as the most successful musical act in history, split up, and then spent the 1970s largely doing their own things (with occasional tantalizing exceptions that sustained ever-present rumors of a reunion).
For John Lennon, the first half of the 1970s was spent to a considerable extent in deliberate reaction to his 20s. It was already becoming apparent late in the Beatles career that John was chafing under the group’s strictures (as were the others); in fact, he had essentially broken from the band in 1969, before Paul McCartney’s doing so publicly in 1970 made the breakup official. With new wife Yoko Ono at his side, John spent the early ’70s working out in public view the lingering issues that his accelerated adulthood had left unresolved (see “Mother” on 1970’s Plastic Ono Band); feuding with McCartney, from whom he had been nigh-inseparable for years as a songwriting partner; and placing himself in the thick of contemporary left-wing activism. His public persona was huge — and it was angry, a sustained therapy session and rebellion for all the world to see.
If this remained all there was to John Lennon, if he had died a bitter man, his death would obviously still be worth mourning, as all unjust deaths are. But beginning in the second half of the 1970s, Lennon began to change. With the birth of his second child, and his first to Ono after a many-month separation, he deliberately receded from public view to be an active presence in his newborn’s life. And so, to a considerable extent, did he remain for the rest of the decade. When he finally was ready to return to the spotlight, he was a changed man. The anger and the hurt that he seemed to wear on his sleeve almost as a fashion statement earlier in the decade had evaporated in his low-key recuperation.
A new spirit of healthy detachment from the world, with a focus on what was really important to his life, suffused Double Fantasy, the album he released to mostly mixed critical and commercial attention in November 1980. “Watching the Wheels,” which opens side two, speaks to his new frame of mind:
Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry, I’m just sitting here doing time
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round . . .
He dedicated one song on it, “Beautiful Boy,” to his young son. Another, “Woman,” is an ode to Yoko. He had done those before, but this one was different: not avant-garde but simple, a plaintive, humble request for her love, and gratitude for getting it despite feeling unworthy. Likewise, “(Just Like) Starting Over,” another Yoko tribute, which opens the album with an upbeat chime to contrast the funereal ringing that opened Plastic Ono Band. The song is just that: a promise to love for the first time again, and “it’ll be / just like starting over.” On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was content, looking outward instead of inward, and ready to begin the next phase in his life. It’s a phase that never truly began. And that makes John Lennon’s death the tragedy it’s considered today.
A few years ago, an article appeared in the Daily Mail claiming that, just before his death, Lennon had become a secret conservative, and was a fan of Ronald Reagan. It seems almost impossible to believe that the same man who returned his MBE to protest the Vietnam War would only ten years later become a Thatcherite, though stranger ideological transformations have happened. (And besides, Lennon had already warned ’60s radicals against “carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.”) Whether the Mail is right or not, it seems almost guaranteed that Lennon, often unpredictable, typically contrarian, and unafraid to skewer conformists, would object to the vapid celebrity appropriation of his left-wing anthem “Imagine” as the go-to response to anything bad happening in the world.
That song alone may prevent conservatives from ever truly warming to John Lennon, barring confirmation of the Daily Mail’s “scoop.” So perhaps a National Review tribute to him will fall on deaf ears. But if you don’t like his music, or merely tolerate the man behind it, then at least consider appreciating that he spent his last years leaving behind anger and celebrity and replacing them with a renewed dedication to his wife and son. Whether you do or not, though, his life and legacy will live on. They do for me, at any rate. All thanks to a father who raised me to appreciate the music of a man who died long before I was born.