A Thread for John Lennon

[Kellie]

John Lennon's strange sort of immortality, now 25 years long

He was shot and killed, 25 years ago today, by a mad fan who thought he'd sold out and become a phony. On this Dec. 8, hundreds of biographies, broadsides, candlelight vigils, documentaries, reconsiderations and a Broadway musical later, John Lennon remains in the culture's magnified crosshairs. And still we can't quite get a fix on him.

Almost anyone of a certain age, now as then, has an opinion; a construct; a shadowy, imperfectly mapped place where Lennon lives and how his music -- even if we only experienced it as a backdrop, as I did -- helped place us in the world and simultaneously question that place. "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Imagine." "Beautiful Boy." "I Am the Walrus." "In My Life." "Mother." "Help!" The titles of the songs -- everyone has his own private playlist -- are enough. They summon things, take us back and remind us what we took forward and what we left behind. They stop time and expand it.

Popular music inevitably becomes the soundtrack of our youth. Lennon, of the Beatles era and beyond, was that and something more, an artist who seemed to both describe and drive experience, to anticipate as well as celebrate, whether it was puppy love, politics, drugs, marriage, dissatisfaction, parenthood, despair, contentment or the conundrum of celebrity he addressed. He was at once knowing and naive, incisive and baffled, contradictory, inspired, vain, generous, uncertain, fully flawed. He was, in other words, alive.

And then, suddenly, when we hadn't thought much about Lennon during his long retreat into househusbandry or whatever that was from 1975-'80, there it was: How displaced we felt, how unfinished, when he died. It's the wound that didn't ever heal, which is why we keep turning back to Lennon while he, endlessly discussed and ever elusive, seems to slip from our grasp.

Other popular musicians get summed up and sent off on a raft of tributes, biographies, box sets and celebratory star-vehicle films, where even the demons take on a kind of retrospective glow. "Ray" (Ray Charles) and "Walk the Line" (Johnny Cash) are the latest examples of the genre. Lennon has certainly had his share of attention and then some, before and after death. Make that the understatement of the day. But it's somehow fitting that he also got an odd, diffident musical about him in which he was played, in the show's San Francisco tryout earlier this year, by nine different actors of both genders and various races.

It didn't work. It felt both pompous and vague. The musical, with various revisions, bombed on Broadway. Blame it, as much has been blamed, on Yoko; she was the unseen hand holding all the cards. But you knew what the show's creators were driving at: Lennon was somehow bigger, or differently shaped, than the standard biopic or musical tribute measure.

One life wasn't enough to contain or explain him, which has fascinated, confused and angered people over the years. How could that adorable, influential, dominant Beatle wind up noodling away at performance art with Yoko? How could someone so patently talented write the mediocre songs on "Sometime in New York City?" What was he doing all those years up there in there in his Dakota enclave? How could a sorry nonentity like Mark David Chapman end it all?

Long before the great maw of entertainment journalism, cable television, image management and the Internet opened to its current, all-consuming dimensions, Lennon seemed to sense, warily and cannily, its appetite. He was, as many commentators and critics have said, both victim and master manipulator of his own image, whether he was being turned into a Teddie-cute Beatle by Brian Epstein, stage managing the bed-ins for peace with Yoko or meticulously recording his every thought, move and meal in his diaries.

Lennon laid the foundation for everything from Madonna's art of perpetual self-creation to Michael Jackson's public spectacle of self-destruction to Bono's purposeful political activism. Many of the aspects of today's celebrity culture -- its power to transfix, trivialize, degrade and do good -- stem from Lennon's singular career.

None of this would have surprised him. In his "last interview" with Playboy, which appears in the book "All We Are Saying," Lennon told David Sheff that by his mid-30s, "I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it and the so-called pain of the artist was always paid for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock 'n' roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was great. But then I found I wasn't free. I'd got boxed in." If it was a trap, he understood how to live inside it, with all its limitations and liberations.

As Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times five years ago, at the 20th anniversary of the artist's death: "Lennon created and cultivated a public persona that was so well defined and copiously documented that it resists attempts to make him into either a saint or, as the revisionists have it, a dysfunctional layabout." Not that that has kept journalists, critics and meta-critics from sifting and resifting the evidence. There are books about every phase and aspect of Lennon's work and life, from his unhappy childhood to his complicated relationship with Paul McCartney, his droll drawings, his final days, even "The Mourning of John Lennon." And they're still coming. A fat new tome, Paul Spitz's recently published "The Beatles," argues that previous books about the Fab Four depend on a simplistic and reductive original narrative.

Anyone who remembers that Monday night in December of 1980, where they were and how they heard what had happened outside the Dakota in New York, has a stake in Lennon, a sense of broadly shared loss that intensifies the private connection many people felt to him and his music. You didn't need to be a rabid or even casual fan. You might have stopped listening to his music or thinking about him, but he was still a presence, an aura that radiated through the culture. He had changed some things, set others in motion, and meanwhile tried to live his life. And then, at age 40, he was gone.

Now, a quarter century later, a sense of persistence and sudden absence remains. We know him, through his music and the paradoxical, intently studied puzzle of his personal life, and we know him not. Lennon is everywhere and nowhere, a maker of infinitely adaptable anthems ("Imagine," "All You Need Is Love," "Give Peace a Chance,") that seem almost creatorless and a complex, faceted, self-scrutinizing artist who died too young.

Last week, and not because the 25th anniversary of his death was coming up, Lennon and the Beatles kept turning up. In the "Sing-It-Yourself 'Messiah' " at Davies Hall, conductor Bruce Lamott quoted a line from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band": "You're such a lovely audience/We'd like to take you home with us." My colleague Mick LaSalle, in a review of Eminem's new CD, called the rapper "the closest thing to John Lennon since John Lennon." Billy Crystal, in his solo show "700 Sundays," invoked the black-and-white TV miracle of seeing the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

We don't just remember Lennon now. We remember how we remember him, what we feel now about our own feelings when we first heard a song or saw him in concert -- that last time in Candlestick Park! -- or wondered what he was up to, what the next album might be and what it meant. No answers, then or now. Only the long tunnel of recollection, lit by a softly glowing light. Imagine that. - Steven Winn

[Kellie]

Happy Christmas (War Is Over)

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over over
If you want it
War is over
Now...

[*silenced*]

Part of me wishes I had been alive when John Lennon was around!
But I still appreciate his great music, the titles I would say are almost identical to the song you named!
Everyone should remember this working class hero!

[Chy]

Thanks Kel!

[historyteach]

John was a very special man.
I miss what may have been...
Imagine!
Indeed...

Shalom!

[dx4life68]

He shouldve killed Yoko Ono instead

[*silenced*]

Perhaps, but he didnt think that Yoko had sold out, only John!
Blah to his damn killer! I cant believe how anyone could kill such an amazing man.
Ok, he had said some **** and got a bit ****y, but sold out? NEVER

[historyteach]

With respect, no one deserves to be murdered.
Strange that murderous sentiment would be on this thread about John Lennon. All he advocated was LOVE and PEACE.
IMAGINE!

Shalom!

[*silenced*]

No, no, I didnt mean he deserved to be murderded, far from it.
Im just saying thats the "reason" his murderer gave for shooting him - not a worthy reason, no - one deserves to die.
Yes, he did, and Im sure weall respect and remember him for the good things he did

[historyteach]

I understood your post, silence. I wasn't refering to yours. And I do know the story behind Mark David Chapman. Not to worry.

Shalom!