'He was a holy fool' – a classic John Lennon
feature from the vaults
Mark Cooper, guardian.co.uk,
As we approach the anniversary of John Lennon's death on 8 December 1980 , we visit Rock's Backpages – the world's leading archive of vintage music journalism – for this insightful piece from Record Mirror
John and Yoko |
When we were growing up, my brother and I, we both loved the Beatles, and he loved John Lennon especially. Our parents used to give us a Beatles album every Christmas. Sgt Pepper was the last one we got. Maybe we left home after that, I can't remember.
My brother used to live in small bedsits in Sheffield . I'd go and visit
him, and for bedtime reading I'd always take down John Lennon Speaks. Lennon,
around that time, always seemed a bit daft, always going over the top and
changing every minute. But I always believed him. He never struck me as a man
who lied. He was always searching for something, trying something out, taking a
new tack.
John, along with Yoko, tried to use his public power for peace,
a word that only presidents use any more. Yoko and he looked so funny in bed
surrounded by cameras and flashbulbs, all white and eccentric. Then there was
the political phase that openly declared John's love affair with New York . The cover was all
newsprint and John and Yoko were angry and left and topical. And above all,
naïve and enthusiastic in the way they picked things up.
I've never written an obituary before. The last time I felt like
this was when Kennedy died and some essential safety seemed to have gone from
the world. I was too young to understand it, but I knew something was wrong. I
haven't written any because most of my friends are too young to have died.
Including John. Now I feel like some binding thing has been torn, not only a
period in life but a whole growing-up.
The Beatles were ours, mine and my brother's, in
the sixties. Our parents came to like them, grudgingly at first and then
wholeheartedly. The sound was ours and the media made them everybody's – they
were more reproduced than Kennedy. John was always winking into cameras, taking
the piss out of the medium, making it human. His wit was always Liverpudlian to
the core. John was always a wag.
The Beatles got wrapped up more and more into a nice homely
package. Everyone loved them, America canonized them and
still does, and the media hugged them. People didn't like John giving back his
medal and a lot didn't think he deserved it in the first place, but they ended
up respecting him. When John was primal-screaming about his Mother or appearing
on the Two Virgins cover, his sheer innocence and commitment somehow enabled
him to lose his dignity and recover it at the same time.
He was a holy fool and still a bit of a wag.
And then he went to New York and left the public
eye. He started escaping the cameras and trying to live his own life with Yoko
and his child. All through the 60s, every gesture he made was mirrored a
thousand times by followers and a million times by cameras. He began to live
for the public, using his gestures as responsibly as he could. Then he stopped
writing his diary in the public eye. John sought anonymity, privacy, peace, a
family life.
Nobody seemed to quite believe in John and Yoko's private life.
Many resented it: they were so used to him and "they never trusted
Yoko". The papers had great difficulty in letting them disappear, he'd
been such good copy. Somehow he managed it by being normal in NYC for a while.
He'd be frequently sighted in the Village, arm in arm with Yoko. He'd chosen
his privacy and the locals at least respected his wish.
Starting Over wasn't really a new start. It was just a reminder
that John still existed, still loved Yoko and rock'n'roll, like suddenly
getting a telephone call from a friend you used to spend every day with and
haven't seen for years. I felt sick when the radio started this morning. I
wanted it to be a hoax. I wanted him to have what he wanted, his son and his
wife. And I can't believe he died like that, his body broken. How could anybody
hurt John, whom everyone loved like they loved their youth?
I'm in a state of shock. I want to talk over the old days and
how we always loved John whatever he did because he always did it all the way
with the best drum sound. And he wrote down growing up for us.
Crazy John. Poor Yoko. Some stupid bloke killed him because he
used to be famous. All you can say is that he always will be. The world's gone
mad and now I'm going to try and get through to my brother again. Because I
want to remember. You owe him that and a whole lot more.
More: The Lennon Letters
“The
John Lennon Letters” edited by Hunter Davies
“In a hundred years from
now,” John Lennon sang
in a satirical home demo he recorded in New York in 1978, “they’re going
to be selling my socks, like Judy Garland! And I hope they get a good price!”
So the founder of the Beatles predicted this day would come — and as editor Hunter Davies makes clear in his
prefatory remarks to “The John Lennon Letters,” even the ex-Beatle’s unsigned
grocery lists and skimpiest doodles now command five figures at Sotheby’s.
A
massive deposit of freshly excavated notes, screeds, asides and howls, each
lavishly reproduced and carefully annotated, “Letters” is the most intimate book
ever published about Lennon. In its revelation of the man’s psychology, it far
surpasses all previous accounts by wives, lovers, half-siblings, ex-aides and
even the best biographers. This is Lennon unfiltered and characteristically
defiant, scrawling ferociously across lined paper, homemade Christmas cards,
Indian novelties, fading Apple Corp. letterheads. Fans of the Beatles and
Lennon, students of popular culture, armchair lovers of English and Irish wit,
and anyone fascinated by the inner workings of the creative mind: All will find
Davies’s book essential.
Those partial to the
Beatles’ early Motown covers may be pained to read Lennon’s casual dismissal of
them, on American Airlines stationery, in September 1971: “ ‘Money’, ‘Twist ’n’
Shout’, ‘You really got a hold on me’ etc. I always wished we could have done
them even closer to the original.”
“Letters”
also delivers the earliest known explanation of why Lennon left his wife and
son for Yoko Ono. “She’s as intelligent as me (you can
take that any way!),” he writes about Ono to his Aunt Harriet, his mother’s
sister, in 1968. “She’s also very beautiful — in spite of reports in the press
to the contrary — she looks like a cross between me and my mother — has the
same sense of humour too!”
Captured
here, too, are Lennon’s views on creativity, as set forth in a 1967 letter to a
cheeky student from Quarry Bank High School , the prototypical
dehumanizing British institution where Lennon, a decade earlier, had honed his
rebel persona. “All my writing,” Lennon says, “I do it for me first — whatever
people make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to
correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes for anybody’s books,
‘creations,’ art, poetry, etc. — the mystery and [expletive] that is built
around all forms of art needs smashing, anyway.”
The
present owner of that two-page gem is a dentist in Arkansas . Davies’s detective
work in uncovering the book’s 286 entries and tracing their complicated
provenance makes for an entertaining divertissement. No one is more qualified.
Two of the letters reprinted herein were addressed to Davies himself. To
research “The Beatles,” the acclaimed authorized biography he published in
1968, he spent the years 1966-68 hanging out with the band — in their homes, at
Abbey Road studios, around Swinging London.
Of
that book, still an indispensable work, Davies writes here that despite urgent
pleas from Mimi Smith — the stern-faced Liverpool aunt who raised Lennon
and demanded the excision of all references to his youthful swearing and
thievery — he “changed nothing.” This conflicts with Lennon’s 1970 Rolling
Stone interview, in which he trashed “The Beatles” and added: “It was written
in this sort of Sunday Times [style]. . . . No truth was written, and my auntie
knocked all the truth bits out about my childhood and me mother and I allowed
her.”
Davies also proves
surprisingly error-prone. He guesses 1970 as the year Lennon sent to Melody
Maker’s Ray Coleman an undated postcard that was signed “Them Beatles.” Davies
should have known better. By 1970, Lennon wasn’t signing anything in the name
of the Beatles. Indeed, only 23 pages earlier, Davies reprints Lennon’s angry
instruction to a lawyer in 1969: “I don’t want to read about ‘Beatles’ as if
they’re still alive — OK?” What’s more, in the photographs section of “Lennon,”
Coleman’s excellent 1984 biography, well known to all Beatles scholars, Coleman
reproduced the “Them Beatles” postcard and correctly dated it from the group’s
1965 European tour.
Other
problems include a tantalizingly incomplete poem that Lennon scribbled on a
Japanese postcard circa 1965 or ’66 (“When a girl begins to be a problem/
Pretty soon the girl must go”) that Davies heralds here as previously
unpublished. But surely he saw this item reproduced just last year, in “Beatles
Memorabilia: The Julian Lennon Collection,” a handsome coffee table volume that
elsewhere in “Letters” he cites by name. Most egregious is the 1971 date
assigned to a postcard that Lennon sent to Julian and signed “love/Dad Yoko
Sean.” Sean Lennon was born in 1975. There are also sins of omission, as Davies’s
selections from Lennon’s Hamburg and Cavern Club days
appear tamer than other letters from the same period.
Our view of Lennon isn’t
changed by his letters, but sharpened. He emerges here a whimsical and
irrepressible soul — undeniably a multifaceted genius — and a formidable scold.
He appears to have nurtured a lifelong love-hate relationship with Christianity,
a dynamic that, when fully exposed here, makes the furor he provoked in the
summer of 1966, with his comments about the relative popularity of the Beatles
and Christ, seem less inadvertent than inevitable.
However,
Lennon also betrays the touching desire to end even his angriest exchanges on a
conciliatory note. At Christmas 1971, after spending the year hurling profane
thunderbolts at Paul and Linda McCartney in public and private, he sends them a
short note. It accompanies what Lennon believes to be a bootleg copy of the
Beatles’ first — and unsuccessful — tryout for a major British label, recorded
on Jan. 1, 1962 . “Dear Paul Linda et
al, this is THE DECCA AUDITION!!” he writes, with a fan’s enthusiasm. “They
were a good group/ fancy turning THIS down! Love John & Yoko.”
Share This Article |
---|
Categories:
Art / Culture,
Current Events,
My Originals,
People
He was a great man