Had he not been assassinated in New York City 25 years ago this December, John Lennon would be a 65-year-old man. He was born Oct. 9, 1940.
Ten years before Lennon’s birth, my father was born in Chicago.
Neither one of them could have predicted how complicated their relationship would be.
When I was 11 years old in October 1970, a song called “Mother” was playing on the radio. It was a dark, mournful, slow dirge that aired on WLS-AM for one reason only: It was the 45-r.p.m. single heralding the release of John Lennon’s first solo studio album. The Beatles had announced the dissolving of their partnership that year.
The cover of the album, “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” was unthreatening.
A pastoral scene on the front showed John and his wife, Yoko Ono, sitting beneath a tree; a childhood photo of Lennon was on the back. “He was a handsome boy,” my father noted in the car.
That Saturday was (so I thought) one of the great ones. My father traveled a great deal as an executive. Having him home on a weekend was a big deal. Having him buy me a new album was like an early Christmas. And to hold the debut solo LP by John Lennon was to feel as though somehow the cutting edge of the vibrant youth culture was in hand.
That’s one of the many reasons why Lennon mattered: then and now. He was fated to personify in his various images and to score in much of his music both the profile and the soundtrack of that rapidly changing epoch, which he still represents. He was the 1960s.
Even then, in the early autumn of 1970, his name alone connoted different things to different people. To the young who wished to have been at Woodstock and yearned to be in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, Lennon signified a whole slew of assumptions.
He was (generally speaking) considered to be the most “way out” of the Beatles; even those of us barely older than 10 knew that meant he had experimented excessively with drugs, wore those hippie-esque granny glasses, sang lead on “Revolution” and conjured up the now patented antiwar anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.”
To the millions who comprised President Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority,” John Lennon also represented what was least admirable or most detested about the so-called counterculture.
He was the “loudmouth” who had blasphemed Jesus Christ in 1966 when his remarks on Christianity and popular culture induced a firestorm of criticism; he was the Beatle with the longest hair, cozying up to radicals and fundraising for Black Panthers; and certainly he was the one most often in the press for drug busts, protests or stunts with Yoko Ono.
By the fall of 1970, in the aftermath of Nixon’s Cambodian incursion and the subsequent massacre of students at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, plus the catastrophic bombing of the Army Math Research Center on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, escalating tensions between young and old had metastasized.
So it was probably the bucolic cover photo on Lennon’s first solo LP that made my father think it was something low-key. Something new. No more of that controversial rhetoric.
He was wrong. Later that afternoon, one thing led to another and the lyrics printed on the album sleeve confirmed what my parents thought they heard emanating from my room. On “Working Class Hero,” the “f-word” was sung not once but twice in one song.
That was just the beginning. A closer examination of the lyrics revealed that in “I Found Out” and at length on a track called “God,” the singer-songwriter was pushing the envelope in ways that bore no relationship to Tin Pan Alley or other traditional venues. Lyrics that grappled with provocative themes? That was an understatement. Throughout this debut solo album, Lennon was trailblazing, smashing icons and breaking the rules.
As a corporate executive, my father could not imagine how any responsible company (i.e., the men at Capitol Records who distributed the ex-Beatles’ solo Apple recordings) could sign off on a work that harbored such unacceptable language. He was beyond shocked; he was stricken. That album was exchanged for another the very same day.
Ten years later, after Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980, my best friends and I exchanged symbolic holiday presents at Christmas. New copies of Lennon’s solo albums were distributed all around. That was something that made our clique a bit odd by the standards of others who were too young to experience the’60s in any active way; we were always retro. We simply preferred the ’60s and the ’50s to 1976 or 1979. And no matter the release date of his albums, John’s voice was always a conduit to the 1960s.
So, new copies of Lennon’s solo canon piled up quickly: In addition to “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” there were the works from 1971-75: “Imagine,” “Sometime in New York City,” “Mind Games,” “Walls and Bridges,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Plus the latest album, which had been released a few months earlier: 1980’s “Double Fantasy.”
One night while home on break from college that season, I took a shot. In my role as periodic family deejay, I was turned loose at the family room stereo.
Rather than play a whole side of any album, I selected ballads; nothing loud or edgy. And my father cried.
A spontaneous John Lennon medley that night consisted of tracks that were hushed or whispered or gently sung: “Love” and “Look at Me”; “Jealous Guy” and “Oh My Love”;and then the spine-tingling tour de force on his “Walls and Bridges” album.
“Nobody Loves You [When You’re Down and Out]” is a saloon song that John had hoped Frank Sinatra would perform (both Lennon and George Harrison admired how Sinatra had reconfigured George’s most famous song, “Something”); the lyric was in sync with Sinatra’s whole “One for My Baby”-“Only the Lonely”-“In the Wee Small Hours”-“Angel Eyes” ethos.
And the strings and the horns and the languorous tempo: It all sounded magnificent.
But it was the integrity of the lyric that got to my father: “Everybody’s hustlin’ for a buck and a dime/I’ll scratch your back and you knife mine.” He vigorously nodded.
And he cried because, at 50, he was feeling the ravages of time and the changes in his own life, career and his own sense of what was possible. Lennon’s voice soothed him.
It’s still happening across all generations, between genders, in myriad re-creations of John Lennon’s best compositions and in all media: on the Broadway stage, in concerts and videos, through books and documentaries, radio specials; and it’s a universal phenom.
Sixty-five years after he was born and 25 years after his death, the reason John Lennon mattered–and still matters–is more obvious than it was even in the fall of 1970.
All flaws notwithstanding (musically or personally), Lennon matters because his own ever-evolving search for meaning impelled him to leave behind, at age 40, eternal songs.
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Michael James Moore lives in Madison, Wis.
