It Was Thirty Years Ago Today...

,...that John Lennon was murdered, announced live to the nation by Howard Cosell during a Monday Night Football broadcast. Within minutes of the confirmation I got a phone call from a friend who knew of my love for The Beatles' music but I was so distraught I couldn't talk. I was twenty-two years old and The Beatles, and especially John Lennon, were my musical heroes. I was very shaken up, the way a young person would be when confronted with the death of someone they figured would be around forever. I spent the few weeks afterwards writing a twenty page tribute to the man and his music. It's still somewhere around here, in a box downstairs buried deep among many other boxes.

One of the things I stated in that paper was my conviction that John Lennon was the primary reason for the band's success, the musical force that put it all together. It was his toughness, his cold-blooded thirst to make good music, that mattered. Without Lennon, Paul McCartney was (is) a talented pop-star. With Lennon adding the necessary edge to Paul's sweetness, they were titans. It can be argued the other way, I admit. Paul's pop-music mentality and keener sense of melody smoothed out some of Lennon's jagged edges. Alone, as their post-Beatle careers prove, they were one-dimensional and somewhat limited musicians who occasionally produced sparks of brilliance.  Together, they stormed the world.

I don't have much time tonight to flesh out my thoughts here but I do want to say that it always baffled me about Lennon's leftism. As a kid, during the movies and interviews, he always seemed to be having a ball and laughing at the entire Beatles spectacle as if he knew it was absurd. He seemed like a man who saw the world as it was, a man of few illusions. How could he fall for all the socialist shibboleths?

I blamed Yoko, and I'm still convinced she had something to do with him turning more political. By the time of his death however, he was no political activist. He was a stay-at-home dad, concerned primarily with his family and their well-being. Fatherhood and experience had forced him to grow up.

I say all of this as an introduction to this column by Jordan Michael Smith in The American Conservative in which he dredges up an interview Lennon gave to Playboy a few weeks before he was murdered. In the interview, Lennon says some things which make it clear he had left his leftist illusions behind:

When it was pointed out that a Beatles reunion could possibly raise $200 million for a poverty-stricken country in South America, Lennon had no time for it. “You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles.” It’s a critique of foreign aid readers of P.T. Bauer would be familiar with. “You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it.”

How many current pop-stars have that kind of realism, to admit that these events they put on do little good? Probably some of them realize it but which of them would admit it?

And then this:

I dabbled in so-called politics in the late Sixties and Seventies more out of guilt than anything,” he revealed. “Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face, to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.

“The hardest thing is facing yourself,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.””

That's the clear-eyed realist I always thought he was. Read the whole thing because their is much more. The interview shows a man who'd grown up, who was facing the world with a new attitude, and who was finally comfortable in his own skin. Things were much simpler for him now: he was happiest spending time with his wife and child. John Lennon was always a work-in-progress (aren't we all?) The saddest part about his murder had nothing to do with us. It had to do with his wife and his child and himself, his life cut short just as he'd arrived at a moment of peace and contentment.