JOHN LENNON, who, as a dominating member of the Beatles, played an important
part in a pop music success extraordinary even by the standards of that
extraordinary genre, died after being shot outside his New York home on
December 8. He was 40.
The Beatles dominated the pop music of the 1960s, creating in the
“Beatlemania” which struck their audiences and young followers wherever they
went, paroxysms of enthusiasm which rivalled and even surpassed anything
that had gone before them in the short history of rock and roll. Hairstyles,
styles of dress, even styles of speaking — for the first time a
transatlantic twang ceased to be a sine qua non for pop performers —
followed in their wake. Indeed, not only were they an astonishing success in
America but they completely wrested the palm from the country where rock and
roll had been born and bred, and which in those days seemed to have a
prescriptive right to adjudicate on what was feasible and what was not, in
pop music. After the Beatles it was never again possible for British groups
to think of themselves as the poor relations in pop music. The Beatles paved
the way for the American successes of the Rolling Stones and many others.
They encompassed the change of heart which could lead an American rock
writer to remark in the later 1960s — “Everyone’s just wild to see an
English rock band”.
But this success was not merely a matter of finding a new formula to succeed
the languorous balladeering into which rock and roll seemed largely to have
sunk after the initial drive of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly
ran into the sands in the early 1960s. The Beatles brought a new musicality
to pop music which succeeded in giving it a much wider appeal than it had
had previously. In their genial, at any rate seldom less than pleasing,
melodies and enticing, attractive harmonies, they somehow gave an impression
of being more musically literate than any of their predecessors — though in
fact none of the four could either read or write music.
And this impression, coupled with their “cleanlooking” appearance, gave pop
music a sudden entrée into quarters where it had previously been virtually a
proscribed subject. The mothers of their besotted fans liked the Beatles too
— could contemplate in them, perhaps, future sons-in-law; while in the most
severely critical musicological circles immoderate rhapsodies were to be
heard on their musicianly attainments. With the pronouncement from one
distinguished critic that the Beatles were the “greatest song-writers since
Schubert” they appeared, as ambassadors for pop music, to have secured an
accolade for their genre that would have seemed impossible a few years
previously.
Of this success, John Lennon was an important — perhaps the most important —
component. It was he who had started the group. With Paul McCartney he
composed the songs which first projected the Beatles to fame. His caustic
wit, his intellectual sharpness and perhaps his sense of what was likely to
be good for the mental health of a group of young men caught up in the kind
of success which overtook the Beatles, were formative influences on the way
the Beatles behaved. It was he who, in particular, disliked the fact that
the Beatles appeared to have become the property of their more respectable
fans. And when first the distancing from, and then the alienation of, those
fans began with the retreat into kaftans, joss sticks and drugs, it bore the
hallmarks of Lennon’s cast of mind and intellectual preoccupations.
John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940. His father, Fred
Lennon, a ship’s steward, and his mother, Julia, separated when he was a
small child and John was brought up by his aunt Mimi. He was educated at
Dovedale Primary School, Quarry Bank High School and the Liverpool College
of Art. A rebel in an era before child rebellion was officially subsidized
by adult indulgence, he took little interest in the formal side of his
schooling and in consequence made little formal progress. However, his head
master at Quarry Bank did take an interest and it was this interest which
enabled him to get into Liverpool College of Art in spite of the fact that
he had none of the necessary certificates.
At art college he followed the prevailing mode of dress and behaviour, that of
the Teddy Boy, and under the tutelage of his mother, who had reappeared in
his life when he was in his early teens, learnt the banjo. The skiffle craze
was then sweeping through Britain and this species of music which required
little or no formal musical knowledge was enabling thousands of teenagers to
participate in music making.
In particular hundreds of groups sprang up all over Liverpool, among them the
Quarrymen, the group Lennon had formed at school. This group was joined in
1956 by a boy from another Liverpool school, Paul McCartney. George Harrison
joined in the following year and later Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best as the
drummer, to give the group the final form in which it was to take the world
by storm. Lennon’s mother died in a road accident in 1958, an event which
affected him deeply.
Between 1956 and 1960, the name of Lennon’s group was to undergo several
metamorphoses — from the Quarrymen it was successively the Moondogs,
Rainbows, Silver Beatles and finally Beatles. None of these transformations
brought much success, however; the group came close to being discovered at
talent shows and auditions on a couple of occasions, but a full career
launch evaded it. For several years the group played, in common with its
many rivals, the round of coffee bars, parties, small teenage clubs and
dances, often for slender remuneration.
Lennon had however found that his meeting with McCartney enabled him to
compose songs and the confidence this gave both men enabled them to persist.
As these songs and their performance took on a more distinctive quality they
began to become known, especially in the Cavern club in Liverpool, one of
the foci of the new Merseyside sound.
From 1960 onwards they also played at a nightclub in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn —
their first formal professional engagement to that date and one which had an
important effect on their development. In the next two years they were to
play at this and other Hamburg night clubs, and it was a song recorded in
Germany which brought them to the attention of Brian Epstein, who was then
running a record department in a shop in Liverpool. More discouragement was
to follow — they were turned down by almost every major recording company in
Britain — but it was Epstein’s persistence which finally saw them to a
recording contract with Parlophone in 1962.
Their first single, “Love Me Do”, was released in October of
that year and entered the charts drawing considerable attention; “Please
Please Me” was at Number One in the January of 1963. These records were
merely the first of a stream of singles which had by the summer of 1963
established a rhythmical style which took the music business, and the young,
by storm. “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You”,
“I Want To Hold Your Hand” — these and countless others
invaded the dancefloors and discotheques with their fresh, insistent rhythms
and boisterous — almost healthy — message, and drove the outmoded sentiment
of the earlier 1960s before them.
This was the zenith of Beatlemania. On tour in this country they were mobbed
wherever they went. America succumbed, audiences even outdoing the scenes of
frenzy registered in Britain. With their triumphant return from the United
States the Beatles seemed almost to become a piece of national property.
They appeared to advertise abroad an English way of life — dynamic,
creative, progressive, forward looking — that was pleasantly at odds with
the received image of a country suffering economic, political and foreign
policy problems, with only a past to find pleasure in. And in 1966, the
group’s joint appointment as Members of the Order of the British Empire
echoed a general feeling that the Beatles had been at the spearhead of the
formation of a new role for Britain in the world.
The Swinging Sixties were suddenly launched. The lead in progressive music had
been plucked from America’s grasp; that in fashion was wrested from Paris.
In design, architecture, motor engineering, lifestyle, the national mood was
suddenly buoyant and the Beatles seemed to be the apostles of this buoyancy.
Lennon himself had, in fact, had to acquiesce somewhat reluctantly in this
species of popularity. It was not in his iconoclastic nature to relish, for
example, an invitation to a formal banquet from a grateful local council.
Journalists, too, found that his barbed ripostes went some way beyond the
characteristic Beatles jollity and candour.
This individuality became more and more marked after 1966, when the group had
ceased to tour and largely lived as individuals, coming together for
recording sessions. Lennon embraced transcendental meditation, drugs and
religion, especially that of a mystical kind.
This did not stop the production of music. A flow of albums continued,
culminating in the brilliant “Sergeant Pepper”; but Lennon now composed his
own songs instead of working jointly with McCartney. Lennon’s own
contribution to these became, too, more surreal and enigmatic with songs
like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Strawberry Fields”. In 1968, too,
he divorced his first wife, Cynthia, whom he had married in Liverpool in
1962, and became associated with the Japanese film producer, Yoko Ono, who
later became his wife. This seemed to increase his distance not only from
the other Beatles but from the rest of the world. His returning the insignia
of MBE in what he described as a protest against British involvement in
Vietnam, Biafra and Nigeria appeared to signal his final renunciation of
what the Beatles had stood for in their early days.
The end of the Beatles eventually came in 1971 when the partnership was
finally wound up in the High Court. The Beatles Fan Club was disbanded in
the following year and it was left to the millions of followers merely to
dream of that chimaerical event, a reunion in the recording studio of the
four members of the group.
Lennon then began a long seclusion with his wife, Yoko Ono, surfacing only
occasionally to make headlines with news that he was struggling against
drugs, was resisting the attempts of the United States authorities to deport
him, or that he had exchanged roles with his wife and was now devoting his
entire energies to bringing up the son of their marriage.
Only recently had he shown signs of ending this seclusion. A new single, “Starting
Over”, recently released, seemed to mark the end of a virtual five-year
retirement and this record was merely a precursor to a new album, “Double
Fantasy”. At the time of his death, Lennon’s fortune was estimated at
£100 million.
Lennon had a son, Julian, of his first marriage and a son, Sean, of his second.
