John Lennon - A Rockstar's Utopia

After the exhilarating adventure of the Beatles came to a close, not without more than a hint of bitterness, John Winston Lennon threw himself into a passionate solo career, taking on a range of wildly different musical guises, from the "crazed" experimentalism of the Plastic Ono Band project to the polished singer-songwriter pop of his final albums. It was a dream shattered by the five shots fired at him in New York on December 8, 1980, by a deranged young man named Mark Chapman. Debate still rages over who was truly the Beatles' real genius (and there's plenty of evidence that could tip the scales toward McCartney), but one fact seems beyond dispute: after the end of the Fab Four, John Lennon proved to be the most complete "singer-songwriter" of the four, amassing a string of songs that remain etched in music history, from "Imagine" to "Jealous Guy", from "Mind Games" to "Woman".

His solo career, however, was marked by striking inconsistency, fuelled in part by his turbulent and often very public personal life, which saw him bound, for better or worse, to his partner and wife Yoko Ono. The "love at first sight" between the two had struck in 1966 at a London art gallery, when John was already on the outs with his wife Cynthia. Yoko Ono, a Japanese artist from a well-off family and a friend of avant-garde figures like John Cage and La Monte Young, is a complex and controversial figure: to many, she was the true cause of the Beatles' breakup and a grasping widow who exploited Lennon's legacy.

Even before the partnership with the Beatles came to an end, John Lennon had already tried his hand at going solo. In '64, for instance, he had managed to publish two nonsense books ("In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard In The Works"), and in '66 he made his acting debut in Dick Lester's comedy "How I Won the War". In musical terms, though, his first steps were all taken alongside Yoko Ono. In 1968 the couple recorded the unlikely avant-garde collage Unfinished Music, No.1: Two Virgins, a jumble of noises, conversations and absorbed eccentricities, (perhaps) inspired by Cage's conceptual music, which baffled most critics (while also fascinating a few "devotees"). The record also caused a scandal thanks to its famous cover photo showing the pair completely naked. On March 20, 1969, Lennon and Ono married in Gibraltar, and for their honeymoon decided to stage a series of eccentric pacifist performances. Thus were born the "Bed-Ins For Peace", the peculiar "group" interviews the newlyweds gave to journalists from beneath the sheets of their bed at the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam. It was during this unusual session that the single "Give Peace A Chance" was born, destined to become one of the great anthems of the peace movement.

A few months later came Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life With The Lions and The Wedding Album. The former gathers five bizarre compositions: side A is taken up entirely by "Cambridge 1919", a live set recorded at Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge, in which Lennon accompanies Ono's vocalizations and screams on electric guitar; side B, meanwhile, presents four tracks that are almost as unsettling: "No Bed For Beatle John" (about a hospital's refusal to admit Lennon during Ono's troubled pregnancy), "Baby's Heartbeat" (that is... the heartbeat of their unborn child), "Two Minutes Silence" (in the most literal sense, commemorating the miscarriage that followed) and "Radio Play", namely 12 minutes of noisy radio zapping (!). The Wedding Album finally closes the couple's experimental phase with two even more outlandish ideas: "John And Yoko", in which the two call out each other's names for more than 22 minutes, and "Amsterdam", 25 minutes of Yoko Ono moaning. The most interesting part of the whole operation is, therefore, the packaging: a box containing Lennon's marriage certificate and a photo of a slice of wedding cake.

Having shaken off his "experimental" hangover, Lennon returned to live performance in September 1969 at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival festival, backed by the Plastic Ono Band, namely Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton on guitar, bassist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White. The following month saw the release of the anti-heroin anthem "Cold Turkey", and Lennon checkmated the Queen, returning his MBE to protest the British government's "militaristic" policies. The start of a series of political and civic initiatives was also marked by "War Is Over! (If You Want It)", another slogan-song for his peace campaigns.

By 1970, the Beatles' story could be considered definitively over, yet Lennon, the man who had once called the four of them "more famous than Christ", chose not to make any official announcement. It was Paul McCartney who went public with the definitive split, right as a Lennon song was climbing the charts in Britain and America for the first time: "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)", a vibrant anthem recorded with George Harrison and steeped in a quasi-Buddhist spiritualism. Lennon took McCartney's move as a personal insult and fired back with his first "real" album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, shot through with a caustic, polemical streak against the Fab Four myth — a bitterness he would also vent in a fiery Rolling Stone interview. It's a sincere and deeply felt album, with lyrics that are harsh and direct, the expression of genuine, painful distress. Ranging from raw rock'n'roll to piano ballads and folk sketches, the ex-Beatle plumbs the depths of his own unease. The whole record is a kind of self-reckoning for Lennon, who at the time was undergoing psychoanalytic therapy with Yoko Ono under the famous American psychiatrist Arthur Janov, author of "The Primal Scream" (the book arguing for the need to revive the "primal scream" and regress to a childhood state in order to better live as adults). There's an epitaph for his mother Julia, struck by a bus before his very eyes when John was just 18: the gorgeous "Mother", introduced by funeral bells and torn apart by Lennon's desperate screams ("Mama don't go, daddy come home"). More than a heartfelt tribute, though, it's an act of accusation against the parents who separated when John was two, leaving him in the care of an aunt (and the album closes with a childlike lament by Lennon in memory of his late mother). Another aching love ballad is the tender "Love", for piano and voice. The "socialist" Lennon intones the anthems "Working Class Hero" and "Power To The People", while his tortured relationship with religion finds an outlet in the invective of "God" ("God is a concept by which/ we measure our pain"), in which he "renounces" everyone and everything (from Christ to Buddha, from Presley to Bob Dylan, down to the Beatles themselves). "I Found Out" and "Remember" are instead classic Lennon-style rock romps. The avant-garde ambitions have vanished (even though Ornette Coleman appears on the record), but Lennon has finally found his footing as a solo artist.

Having moved to New York, Lennon cemented his legend with the album Imagine (1971), which topped the charts worldwide. The title track's wistful, utopian ballad would remain his most famous song, his spiritual testament and an anthem for generations of pacifists and "dreamers" (“Imagine no possesions/ I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger/ A brotherhood of man/ Imagine all the people sharing all the world/ You may say I’m a dreamer/ but I’m not the only one/ I hope some day you’ll join us/ And the world will live as one”). But the album stands out for plenty of other tracks too, starting with the most famous ode to jealousy in rock history, "Jealous Guy", which countless artists would cover (though only Bryan Ferry managed to do it justice): an exquisite melody, elevated by a superb string arrangement. Then there's the other exceedingly delicate melodic gem "Oh My Love" (one of his most moving ballads), the vitriolic attack on Paul McCartney in "How Do You Sleep?" ("the only thing you done was Yesterday"!), the raw, abrasive "It's So Hard" and "Gimme Some Truth", and yet another pacifist anthem, this time set to a blues rhythm, "I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama". Overall, it's a mature, deeply felt album, which only falters at the very end, with the saccharine "Oh Yoko!".

After the Christmas release of the single "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", 1972 brought the double album Sometime In New York City, in which Lennon's political commitment became more radical, with a series of pacifist, feminist and anti-imperialist statements. Musically, though, the record, little more than a rehash of political slogans, fell short of expectations. A year later, Mind Games fared better, carried by its wistful title track (though not by much else...). Its lyrics also brought to light the crisis between John and Yoko, and soon after the two separated. The following year, however, after the Elton John and John Lennon concert at Madison Square Garden in New York, the couple began seeing each other again. In the meantime, Lennon had released another album, the mediocre Walls And Bridges (featuring a track co-written with Elton John, "Whatever Gets You Through the Night"), and was coming out of a highly self-destructive period, caught up in drugs and casual sex. In 1975 came Rock'n'roll, a collection of oldies marking a kind of "homecoming" to the roots of the music Lennon had always loved best.

After collaborating with David Bowie (co-writing the hit "Fame") and winning a legal battle against the Immigration Department, which had revoked his residency permit over marijuana possession, Lennon withdrew into the shadows, holing up in his Manhattan home with his wife and newborn son Sean.

Five years would pass before he returned to the recording studio, for the album Double Fantasy (1980), and success exploded once again, thanks to wistful ballads like "Woman" and "Just Like Starting Over". The former, in particular, seems to lay open Lennon's restless heart to a tenderness of unmatched romanticism (“Woman I know you understand/ The little child inside the man/ Please remember my life is in your hands/ And woman hold me close to your heart/ However, distant don’t keep us apart/ After all it is written in the stars… I never meant to cause you sorrow or pain/ So let me tell you again and again and again/ I love you – yeah, yeah – now and forever”): what woman wouldn't want a song like that written for her? The rest of the album, meanwhile, coasts along on a few pleasant pop ideas, though still a notch below his usual standards ("Watching the Wheels", "Cleanup Time"), alongside moments of genuine sentimentality ("Beautiful Boy", "Dear Yoko").

But just as the album was climbing the charts, tragedy struck on December 8, 1980, shattering forever the utopia of the dreamer from Liverpool. It was a bitterly cold night in New York, but John Lennon had chosen that very day to leave the house after months of seclusion. It was past eleven at night when a young man approached him — the same man he had signed an autograph for just a few hours earlier. It happened in an instant: five gunshots, Lennon's round glasses shattered and bloodied, his body on the ground in front of the Dakota Building. The killer was a disturbed young man who would claim to be his fan, Mark David Chapman. The night after the tragedy, Bruce Springsteen opened his concert by shouting to the crowd: "If it wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us wouldn't be here tonight". The world went into mourning and paused to remember him: on December 14, millions of fans joined together in ten minutes of silence in his honor. The album Double Fantasy and the single "(Just Like) Starting Over" settled in firmly at No. 1 on charts around the world, and much of his earlier catalogue enjoyed a renewed wave of popularity.

Over the years there has been no shortage of speculative ventures, often managed by Yoko Ono herself. Thanks to the copyright on her husband's image, the Japanese artist has indeed managed to close billion-dollar deals, which have earned her far more than her own hermetic musical projects. Yet the legend of the former Beatle has always remained untouched.

On the internet, for instance, Lennon is one of the most idolized artists. And among the most bizarre online tributes to his memory is "Imagine, and it's true!", a way of talking to an artificial John Lennon. By visiting the website triumphpc.com/john-lennon you can actually "chat" with a virtual John Lennon, programmed on the basis of more than a thousand statements and interviews given during his lifetime by the Liverpool musician.

Countless music polls have been won by the former Beatle (the latest, by "Channel 4-Hmv", named him "the most influential musician of all time"). "Imagine" has repeatedly been voted "song of the century". The autobiography "The Beatles Anthology", published in Britain in 2003, was the biggest publishing success of the new millennium, selling over 20 million copies. The Beatles' most recent compilation, "1", topped the charts in Europe, the US and Japan. And it was in Tokyo that the first permanent museum dedicated to John Lennon was opened.

Today, the myth of John Lennon remains as alive and relevant as ever, even though his dream - the dream of an entire generation - seems to have finally faded away.

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