To mark the 42nd anniversary of John Lennon's death, extracts from two earlier posts, both written in 2010. Links to the full versions can be found at the end.
One incident remembered from childhood bears out the "semi-religious" tag being applied to pop music for myself and my brothers. My father was advising a priest who was staying overnight, and we, the children, had a lot of opportunity to talk to him. I think (and this sounds like a lousy joke but isn't) he may have needed time off to reflect on his calling, as a later article in the Daily Express - evidently a class act even then - dignified his dark night of the soul with the heading:
VOCATION? NO - VACATION!
Anyway, the wide-ranging conversation came round to the subject of pop music, and this man of God shocked us by claiming that the Beatles regularly laughed themselves silly at the "cripples and hunchbacks" who would be waiting to greet them at airports; it was all there in the biography, he said, if we didn't believe it.
I can barely remember the incident, let alone the timescale; all I recall is at some point later my eldest brother proclaiming: "It doesn't matter - JL still is King."
*
Having arranged to see Nowhere Boy yesterday with my Cheapo Gaffe Friend, I was late and wasn't allowed to enter the cinema as I was just over the thirty minute limit. I wanted to scream: It's not fair! I'm going to appreciate it more than her, what with my extra knowledge about the Beatles, having read all the biographies including the "spurious" one - I've even got a complete book about the "Paul is dead" theory - I mean, c'mon.
But (of course) I didn't. I walked away and mooched around in bookshops for an hour. Ironically, had Cheapo [Records] still been open I'd have gone there instead, as this was the Prince Charles Cinema, only a couple of minutes' walk away.
There was, however, a reward of sorts later, when she emerged from the cinema and spoke these words: "I'd forgotten she was run over."
But the feeling I had at that moment - an unlovely male sense of superiority about being in possession of more Beatle fax'n'info, basically - vanished in the act of writing this down.
Who knows what Lennon's life would have been like if that accident hadn't taken place? Would there still have been the same anger-fuelled hunger to create? That part of [Mark] Shipper's book [Paperback Writer] feels real enough. In the song Dear John, when Lennon sings:
Put the TV on, have a snack
Wash your mother's back
it may be a reference to Yoko, whom he called "Mother", but if it's more than that (just as the White Album's Julia is about both his mother and Yoko) then there's something very moving, likewise, about that line in the later song, even if it was intended as a throwaway: the same wish for intimate contact with someone who can never now be reached, except fitfully and imperfectly ("meaning less") through music - the half-formed nature of the demo is somehow appropriate - and in the light of the more serious point at the end of Shipper's book the song also serves to reassure us that Dakota John and Beatle John are one and the same, creating out of the same deep need.
... You can tell yourself you're chatting to John at the John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project here. The results are variable, although today he greeted me with:
You are what you are Anthony . Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you'll get it as soon as you like.
Happy Christmas in advance, John - wherever you are.
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