Now I get Jesus.\u00c2\u00a0 What it was like to have your hero taken away from you before his time.\u00c2\u00a0 Martyred by a society that didn’t understand him.<\/p>\n
John Lennon wasn’t God when he was alive.\u00c2\u00a0 But in the ensuing twenty five years since his death, that’s what he’s become.\u00c2\u00a0 A man who listened to his inner tuning fork, who wasn’t worried about what SOCIETY told him to do, but what was right.<\/p>\n
They don’t know how to do it right in the U.S.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything’s too commercialized, too sensationalized.\u00c2\u00a0 To get the skinny, you’ve got to go to the BBC, where subjects are given respect.\u00c2\u00a0 I was stuck in traffic on the 101 when I pushed the button on my XM tuner to discover a ten hour special on John Lennon.<\/p>\n
Was John Lennon arrogant?<\/p>\n
He said he was just speaking the truth.\u00c2\u00a0 He was like a kid, unconditioned by society.\u00c2\u00a0 When he saw something he didn’t like, he railed against it.\u00c2\u00a0 He told the story of going to a hospital for the underprivileged in the Bahamas while filming "Help".\u00c2\u00a0 When he got to the state dinner that evening, he confronted his hosts with the squalid conditions and when they didn’t give a satisfactory response to his protestations, he started acting out.\u00c2\u00a0 Insulting them.\u00c2\u00a0 Clanging his silverware.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, it’s not about manners, but PEOPLE!<\/p>\n
We don’t have rock stars like this anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 If they’re not checking their SoundScan numbers, they’re checking their stock portfolio.\u00c2\u00a0 Their music doesn’t come from the heart, but the head.\u00c2\u00a0 Lennon’s genius was his came from both.<\/p>\n
Funny to hear the tracks of yore.\u00c2\u00a0 "It Won’t Be Long", which was seen as an album track back then, sounds like pure joy today.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, canonize "Never Mind The Bollocks", but that pink-jacketed record has not one tenth of the energy and emotion of the lead-off track on "With The Beatles".<\/p>\n
With digital transfers you can hear all the words now, and the inflections.\u00c2\u00a0 We played the vinyl so much that it was clouded in a sea of noise.\u00c2\u00a0 But, within those mixes was a living, human being, speaking his truth.\u00c2\u00a0 "A Hard Day’s Night" might have been a movie, but the title song is not a trifle.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the world-weary tune of someone who’s been at the top and is doing his best to continue to surf the wave, not even sure why he’s doing it anymore, other than it’s expected of him.<\/p>\n
Then there was the aforementioned "Help".\u00c2\u00a0 John, in his interview with Jann Wenner from 1970, asked, didn’t anybody GET IT?\u00c2\u00a0 That he was asking for HELP, some RELIEF from the onslaught.\u00c2\u00a0 Delineated so well in this documentary.\u00c2\u00a0 More than a gig a day.\u00c2\u00a0 From the hotel room to the car to the gig to the car to the hotel room to the airplane.<\/p>\n
Then they hit "In My Life".<\/p>\n
I guess everybody’s youth is special.<\/p>\n
But not everybody had the Beatles.<\/p>\n
I wouldn’t quite say we were asleep, but we were kind of mindless.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like today.\u00c2\u00a0 Kids are getting shot in Iraq, but nobody seems to notice here back home.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody’s still worried about his possessions, getting high.\u00c2\u00a0 But, the Beatles were a smack to the head that you didn’t expect.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like they invented a new kind of orgasm.\u00c2\u00a0 And we were THERE!<\/p>\n
John Lennon wouldn’t be quite the hero if he hadn’t been gunned down.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of the sheen had already rubbed off.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s how you become a religious figure, by being here for such a very short time.<\/p>\n
If John were still with us today, I’m not sure what message he would be sending.<\/p>\n
I hope it would have the energy of "Instant Karma".<\/p>\n
But the era is different.\u00c2\u00a0 By 1970, we were tired.\u00c2\u00a0 The sixties had worn us out.\u00c2\u00a0 We were ready to be sunny.\u00c2\u00a0 Ready to believe in OURSELVES again, after realizing we couldn’t believe in the government, or the Beatles for that matter.<\/p>\n
Maybe he’d be singing "Gimme Some Truth".\u00c2\u00a0 God, we need that in the era of Fox News, in a time when the Administration is on an endless disinformation campaign.<\/p>\n
But what I’d expect John Lennon would be playing is something akin to "Come Together".<\/p>\n
There was not a lot of advance notice for "Abbey Road".\u00c2\u00a0 We kept hearing the band was breaking up.\u00c2\u00a0 And, all these years later, the record is remembered most for Paul McCartney’s second side and George Harrison’s "Something".\u00c2\u00a0 But what drew us in, what truly resonated, was "Come Together".<\/p>\n
Oh, it wasn’t a radio thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody bought the record the week it came out.\u00c2\u00a0 We were sitting in the high school library and somebody started pounding out the rhythm on the table.\u00c2\u00a0 And Gary Fialk started singing the "shhh" part.\u00c2\u00a0 And then maybe it was Marc Goloff who filled in the rest of the instrumentation.\u00c2\u00a0 And, when we had the intro nailed, at the proper moment, we all started to sing, quietly, under our breath.<\/p>\n
Here come old flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly We weren’t worried about the librarian, weren’t worried about making noise, this was more important than discipline, than decorum, this was OUR LIFE!<\/p>\n That’s what singular John Lennon did.\u00c2\u00a0 He brought us all together.<\/p>\n We could use some of that right now.<\/p>\n If only the Evangelical Christians.\u00c2\u00a0 And the punks.\u00c2\u00a0 All those with tattoos and nose rings.\u00c2\u00a0 If only there were something we could all agree on, believe in together.<\/p>\n That’s what the Beatles were.<\/p>\n And, make no mistake, the Beatles were John Lennon’s band.\u00c2\u00a0 After all, he was two years OLDER than Paul McCartney.\u00c2\u00a0 And, at that age, two years make all the difference.<\/p>\n There are places I remember It’s hard to keep going.\u00c2\u00a0 With my father gone.\u00c2\u00a0 My ex-wife too.\u00c2\u00a0 You get older, and it’s an endless series of losses.\u00c2\u00a0 It gets harder and harder to figure life out.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe that’s why John Lennon retreated into the Dakota.\u00c2\u00a0 Because everything society told him he should want, what he worked so hard to achieve, didn’t fix his problems.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, John Lennon was unable to bask in the glory of his own work.\u00c2\u00a0 As the creator, he could not be touched by his genius, he could only give.<\/p>\n Listening to the tunes today, my life flashed by in my mind.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only the night of his death, when I was arrested for driving under the influence and locked up in the drunk tank, but also those days in the sixties, when I had hope.<\/p>\n You can’t lose hope.\u00c2\u00a0 John Lennon gave us hope.\u00c2\u00a0 That everything could work out if you were just yourself.\u00c2\u00a0 That you didn’t have to play the game, that you could make it on your own terms.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s why we won’t let his memory go.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now I get Jesus.\u00c2\u00a0 What it was like to have your hero taken away from you before his time.\u00c2\u00a0 Martyred by a society that didn’t understand him. John Lennon wasn’t God when he was alive.\u00c2\u00a0 But in the ensuing twenty five years since his death, that’s what he’s become.\u00c2\u00a0 A man who listened to his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-44","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
He got ju-ju eyeball, he one holy roller<\/em><\/p>\n
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone, and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all<\/em><\/p>\n