The Revelations of St. John the Divine: John Lennon by Philip Norman

By Mark R. Leffler

“That song (“Woman’) broke my heart after he died; I couldn’t listen to it for about ten years without getting upset because I was there when he recorded that, and I remember it coming into the universe. And I remember how when he dies “Double Fantasy” was all over the radio, you couldn’t get away from it. Every time I heard his voice it was like a knife in my heart, it hurt so much. And it took me a good ten years before hearing his voice wasn’t an incredibly difficult thing.”

                                                                                                                                  Sean Lennon

            Two of the major figures in my life growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania were Bruce Lee and John Lennon. Both had lives that were derailed by personal tragedy and their deaths affected me more profoundly than Jesus or any family member.

            Bruce Lee posters covered my wall, and he had already died by the time I became aware of him. Unlike Lennon, who was killed by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, on a cold winter night in 1980, Lee died of a brain hemorrhage on the brink of world wide superstardom waiting for the release of his first major Western film “Enter the Dragon.“

            But John Lennon was alive and well and living in NYC during my teen years. I grew up, like most kids of my generation, with the two double LP greatest hits collections, known as the Red and Blue collections. The Red collection was most of their early hits like “She Loves You”, “Help” and “Ticket to Ride”, while the Blue LP, focused on the later more surreal numbers like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life”.

            Then late one December night word passed through the Sig Ep fraternity house I was boarding in that Lennon had been shot. It followed shortly thereafter that he was dead. Even weirder, much of the country received the news from Howard Cosell, who interrupted the call of a Monday Night Football game by announcing “but then we must remember this is just a football game….”   Whaaaaa?

            The life of John Winston Ono Lennon has been detailed and written about more than almost any other figure of the 20^th century. His life has been dissected and analyzed by dozens of skilled biographers. Which is why it is surprising that there is much left unsaid about the most intellectual and artistically daring of The Beatles.

            Listening to the music made during the brief career of The Beatles, it is evident that Lennon chaffed at the role of pop star and American Idol. A decade before, it should be noted, that role was filled by such profound characters as Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Pat Boone. By contrast Lennon  was a profoundly serious guy on a profoundly serious search, first for girls and money, later for peace and enlightenment.

            And his music is evidence of that seriousness.

            John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (851 pgs, Ecco Books/Harper Collins, 2008) is a meticulously researched and thoughtful look, almost thirty years after his death, at one of the greatest songwriters and musicians of the 20^th century. Lennon was a product of his time, a baby boomer who believed his life was saved by Rock and Roll. It probably was, as Norman illustrates.

            Lennon and McCartney were the Rogers and Hammerstein of their age, and their music was the soundtrack to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of Feminism and the Sixties as we remember them (1965-75). While most of his life with the Beatles has been well documented, his life before appearing with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr on the Ed Sullivan Show in front of hundreds of screaming adolescent girls is not as well known except to the most dedicated of Beatlemaniacs.

            This is where Norman’s fame as a rock journalist really pays off for the reader. There are dozens of anecdotes illustrating his life being raised by his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George, stories from friends and schoolmates, ex-girlfriends others. He was the product of a liaison between a single Liverpool girl (his mother Julia, later immortalized in his solo song of the same name) and a merchant seaman named Fred Lennon.

            The singular formative event of his life was his mother’s death, killed in an unspeakably stupid car accident just when she and John were becoming close in his teenage years. The chapter dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy leads with the quote: “I was in a blind rage for two years. I was either drunk or fighting.”

            Many of us have felt the power of music to transform us and make sense of a world that often offers only pain, heartache and tragedy. But in the case of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, their lives were truly saved by rock and roll. Anyone fortunate enough to listen to early tapes of them performing live in Hamburg, Germany can hear the joy and raucous energy that these two Baby Boomers brought to the stage. Both had lost mothers (Paul’s to cancer when he was a boy) and the bond between them would produce some of the greatest music of their generation.

            There are two other books by Norman about The Beatles, and his clout allowed him official sanction from Lennon’s widow, the much reviled Yoko Ono Lennon, who many fans, rightly or wrongly, blame for breaking up the band. Lennon’s own son Sean discounts this, and tells Norman that he considers Plastic Ono Band to be one of the “greatest rock and roll records ever.” Since Lennon’s son declines to participate in any of the hundreds of Lennon memorials held annually, it’s a treat and a pleasure to read his comments shared with this most trusted of biographers.

            There are many Lennon biographies to be found on the shelves of book stores and libraries, but this large and serious book is one that deserves a place in the collection of any Beatles fan as well as younger readers just becoming aware of this most amazing of musical artists.