Tag: John Lennon

If it was 30 years ago, why do I remember it so well?

“The Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization.”


Unfairly or not, I always associate John Lennon’s death with the breakup of my girlfriend the week before. It was Monday, December 1, 1980, and, unlike all of those “grownup” breakups in the movies of that time, this was painful and acrimonious. About the only cinematic aspect of it was the line from near the end of the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, delivered by Alvy Singer (Allen): “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

So when the FOLLOWING Monday night came around, it was incumbent upon me to do whatever I could that would be contrary to what I would likely be doing with her. The choice was clear: I needed to watch Monday Night Football. It’s not as though I never watched the game, but it was usually a bit here and there. This time I was going to watch the whole damn thing.

And, if I recall correctly, it was a pretty close game between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, when announcer Howard Cosell said at about 11:15 p.m., “One of the great figures of the entire world, one of the great artists, was shot to death horribly at the Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City. John Lennon is dead. He was the most important member of the Beatles, and the Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization. Not just people in Liverpool, where the group was born, but the people of the world.”

Here’s a snippet of the broadcast after that point.

So the first thing I do is call my good friend Karen, who had written, for our sixth-grade newsletter, a fantasy story about winning tickets to a Beatles concert, and who, that very fall, was working for his record company and promoting his and Yoko’s album, Double Fantasy. But her line was busy. I called my ex-girlfriend and told her; she was appreciative of the fact that I told her. I called Karen several times after that, but the line remained busy. I began to listen to my favorite radio station, WQBK-FM, Q104, and listen to the requests pouring in. It was either that night or the next morning that I asked for, oddly, The End by the Doors, and they played the whole 11-minute version.

Eventually reached Karen at about 1:40 a.m. When she heard my voice, she just cried for 10 minutes. We talked the next day, when I went out and bought, at lunchtime, Rock ‘n’ Roll; there wasn’t a copy of Double Fantasy to be had.

And thinking about time period STILL fills me with a surprising amount of sadness.

JEOPARDY! factoid: Calling him a Revolutionary, in 2000 Fidel Castro dedicated a statue of John on the 20th anniversary of his murder.

I was watching LENNONYC this past weekend – it’ll be repeated on my local PBS station tonight – and it was a good portrait of John’s life from 1971 until the end. Much of the info I knew, but a few bits I did not, such as Yoko going back to the studio after John died to listen to his outtakes.
***
Denise Nesbitt remembers.

John Lennon Would Have Been 70

“No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky”


The Beatles were my favorite group, and John Lennon was my favorite Beatle. As I stated on Ringo’s 70th, I decided I would list my 10 favorite songs of each Beatle on his 70th birthday, or what would be his 70th. Here’s my JL list, with YouTube links throughout.

  1. Crippled Inside – Frankly, I have lots of #10 choices, but this one jumped out at me this month playing all my Lennon CDs. Maybe it’s because of the juxtaposition between the title and the jaunty melody.
  2. Mind Games – “Love IS the answer.”
  3. Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – I had a girlfriend who thought this was the silliest Christmas song ever. (Had she heard Macca’s Wonderful Christmastime?) But I’m very fond, though I tended to cry when I heard it in December 1980. “War is over if you want it.” Idealist? Naive? Don’t care.
  4. Cold Turkey – with its blistering guitar line, it FELT like drug withdrawal.
  5. Love – very simple, some say simplistic, song.
  6. Gimme Some Truth – I like this so much that I tend to sing harmony vocals, mostly a third above the melody, in the “No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky” section. Those particular lyrics always amused me.
  7. Nobody Told Me – I wasn’t really paying attention. When Double Fantasy came out in 1980, I thought that was going to be it for John’s musical output. Then Milk and Honey came out posthumously in 1983, and I felt happy. And I can relate: “Nobody told me there’d be days like these.”
  8. How Do You Sleep? – from the generally mellow Imagine album, it is a really nasty song directed as his friend and former writing partner. Long before the smackdowns rappers were doing on records, John was dissing Paul, and doing it so well! Love the strings; I even forgive the rhyme of Yesterday and Another Day, since it namechecks a couple of Macca songs. What did it mean that George appeared on the track?
  9. (Just Like) Starting Over – the first single from Double Fantasy in 1980, I was so glad to hear John having fun after his five-year self-imposed musical exile. Of course, after he died, the irony of this tune became quite unbearable for a while. Now I think of it fondly, though the other, posthumous singles from this album (Watching the Wheels and Woman, et al) I just never listened to enough to really appreciate.
  10. Instant Karma – always thought it was just the perfect single, from the first two notes, followed by the drum fill. In fact, the little drum solos through I rather like as well. Feels like a follow-up of sorts to the Beatles’ Ballad of John and Yoko.

You’ll note that Imagine did not make the list. I’m afraid that it suffers in my heart from massive overplaying, not just his version but many others, from the 9/11 tribute album to the Glee soundtrack. I’ve just ODed on it, though I always liked the piano part before the vocals come up.

Oh, and happy 35th birthday to John’s son, Sean, who I saw perform a couple years ago.

Picture courtesy of Google
LENNONYC – Preview Excerpt
Watch a clip from the AMERICAN MASTERS: LENNONYC, a new film that takes an intimate look at the time Lennon, Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, spent living in New York City during the 1970s. The film premieres nationally Monday, November 22 at 9pm on PBS.

Salon review: Sundance: John Lennon, angry young man; British hit “Nowhere Boy” delivers a compelling family melodrama about the future Beatle’s Liverpool teen years

Mitch Miller & The Gang – Give Peace A Chance

What if the Beatles were on Motown Records?: an imaginative fiction.

Julian and Sean Lennon Come Together; Having Grown Up Separately in the Shadow of a Beatle, the Half-Brothers Discuss Their Careers and Their Close Bond (CBS Sunday Morning)

Podcast: Coverville 710: The John Lennon Cover Story III

John Lennon: Working Class Mythmaker. I really like this piece. Interestingly, it has a clip about the Beatles and Jesus controversy; the subsequent clip noted the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the protests.

Ringo Starr is 70

Besides my Top 10 Ringo songs, versions of a couple of the same songs by John and George.


I decided that, for all four of the Beatles, I would list my Top 10 favorite songs on their 70th birthdays, or in the case of John and George, what would have been the big seven-oh.

Ringo is easy, because I have relatively few of his albums, as well as a live triple-CD anthology and a greatest hits collection. This will NOT include any live versions of his old Beatles tunes.

ten It’s All Down To Goodnight Vienna – a most peculiar song by John Lennon, who plays piano, with odd scansion to boot. jl-piano.

nine Liverpool 8 -. A history lesson.

ate Oh My My -featuring background vocals by Martha Reeves and Merry Clayton, those great Billy Preston keyboards, and Tom Scott on the sax.

seven Love Me Do. As obsessive Beatles fans know – guilty as charged – Ringo replaced Pete Best shortly before the Beatles went into the studio for the first time with producer George Martin. Martin, disliking Best’s drums, and unfamiliar with Starr’s, hired session musician Andy White to playing drums, relegating Ringo to playing tambourine. Ringo STILL seemed miffed by this while he, Paul, and George were making the Anthology albums and videos in the mid 1990s. This record is, I suspect, partially closure for the drummer.

six Step Lightly, mislabeled as Six O’Clock; indeed, most of this YouTube guy’s Ringo videos are given incorrect titles. This is from the Ringo album and features the dancing feet of Richard Starkey, MBE.

five Early 1970, a piece about the other Beatles at the time of the breakup. It is noteworthy that all of them play and write songs for Ringo, even as acrimony amongst the others festered.

for No No Song. This always reminded me of a variation on Randy Newman’s Mama Told Me Not To Come. Ringo’s old drinking buddy, Harry Nilsson, does the backing vocals.

three I’m the Greatest. A cheeky song that John Lennon wrote for his friend who was also born in 1940. Here’s John Lennon’s demo version.

too It Don’t Come Easy – with Badfinger on backing vocal; here’s George Harrison’s demo version.

won Photograph . A song co-written by George and Ringo, with George also on backing vocals and 12-string guitar. As Ringo mentioned at the Concert for George in November 2002, a year after George’s death, the song has taken on a whole new meaning:
Ev’ry time I see your face,
It reminds me of the places we used to go.
But all I’ve got is a photograph,
And I realise you’re not coming back anymore.

Ringo took a lot of heat in recent years for declaring that he would no longer sign autographs. In subsequent discussions, he indicated that he was tired of signing items only to see them on eBay or Craigslist the next week; I sympathize with that.

Ringo kicks off Live from the Artists Den on PBS this week.

Happy birthday, Richie.

Wicked Wednesday Meme: John Lennon

I’m religiously cynical. Or cynically spiritual.

I discovered a new meme: “Hi and welcome to our brand new Wednesday Wickedness. We are like other memes in that we will ask you ten questions each and every Wednesday. But our little ‘twist’ is that each week we will pick a famous person and pick ten of their quotes. Each of our questions will be based on the quotes. Got it? Great! Let’s begin this week’s meme!

“Today we picked John Lennon. Here’s Wednesday Wickedness!”

1. “Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak.” Who was the last celebrity that you thought was bright until you saw them interviewed?

Actually, this happens all of the time, not so much with celebrities as much as with politicians. I keep thinking that they got nominated or even elected, so they must have brains in their respective heads. But not necessarily: see Dr. Rand Paul, e.g.

2. “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” Do you get upset, and do you think you’re being lazy when you do nothing?

Last Saturday, all I did was write a few blog posts, read a week’s worth of newspapers, watch a week’s worth of news. Was that “nothing”? Define “nothing”. In any case, I don’t get upset even if others might consider it laziness.

3. “If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.” Do you think that the U.S. and our wars seem to just ignore our history?

Well, not just our history. The Afghanistan war seems to be ignoring Afghanistan’s history; see, e.g., the Soviet Union’s failed attempts to “fix” the country.

4. “I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.” Do you feel you conform just to fit in?

To a degree, don’t we all? That said, I do have my freak elements.

5. “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” Do you feel that you at times do not enjoy the moment because you are worried about what comes next?

On the contrary, I think I probably should worry more about the future, but I tend to have a que sera, sera attitude.

6. “The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.” Does it seem that when you learn more about yourself, that others’ opinions of you are more likely to seem stupid?

All unwarranted negative opinions about me are stupid, by definition. Thing is, I care less than I used to about what other people think.

7. “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” Do you feel that when you share beliefs with someone, there is more likelihood of accomplishing a goal?

Sure, but only because I’m undisciplined and need someone to shore up my weak spots, as I do with another.

8. “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” How religious or spiritual are you? Or how cynical are you? (Pick your question.)

I’m religiously cynical. Or cynically spiritual. I’m a person of faith, but I know that, to some degree or other, we all create our religion in our own image. I buy into the loving, compassionate, just God. Others, in my opinion, buy into a warlike and/or punitive deity.

9. “Before Elvis there was nothing.” Do you think as rock ‘n roll history is concerned, that Elvis had that big an impact?

Of course. He legitimized rhythm & blues and gospel and country to a larger audience. My father hated Elvis, but his commercial success, particularly before he went into the Army, was an important development in the roots music eventually coming more to the fore.

10. “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that.” Do you feel after what has happened on Wall Street and our financial institutions, that his quote is more relevant today?

That there are maniacs is clear. The financial meltdown is only one small part of it. You have global warming deniers making death threats against the scientists who accept global warming. You have politicians that just boldly lie, even though the public record is clear. You have politicians calling simultaneously for less government and more, depending on their issues. Add to that, birthers and other loonies…

The 30-Day Challenge: Day 3- Favorite Musician

He’s not the greatest singer, or guitar player, or pianist, though more than adequate.

Does one have a favorite musician? I mean, I do love:
B.B. King’s guitar
Jerry Douglas’ dobro
Rick Wakeman’s organ
Alison Krauss’ fiddle
Itzhak Perlman’s violin
Pete Seeger’s banjo
Bill Evans’ piano
Hubert Laws’ flute (he plays on It’s Love by the Rascals
Nat Cole’s vocals (the voice is an instrument – and I have an irrational affection for the way he says BEER)

But truly, anyone who knows me for a while KNOWS that the ultimate choice will be John Lennon. I have a picture of him in my office (thanks, Rocco) and a picture of the IMAGINE section of Strawberry Fields in New York City (thanks, honey).

He’s not the greatest singer, or guitar player, or pianist, though more than adequate. He IS a great songwriter, of course.

So, what Lennon song should I link to? WWJD? (What would John do?) It being Memorial Day weekend, he’d probably find an alternative version of
I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier.

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