It’s not a rock anthem or a message song. My favorite Lennon song is Julia, recorded 54 years ago today. Lennon’s posthumous album Milk & Honey (1984) included the great Nobody Told Me, with the lyric about “strange days, indeed” that is both bittersweet and comforting. After his murder, Double Fantasy ‘s first single (Just Like) Starting Over went to Number One on the charts. The world grieved, and musical tributes poured in, even from the other Beatles, who all appeared on George Harrison‘s single All Those Years Ago (1981).įans found solace in Lennon’s music. Lennon never had a chance to experience his career resurgence. Lennon had only returned to making music that year, with the album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Ono. On a snowy evening in December 1980, riding together in his car, my new boyfriend (now my husband) and I had to pull over to the side of the road as we heard the announcement on the radio that Lennon had been murdered in front of the Dakota Apartments where he and Ono lived with Lennon’s son Sean Lennon. But it was already over musically before I met her.”
“Everybody wants to blame someone for The Beatles’ breaking up. He felt he could never do that as one of The Beatles. He grew to want something else: a purer sound and a more profound art. Young Lennon had wanted to get out of Liverpool, make music, and become rich and famous. You could have pictures in your head and make pictures into words, and the music would carry the words along, like a big boat. “Rock ‘n’ Roll was a place to put everything. The same year, Lennon’s mother died of cancer. Lennon began playing Skiffle while Elvis Presley was playing a new kind of music in the USA. It is a simple, casual, shuffling style that uses one-string bass and washboards. Skiffle music was all the rage in England at the time. But I didn’t know what the hell to do about it.” When he was 12 years old, Lennon’s report card read: Art helped him express his sense of the absurd.
He also began to draw and write books starting when he was eight-years-old.
He became a leader of a street gang, shoplifting and hitching rides on trolley cars. Lennon slowly emerged from his loneliness. His mother lived nearby and was a sort of shadow figure in his life. Lennon was sent to live with his mother’s married sister, Mimi Smith, whose husband was a milkman. Lennon’s father later did time in jail for desertion, but when he got out, Lennon’s mother, Julia Lennon (née Stanley), had already found a new man. His father was a sailor who abandoned his son shortly after his birth, as Liverpool was being bombed by those damn Nazis. John Lennon was just 20 years old when The Beatles played small clubs in Hamburg.
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