Thirty Years Past
Dec. 8th, 2010 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThirty years ago today - though not on this side of the Atlantic, where it would be the early morning hours of December 9th - John Lennon, returning from the studio, was shot by a man the papers subsequently described as a "deranged fan". I'm not sure about the state of his sanity, then or now (he's still serving time in prison, each appeal denied), because murder does not require insanity in the clinical sense. But he was most definitely a fan, modelling his life after John to the extent of marrying a woman of Japanese origin, and the creepiest detail of the that New York death to me was always that a few hours before, the killer got himself an autograph on John's new album, Double Fantasy. There is a photo of the two of them while John is giving the autograph; Chapman's face behind him is a bit blurry, but he looks as delighted as any fan ever given a moment of time by his idol. When asked later why he didn't shoot John then, Chapman responded: "I couldn't shoot him like that…I wanted to get his autograph."
It wasn't the first time that the public adoration had turned violent and potentially lethal; there had been the aftermath of the infamous "more popular than Jesus" quote in the US with the burning of records (in which a teenage Mark David Chapman participated) and the demonstrations, complete with death threat before a Memphis concert. The whole running-away-from-fans phase which A Hard Day's Night immortalized had a lot of comedy moments, to be sure, but the darker flipside of that insane popularity had always been there, too. May Pang describes an incident from the mid-70s when taking an elevator a restaurant. The elevator was very crowded. Suddenly there was a power failure. Then May felt people's hands touching her genitals and breasts. When the lights came back on, she saw a middle aged woman rubbing herself against John and saying, "Squeeze my tits". Other complete strangers were grabbing John between his legs and fondling him. May was horrified and she asked John about it later, wondering why he didn't become upset. John replied, "Oh, that has always happened to us. We got used to it after a while." He also explained that Beatle girlfriends/wives would get groped also bc the fans wanted to touch anyone who had been close to a Beatle in an intimate way. Going back to the 60s, George Martin tells a story about finding Paul in the studio at the piano, looking depressed. George M. went and sat with him on the bench and asked him what was wrong. He tried to put a arm around Pauls shoulders, but Paul said: "Don't touch me. It hurts." George said,"What happened to you?" Paul took off his jacket and undid his shirt so he could see. His back, arms, everywhere was covered with bruises. Paul said,"Well you know, the cops get a little rough when they try to protect us. The fans get a little rough too. It happens. I just dont want to be touched right now."
Perhaps in retrospect, Chapman or someone like him was bound to happen to one of them, sooner or later. (George Harrison got stabbed by another "deranged fan" who'd broken into his house many years later, until his wife Olivia managed to knock the man out and call the police.) It had a kind of vicious inevitability to it, making it even more awful. John's childhood friend Pete Shotton summed up his reaction when learning what happened the next morning: “All the way home I thought: What a life. What a fucking life. And what an end. What a fucking end.“
One of the more insidious after-effects of the assassination was the way it transformed John in the public consciousness from a very human figure, with strengths and flaws, into a secular saint, something that Ray Connolly spoke at length against when writing about the day after John's death and his personal reaction, Unimaginable:
(A)lready you could smell the whiff of incense at the public canonisation of a newly martyred saint. And John was anything but a saint. Plum put it best that night after the children had gone quietly to bed and we'd watched the television tributes. "I can't stand all the tears and pious sanctimony about the man. I want to think about John Lennon the way he was when I first saw him with the Beatles in Southport--laughing and cheeky and funny. And full of life." At four thirty the following morning, just twenty four after being told about the shooting, I got a phone call from a Los Angeles radio station. It was from a disc jockey asking if it was true that we in the UK didn't understand the gun laws in America. It wasn’t a long conversation, being abruptly terminated when I used inappropriate language for radio in giving my opinion of American gun laws. (...) In New York Yoko watched at her window as thousands gathered outside in Central Park and a message from her was read out. John had prayed for everyone, she said.
I know she meant well, but somehow I doubted that. Yet it marked the beginning of a twenty five year long publicity campaign to paint John in all the colours of the beatitudes and overlook his many human faults. Today as his killer, Mark Chapman, still languishes in Attica Prison, his applications for parole being repeatedly turned down when Yoko protests with good reason that neither she nor Sean would feel safe if he were freed, the memory of John Lennon has been whitewashed and heritaged, his great comic wit almost forgotten--as indeed have so many of his great songs other than the hits.
Once he was the first world rock star with attitude, a zany, funny, outrageous man who wrote clever songs, said what he believed and never cared what anyone thought. Now, the victim of the world's first rock and roll assassination, murdered because of his own incredible fame, he's remembered as a sort of sweet-natured, kindly prince of peace.
Inevitably, this created backlash, probably most notoriously in the Albert Goldman biography The Lives of John Lennon which is one long exercise in character assassination over hundreds of pages. (Not just of John but also of Yoko; it's probably the most negative depiction of her on paper.) Which is why I find descriptions of the man as neither a saint nor a demon, but a human being, all the more valuable. Like this one by Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' sound engineer:
When John was in a good mood - which was a lot of the time - he could be sweet, charming, caring and incredibly funny. But he was moody, and if you caught him at a bad moment, he could be biting and nasty: you could see the anger written all over his face. THe problem was that you never knew exactly which John you'd encounter at any given moment, because his mood could change quite suddenly. Fortunately, it could change back just as quickly, so if you knew he was grumpy, the best course of action was to stay out of his way for a while, until he became approachable again. In time, I began to realize that John's mood changes seemed to always be preceded by long moments of silance. He'd get a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes and you'd think that he was pondering, ruminating. In fact, that look was probably due more to his poor eyesight then anything else. Although he wore glasses in the reocrding studio, they didn't seem to help much. He was often rubbing his eyes because they were tired, and he frequently had a glazed expression on his face, even before he got into drugs. As a result, there was always a funny look in his eyes, as if he were somewhere else. Perhaps everything was simply out of focus for him! Years later, I heard a story from them of how, as teenagers, Paul and John were walking home together late one winter night. All of a sudden, John stopped dead in his tracks outisde someone's house, staring in amazement at what he was convinced was a group of people playing cards out on their lawn, despite the freezing temperature. Because of his bad eyesight, he couldn't tell that it was actually a nativity scene.
But underneath all the bluff and bluster, John struck me as a very insecure person. I'm not sure what he had to be insecure about, unless it was the songwriting competition he was always engaged in with Paul. Perhaps deep down he thought that Paul was more talented than he was. I also always felt that in many ways, John was quite naive. Everything he did had an activist bent - things had to be done because they were in support of something, or against something. He tended to view the world in black and white, not shades of gray. You could never really have a relaxed, calm conversation with John over a cup of tea like you could with Paul. Everything always ended up with agitation of some kind; he was very confrontational. But he was very real, too. Even if he was being nasty, you could see that he genuinenly enjoyed talking with people. (...) During playbacks, John and Paul would often huddle together and discuss whether a take was good enough; they'd talk about what they were hearing and what they wanted to fix or do differently. John wasn't casual about making records, not on the early years, anyway. Still, it was Paul who was always striving to get things the best that they could possibly be. John certainly didn't have that attitude, but, to his credit, he was usually willing to try Paul's ideas, and he did want things to be right - he just wasn't necessarily happy about spending lnog hours in pursuit of perfection. He might well grumble, "'We've done it to death," but if Paul was insistent, they'd do another take; inevitably, John would be the one to give in. Many people's view of the Lennon/McCartney collaboration is a simplistic one: that Lennon was the rough and ready rocker, while McCartney was the soft sentimentalist. While that might have been partially true, their relationship went a lot deeper than that. Perhaps the most imporant role each played for the other was that of unbiased critic. John was pretty much the only person in the world who could turn to Paul and say, 'That song is shit' - and Paul would take it. Conversely, Paul was the only person who could look John in the eye and say, 'You've gone too far.' They were usually diplomatic with each other - Paul might say to John, 'Oh, I think you can do better than that,' or something similar - but that's what it came down to.
Emerick much later in his book has a description of that collaboration working even in free fall, when the relationship had turned dysfunctional, which at the same time is one of the great John anecdotes from the later years, with one of the most quoted John outbursts. It takes place during the recording of the White Album. We're weeks into the recording process, Yoko has been there all the time, but nobody has said anything out loud, yet Emerick speculates that this as much as anything else was the reason why Paul all of a sudden decides to drive everyone mad by doing take after take after take of, of all the songs, Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da. Not Blackbird, which had been recorded in minimum time, definitely not the various versions of Revolution, not Helter Skelter, no, that little ditty of an earworm. Three nights of Ob-la-di, Ob-La-Da later:
So when Paul announced several nights later that he wanted to scrap everything that had been done so far and start the song again from scratch, John went ballistic. Ranting and raving, he headed out the door, with Yoko trailing closely behind, and we thought we'd seen the last of him that evening. But a few hours later he stormed back into the studio, clearly in a highly altered state of mind. "I AM FUCKING STONED!!" John Lennon bellowed from the top of the stairs. He had chosen to make his entrance through the upstairs door, presumably so that he could quickly gain the attention of the three startled Beatles below. Swaying slightly, he continued, waving his arms for emphasis. "I am more stoned than you have every been. In fact, I am more stoned than you will ever be! And this," Lennon added with a snarl, "is how the fucking song should go." Unsteadily, he lurched down the stairs and over to the piano and began smashing the keys with all his might, pounding out the famous opening chords that became the song's introduction, played at a breakneck tempo. A very upset Paul got right in Lennon's face. For a moment I thought fists might fly. Instead, he smiled. "Okay then, John," he said in short, clipped words, staring his deranged bandmate straight in the eye. "Let's do it your way." As angry as he was, I think that deep down inside Paul was flattered that his longtime collaborator had given the song any thought at all... and maybe that was what he had wanted all along.
Going back to Connolly again, in 2009 he used all his Lennon interviews for this great article which is full of good John quotes on songs (his and others), politics, his two partnerships and manages to be affectionate without being reverential. Highly recommended. And then you're brought up short by a quote right at the end which makes you choke: "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."
It wasn't the first time that the public adoration had turned violent and potentially lethal; there had been the aftermath of the infamous "more popular than Jesus" quote in the US with the burning of records (in which a teenage Mark David Chapman participated) and the demonstrations, complete with death threat before a Memphis concert. The whole running-away-from-fans phase which A Hard Day's Night immortalized had a lot of comedy moments, to be sure, but the darker flipside of that insane popularity had always been there, too. May Pang describes an incident from the mid-70s when taking an elevator a restaurant. The elevator was very crowded. Suddenly there was a power failure. Then May felt people's hands touching her genitals and breasts. When the lights came back on, she saw a middle aged woman rubbing herself against John and saying, "Squeeze my tits". Other complete strangers were grabbing John between his legs and fondling him. May was horrified and she asked John about it later, wondering why he didn't become upset. John replied, "Oh, that has always happened to us. We got used to it after a while." He also explained that Beatle girlfriends/wives would get groped also bc the fans wanted to touch anyone who had been close to a Beatle in an intimate way. Going back to the 60s, George Martin tells a story about finding Paul in the studio at the piano, looking depressed. George M. went and sat with him on the bench and asked him what was wrong. He tried to put a arm around Pauls shoulders, but Paul said: "Don't touch me. It hurts." George said,"What happened to you?" Paul took off his jacket and undid his shirt so he could see. His back, arms, everywhere was covered with bruises. Paul said,"Well you know, the cops get a little rough when they try to protect us. The fans get a little rough too. It happens. I just dont want to be touched right now."
Perhaps in retrospect, Chapman or someone like him was bound to happen to one of them, sooner or later. (George Harrison got stabbed by another "deranged fan" who'd broken into his house many years later, until his wife Olivia managed to knock the man out and call the police.) It had a kind of vicious inevitability to it, making it even more awful. John's childhood friend Pete Shotton summed up his reaction when learning what happened the next morning: “All the way home I thought: What a life. What a fucking life. And what an end. What a fucking end.“
One of the more insidious after-effects of the assassination was the way it transformed John in the public consciousness from a very human figure, with strengths and flaws, into a secular saint, something that Ray Connolly spoke at length against when writing about the day after John's death and his personal reaction, Unimaginable:
(A)lready you could smell the whiff of incense at the public canonisation of a newly martyred saint. And John was anything but a saint. Plum put it best that night after the children had gone quietly to bed and we'd watched the television tributes. "I can't stand all the tears and pious sanctimony about the man. I want to think about John Lennon the way he was when I first saw him with the Beatles in Southport--laughing and cheeky and funny. And full of life." At four thirty the following morning, just twenty four after being told about the shooting, I got a phone call from a Los Angeles radio station. It was from a disc jockey asking if it was true that we in the UK didn't understand the gun laws in America. It wasn’t a long conversation, being abruptly terminated when I used inappropriate language for radio in giving my opinion of American gun laws. (...) In New York Yoko watched at her window as thousands gathered outside in Central Park and a message from her was read out. John had prayed for everyone, she said.
I know she meant well, but somehow I doubted that. Yet it marked the beginning of a twenty five year long publicity campaign to paint John in all the colours of the beatitudes and overlook his many human faults. Today as his killer, Mark Chapman, still languishes in Attica Prison, his applications for parole being repeatedly turned down when Yoko protests with good reason that neither she nor Sean would feel safe if he were freed, the memory of John Lennon has been whitewashed and heritaged, his great comic wit almost forgotten--as indeed have so many of his great songs other than the hits.
Once he was the first world rock star with attitude, a zany, funny, outrageous man who wrote clever songs, said what he believed and never cared what anyone thought. Now, the victim of the world's first rock and roll assassination, murdered because of his own incredible fame, he's remembered as a sort of sweet-natured, kindly prince of peace.
Inevitably, this created backlash, probably most notoriously in the Albert Goldman biography The Lives of John Lennon which is one long exercise in character assassination over hundreds of pages. (Not just of John but also of Yoko; it's probably the most negative depiction of her on paper.) Which is why I find descriptions of the man as neither a saint nor a demon, but a human being, all the more valuable. Like this one by Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' sound engineer:
When John was in a good mood - which was a lot of the time - he could be sweet, charming, caring and incredibly funny. But he was moody, and if you caught him at a bad moment, he could be biting and nasty: you could see the anger written all over his face. THe problem was that you never knew exactly which John you'd encounter at any given moment, because his mood could change quite suddenly. Fortunately, it could change back just as quickly, so if you knew he was grumpy, the best course of action was to stay out of his way for a while, until he became approachable again. In time, I began to realize that John's mood changes seemed to always be preceded by long moments of silance. He'd get a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes and you'd think that he was pondering, ruminating. In fact, that look was probably due more to his poor eyesight then anything else. Although he wore glasses in the reocrding studio, they didn't seem to help much. He was often rubbing his eyes because they were tired, and he frequently had a glazed expression on his face, even before he got into drugs. As a result, there was always a funny look in his eyes, as if he were somewhere else. Perhaps everything was simply out of focus for him! Years later, I heard a story from them of how, as teenagers, Paul and John were walking home together late one winter night. All of a sudden, John stopped dead in his tracks outisde someone's house, staring in amazement at what he was convinced was a group of people playing cards out on their lawn, despite the freezing temperature. Because of his bad eyesight, he couldn't tell that it was actually a nativity scene.
But underneath all the bluff and bluster, John struck me as a very insecure person. I'm not sure what he had to be insecure about, unless it was the songwriting competition he was always engaged in with Paul. Perhaps deep down he thought that Paul was more talented than he was. I also always felt that in many ways, John was quite naive. Everything he did had an activist bent - things had to be done because they were in support of something, or against something. He tended to view the world in black and white, not shades of gray. You could never really have a relaxed, calm conversation with John over a cup of tea like you could with Paul. Everything always ended up with agitation of some kind; he was very confrontational. But he was very real, too. Even if he was being nasty, you could see that he genuinenly enjoyed talking with people. (...) During playbacks, John and Paul would often huddle together and discuss whether a take was good enough; they'd talk about what they were hearing and what they wanted to fix or do differently. John wasn't casual about making records, not on the early years, anyway. Still, it was Paul who was always striving to get things the best that they could possibly be. John certainly didn't have that attitude, but, to his credit, he was usually willing to try Paul's ideas, and he did want things to be right - he just wasn't necessarily happy about spending lnog hours in pursuit of perfection. He might well grumble, "'We've done it to death," but if Paul was insistent, they'd do another take; inevitably, John would be the one to give in. Many people's view of the Lennon/McCartney collaboration is a simplistic one: that Lennon was the rough and ready rocker, while McCartney was the soft sentimentalist. While that might have been partially true, their relationship went a lot deeper than that. Perhaps the most imporant role each played for the other was that of unbiased critic. John was pretty much the only person in the world who could turn to Paul and say, 'That song is shit' - and Paul would take it. Conversely, Paul was the only person who could look John in the eye and say, 'You've gone too far.' They were usually diplomatic with each other - Paul might say to John, 'Oh, I think you can do better than that,' or something similar - but that's what it came down to.
Emerick much later in his book has a description of that collaboration working even in free fall, when the relationship had turned dysfunctional, which at the same time is one of the great John anecdotes from the later years, with one of the most quoted John outbursts. It takes place during the recording of the White Album. We're weeks into the recording process, Yoko has been there all the time, but nobody has said anything out loud, yet Emerick speculates that this as much as anything else was the reason why Paul all of a sudden decides to drive everyone mad by doing take after take after take of, of all the songs, Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da. Not Blackbird, which had been recorded in minimum time, definitely not the various versions of Revolution, not Helter Skelter, no, that little ditty of an earworm. Three nights of Ob-la-di, Ob-La-Da later:
So when Paul announced several nights later that he wanted to scrap everything that had been done so far and start the song again from scratch, John went ballistic. Ranting and raving, he headed out the door, with Yoko trailing closely behind, and we thought we'd seen the last of him that evening. But a few hours later he stormed back into the studio, clearly in a highly altered state of mind. "I AM FUCKING STONED!!" John Lennon bellowed from the top of the stairs. He had chosen to make his entrance through the upstairs door, presumably so that he could quickly gain the attention of the three startled Beatles below. Swaying slightly, he continued, waving his arms for emphasis. "I am more stoned than you have every been. In fact, I am more stoned than you will ever be! And this," Lennon added with a snarl, "is how the fucking song should go." Unsteadily, he lurched down the stairs and over to the piano and began smashing the keys with all his might, pounding out the famous opening chords that became the song's introduction, played at a breakneck tempo. A very upset Paul got right in Lennon's face. For a moment I thought fists might fly. Instead, he smiled. "Okay then, John," he said in short, clipped words, staring his deranged bandmate straight in the eye. "Let's do it your way." As angry as he was, I think that deep down inside Paul was flattered that his longtime collaborator had given the song any thought at all... and maybe that was what he had wanted all along.
Going back to Connolly again, in 2009 he used all his Lennon interviews for this great article which is full of good John quotes on songs (his and others), politics, his two partnerships and manages to be affectionate without being reverential. Highly recommended. And then you're brought up short by a quote right at the end which makes you choke: "I’m not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at 20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I don’t want to die at 40."
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 06:59 pm (UTC)I don't react much usually on the 8th December, for I am mourning the death of someone very dear in RL and even though it has been twenty years yesterday evening, the pain is left untouched.
So while I feel the tragedy of John's death, it becomes...kinda blurry in comparison of the other one.
I will get back to the links you also posted today.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-27 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-28 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-28 03:39 pm (UTC)