Musings on the Death of John Lennon
Everybody of my parents' generation knows where they were when Kennedy was shot. I was just a few months old.
Bear with me as I write this, I can scarcely see the keys.
I was on the seventh floor of the South Cheshire College of Further Education. I was waiting for the class to begin. For some reason all the staff were late. Only as I write this now, nearly 20 years later do I realize why.
I had a tape recorder. It was the only time I had ever taken it to college. It was the only time I played that tape. I never played it again, after the day the music died.
It wasn't his best song. There were much better tracks on that tape. Imagine. Woman. Even Happiness is a warm gun. But it was actually playing Why don't we do it in the road?
Until that moment he had been a well respected teacher.
“I wish somebody would do to him what they did to John Lennon.”
But it was John. It was. I was playing John Lennon's music when I heard the news. I haven't played it since until today.
Update October 2010:No it wasn't! It was Paul. Why don't we do it in the road? was Paul's song. Damn, I feel so stupid. |
I didn't cry until later.
I am crying now.
I couldn't play it in 1980. I didn't want people to think I worshipped dead heroes.
John was no hero. That mindless bastard fired at an icon and killed a husband and father. He didn't die for any cause.
I have come through it now. I feel a lot better. I have lost a cupful of snot and tears and my head feels much better in every sense.
I bought a CD today. When I find my black tape I will cover up the title. Legend is not appropriate. I played it to myself and it all started to come out. Since 1980 this is only the second piece of music I have bought.
I can't afford a comprehensive collection that reflects all my taste in music, I did not want to be judged by a few selections. I had the same kind of problem with books as well. I spent agonizing times in the library trying to pick a selection of books that revealed my broad intellect, as if I cared what a couple of old spinsters behind the counter thought about me. I have now overcome that problem. I can go to the library and come away with anything. The breakthrough came on the day I took a book on the Nazi Lebensborn eugenics plan, a book on genetics and an encyclopaedia of firearms to read while I cared for children at the deaf school. Now people can think what they like. That is one consolation of age, the older you get the less you care about the impression others receive about you; let then think what they want, fuck 'em.
I was really getting into Give Peace a Chance, I loved the way that it didn't matter that I have no sense of rhythm, any clapping, head-banging or foot stamping works fine. Then the random play cut back to the same track again. I was streaming out the tears and banging away to my version of the beat. Catharsis. An hour later that process is now complete.
Hippies never stopped any wars
Why did I cry?
Dozens of reasons. I had lost a hero because the world had gained one. I didn't want a dead hero. I could see through the hero-creation myths that our society is prone to. Strange loser becomes popular eccentric then becomes dead hero. I hate the whole hero and icon thing.
I also lost the music. I liked the music because I liked it. Now I couldn't be seen to like it because people would think I was worshipping the icon. I was crying for twenty years of self-imposed silence.
Twenty Five Years On added 8 December 2005
John wasn't a martyr. It wasn't an assassination. A nobody tried to become a somebody through a pointless act of violence, and the whores in the media let him succeed. I will never speak his name. I haven't done so in twenty five years.
Never mention the name of that nobody ever, to anybody, for any reason. That is the best thing you can do for John and for the lives of other people who may yet become victims of the cult of celebrity.
Update: October 2010I have now reached the conclusion that John Lennon was one of the most over-rated people ever to draw breath. He was a musician and a failed artist and a failed writer (if he had not have been a musician he would never have been able to make a living as an artist, poet or prose writer). He was not by any stretch of the imagination a great philosopher or political thinker, and neither was or is his rather silly wife. I can say this now, I am older than he ever lived to be and I value my experiences and insights more highly now. 
The first verse of Imagine sounds great, but that's where it ends. That is it. Most of the other political ideas in his songs are rather puerile. He was not a working class hero - he was neither a hero nor working class. He was a lower middle class musician with a whole bag of chips on his shoulders, a very good musician with very good musician friends, nothing more. His self-image as a great revolutionary figure bringing peace to the world was laughable, almost as funny as those idiots who believed in him. |
2010
What's the worst that could happen? It's a common enough expression and sentiment. My father found out that it is sometimes a bit worse than you imagine. He has never been a betting man, or horsey. His father had kept horses and showed them and quite possibly had been a bit more fond of his horses than he was of the cows he was meant to be milking or the children he was fathering. So when he was offered the chance to enter a sweepstake in the Grand National my father imagined it was just a bit of harmless fun, it was not likely to be the start of a decline into gambling addiction, so what the hell, what's the worst that could happen?
He didn't win. Who expects to win in a race with forty odd horses jumping over big fences? Most of them jumped over a few fences. Not my father's horse though. First fence. Full gallop. Wallop. The jockey clears the fence. The horse doesn't. It breaks a leg and the vet is called in to shoot him. It's the sort of thing to put you off the sport for life. And it did. I have never put a bet on a horse either.
Do you remember the heady days when illegal taping was killing music but just before they started to panic about it? I'll never forget the day the music died. The build up took several weeks. Every day I was taking a coach to go to my FE college, sharing it with a bunch of other sixteen to nineteen year olds. It started with one of the posh kids who hadn't got the O-Levels he needed to stay in the sixth form. Would you mind if I played my cassette, yah? For us all to hear?
Oh. Wow. What a great idea. I'll make a cassette and all these stuck up kids from the grammar school will see that I'm really smart and deep and have excellent taste. And maybe one of the girls will actually let me talk to her. It's got to be worth a try.
So I made a tape of some shitty stuff off the radio and I spliced it in with a couple of tracks of Rush and a little bit of Hawkwind and a bit of AC/DC from the Dirty Deeds Done Cheap LP, not too much though or else I would face the ignominy of somebody standing up and saying what is this shit, let's have some Genesis and Santana. I also included some of the Beatles. I had grown up with the Beatles all my life. My mother liked them, my big sister liked them their music was around me all my life. When I was a little boy Beatlemania was at its height. I didn't go to bed, I went to ya-yas. Because my bedroom had the Beatles on the wallpaper. But in the late seventies most of the other kids around me saw the Beatles as just a bunch of old guys. Christ they must be pushing forty! Fucking geriatrics, they'd not done anything for years, apart from Paul, who was basically a big girl's blouse. Having your wife in your rock group, that's rather pathetic, and perhaps a bit cheap too.
There weren't many of Paul's tracks that I wanted to play. Only Helter
Skelter. That was fantastic, and something about people murdering when
they heard it, that was real rock and roll. I wanted to play John's music.
I toyed with idea of including Revolution number Nine, but I decided that
was probably the best way to have my cassette - and possibly even myself
- tossed out of the coach window. I settled on Happiness is a warm gun
and Why don't we do it in the road as reasonable compromise between seeming
deep, eclectic, avant garde and intellectual and seeming to be actually
retarded or mentally unstable. OK, this was coming on. I might be ready
to play this next week. Or so. I just need some more current stuff to
keep the mix acceptable. I'll listen to the radio. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS. He's
made a new album! I'll have to get me a copy of that. A few days later
I find out that mother's special friend has got the album. Now my mother
has never told me that she is bisexual but I'm pretty convinced that most
of the women she's shared a bed with over the last thirty odd years have
been lesbians. 
So I am round her house with my cassette recorder, making
sure I had all the cables I needed. I did not want to face a lesbian Hattie
Jacques look-a-like and ask for a double ended male
adapter. Your parents
having sex is bad enough without going any further down THAT route. So
I make a copy of Double Fantasy and I see the rest of her collection,
including a single of Give Peace a Chance. That was something special.
I had read my sister's copy of Lennon's Rolling Stone interview several
years before and I knew the whole story. The man was my hero. No two ways
about it. That single was like a holy relic. Isn't it amazing how when
you're seventeen something ten years old can seem like an antique?
So I made my choices of a couple of new tracks from Double fantasy album onto the tape, Just Like Starting Over and Woman and Kiss Kiss Kiss, in which Yoko does a very stimulating simulated orgasm. At least it was very stimulating to a seventeen year old. Terrific. I have finally got together a tape I can play on the coach. I'll take it on Monday. Bugger. It's the gormless driver who plays Radio One. Never mind, there's always Tuesday. But in the morning Julian or whatever his face is beats me to it and we are entertained by The Clash and the Sex Pistols. What joy.
So I am in college waiting for the lessons to start. No lecturers. Anywhere. Ho ho. Here's my chance to entertain my peers with my musical taste for the first time in my life. I dig out my mono cassette player and stick the cassette in. It was never finished. I never played it again. Ever. To this day I have not played any music for anybody else. Why? For exactly the same reason my father never placed another bet.
The sounds of John Lennon sounding rather like, in my wife's favourite expression when referring to Bruce Springsteen, a constipated cat, blaring out “no-one will be watching us, why don't we do it in the road” were playing when my lecturer finally walked in and said that he wished somebody would do to whoever was singing that load of shit what they did to John Lennon.
Update October 2010:No it wasn't! It was Paul. Why don't we do it in the road? was Paul's song. Damn, I feel so stupid. |
Because that Tuesday morning, 9th December, 1980, I was not listening to the radio on the way in to college the full significance of that comment didn't sink in straight away. On the way home there was no point in me playing my tape. There was only one man on the radio that afternoon once the news had broke.
I don't do dead heroes. They are of no use to anybody. I never played that tape again precisely because I don't do dead heroes. For twenty years I didn't let music touch me or get to me again. Ten years ago I faced up to the impact of that day and decided to put it into perspective and accept that music did not die that day. Another ten years on and I have made another breakthrough, a liberating decision. Now I can look back from a vantage point that John never reached. I am older than John ever got to be. And wiser too. Much wiser. John was just a musician. That's what he was good at. It was the only thing he could have done professionally. He was not a philosopher and his political analysis stank. His books and etchings would never have sold in a million years without his fame as a musician, and no nobodies would ever have shot him. No, for me it isn't Lord Voldermort whose name shall never be spoken I have never spoken the name of John Lennon's murderer and I never will. To do so for any lowlife who tries to become famous by using criminal violence is to be an accessory after the fact.
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