DEC. 8, 2005--The segment of the American population that can remember what it was doing on Nov. 22, 1963 is beginning to thin.
Ten years ago, in the fall of 1995, I learned from a radio broadcast that the majority of the population of America alive in 1995 had not yet been born in 1963. As a baby boomer who had been in the fourth grade on the day John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, accustomed to the idea that my generation was important, and that this was something that would always be remembered, that came as something of a shock.
With 11/22/63 fading, and 9/11/01 still a bit recent, the moment in history that virtually everyone my age--and even a little bit younger--seems to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when it occurred was that which occurred 25 years ago tonight: Dec. 8, 1980. That was the night John Lennon was murdered in New York by a crazed fan.
Since this is my blog and I can be as self-indulgent as I please, I'll tell you where I was and what I was doing. I had just turned 25. I was a newspaper reporter in California's Imperial Valley, and was sitting in my apartment in El Centro that Monday night when my mother called from Chula Vista, two hours away over on the coast. She and my father were watching Monday Night Football on ABC, and the football broadcast had been interrupted so the announcer--was it Howard Cosell?--could share the awful news with the nation. Not a football fan myself, had I not had that phone call from my mother, I probably wouldn't have learned about Lennon's murder until the Today Show the next morning.
It was a HUGE moment for the baby-boom generation. The oldest of us were in our mid-thirties then (Born in 1955, I'm a "trailing-edge" boomer) and the Beatles had been so much a part of our collective upbringing that it must have seemed to those thirtysomethings that night as if some sort of umbilical cord tying them back to their youth in the 1960s had just been severed. Certainly this twentysomething had a hint of such a feeling, and I was only 14 when the Beatles broke up in 1970.
The outpouring of tributes was prompt and massive. The fact that Lennon died just before Christmas, when the nation is trying its best to be in a festive mood, only made the nostalgia and the feeling of loss that much worse. How many young journalists, when they sat down to write their pieces about What John Lennon Meant To Me, were remembering Christmas mornings when Beatle albums might have been among their gifts? Whatever the reason, in the weeks following Lennon's murder (I refuse to call it an "assassination," and explained why this week in the pages of National Review magazine) it seemed as if every journalist in the country between the ages of 25 and 40 was tapping out his or her version of Lennon In My Life, replete with memories of seeing the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show, sporting that long hair which would soon spawn so much imitation--and so many dinner-table arguments--throughout the western world, or of Dad entering the bedroom with a mop on his head, singing "Come to dinner, yeah, yeah yeah!"
I didn't write my version. In part that was because I knew my editor would never print such a thing: he was an old fart from the days of Your Hit Parade who thought music meant Snookie Lansen, Shrimp Boats and How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? He conceded the front page to the Lennon murder that day because even he had to admit that it was news, but he refused to do anything gratuitous. I didn't even ask.
In truth, even had my editor been a big Beatles fan, I probably would not have asked. Because frankly there are two pop phenomena I find it utterly impossible to relate to: Elvis-olatry and the canonization of John Ono Lennon. (Well, actually make that three phenomena: I'm unable to hear anything the slightest bit redeeming in the sound of some functional illiterate grunting and shouting in front of an artificial rhythm-machine, so the appeal of rap will also remain a mystery to me.) Elvis was a nice young man with one of the most remarkable singing voices of his time. But when he had to wrestle with growing up, it seems to me he lost the war. I can enjoy his songs, but can't think of him as a cultural hero. I feel the same way about John Lennon.
I am, and have been most of my life, a Beatles fan. What music lover could fail to be? John Lennon and Paul McCartney, as a songwriting team, rank right up there with the Gershwins, Rogers & Hart, Cole Porter and Duke Ellington. But that's actually the problem: I recognize the Beatles as what they were: the songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney, with George Harrison and Ringo Starr playing backup. The Beatles were a great band, but the true magic was in John and Paul's compositions. Had John and Paul not been such an incredible team, the Beatles would probably be no better remembered today than The Dave Clark Five.
In short, the Beatles were greater than the sum of their parts. Individually, they were not. After the group broke up in 1970, I watched John and Paul, free from the restraint that each had placed on the other, spin off in their individual directions--Paul toward icky-sweet pop sentimentality, John toward wacky, self-indulgent forays into art and febrile politics, staging "bed-ins" and recording mediocre albums on which he vented his spleen at Paul over the personal differences that had broken up the group. True, John found his equilibrium a few years later and gave the world some good rockers, but I don't think he or Paul ever did anything separately as well as they did it together, and please don't get me started on Imagine.
I cannot stand that song. I admit it, openly and freely. It's a pleasant little tune, yoked to the most sententious, shallow, childish lyric since Paul Simon allowed himself I Am A Rock. In a world in which Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been for several years already exposing the lies behind Soviet power, Lennon was crooning about the sort of world Marxists used to pitch before their mendacities were exposed: no possessions, no borders, no religion...just a big, global, atheistic warm bath. Please. Some are inclined to give him a pass for his naievete; I'm not. Sorry. A streetwise kid from Liverpool, he should have had better sense. And that line! No one seems inclined to point it out, so I'll remind one and all: "And no religion too," he sings. To mangle basic grammar for the sake of a cheap rhyme is something a sixth grader writing his first love poem might do. For one of the century's greatest lyricists and songwriters to get away with this, unremarked, is unconscionable. Didn't Rolling Stone or Newsweek or somebody call him on this egregiously bad line? Apparently not, and Imagine still draws sighs of admiration. Not from me.
I was saddened by Lennon's death, and still am. He died too young, obviously, but he also died at the very moment he seemed on the verge of a creative rebirth. He had just released a remarkably good album, Double Fantasy, and good things seemed to loom on the horizon for him. I heard the radio interview he gave just hours before his death. He sounded upbeat, energized and ready for work. The whining and carping of past days had been put behind him; he criticized his younger self for behaving childishly, and as he signed off the interview, he and his wife Yoko Ono wished one and all "a happy Christmas." Had he not been killed that night, had he celebrated his 65th birthday this year with his old friend Bob Dylan (now 64) and perhaps even with a reconciled Paul McCartney, who knows what might have accrued between that upbeat radio interview and now? Perhaps I might be writing a birthday tribute including praise for half a dozen excellent albums that were never made.
Just imagine.
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