It was forty years ago today…
As the latest bout of Beatlemania subsides, GREG
MAUGHAN looks at the enduring appeal of John Lennon, the most iconic
member of the ‘Fab Four’.
FORTY YEARS ago last month, the Beatles split up
after seven years, thirteen studio albums, 21 US number one singles, and
having attained a level of world-wide fame never before achieved by any
group of working-class musicians. Their popularity and profile is still
strong – the remastered release of their entire back catalogue has
recently entered the charts en masse, with a record twenty different
albums in the Top 75 at one time, while the anniversary coverage in the
media has been extensive.
Although all of the Beatles were greatly talented
individuals, the most iconic member was almost certainly John Lennon.
Lennon’s work with the Beatles and his solo material (right up until
Double Fantasy, which was released barely a month before his murder in
1980) displays a verbal wit, musical verve and experimentation but most
centrally at its best, an empathy and an ability to absorb and be
effected by events, both personal, close to home, and internationally.
It was this tendency for Lennon to be touched by
world events, combined with his instinctive sympathy for the ‘underdog’,
that led him towards political questions and saw him, for a period at
least, describing himself as a socialist. This is an aspect of the
Beatles which was not touched upon in any of the mainstream media
coverage of their 40th anniversary. The central contradiction
was that, at one and the same time, the Beatles were a ‘corporate’ band,
whose faces adorned countless merchandise and who were aggressively
marketed; while all the time personal experiences and world events
pushed all the Beatles, but Lennon in particular, further away from the
mainstream.
Born in 1940, Lennon was brought up by his aunt Mimi
in comfortable surroundings. Though by no means rich, Lennon was
certainly the ‘poshest’ of the Beatles. He was a show-off and an
attention-seeker as both a child and a teen; this can be explained to
some extent by Lennon’s abandonment issues with his parents.
In a certain sense, the meteoric rise in popularity
of the Beatles fed into his ego, but at the same time Lennon felt
increasingly constrained by his fame. The huge controversy in the US in
particular surrounding his claim that the Beatles were ‘bigger than
Jesus’ is a good example of this. The corporate image that Beatles
manager Brian Epstein was keen to foster meant that huge pressure was
put on Lennon to avoid areas of controversy, and the backlash against
these comments seemed to reinforce that.
But at the same time, the movement against the
Vietnam war was developing and Lennon, increasingly influenced by the
‘Hippy scene’ and pacifist ideals, felt that he should use the position
he had. Ray Coleman details this in his biography, Lennon: "Lennon
wanted to condemn publicly American aggression in Vietnam at the height
of the Beatles fame. Epstein warned him against it, and John, who for a
time did not want the roller-coaster of Beatlemania to wane, went along
with the ‘party line’. It was a bitter pill to swallow".
But Lennon could only constrain himself for a period
and, as he explained in a later interview with the left newspaper Red
Mole: "There came a time when George and I said ‘Listen, when they ask
next time, we’re going to say we don’t like the war and we think they
should get right out’. That’s what we did. At the time this was a pretty
radical thing to do, especially for the ‘Fab Four’. It was the first
opportunity I personally took to wave the flag a bit".
Although Lennon continued to hold anti-war and
pacifist beliefs, the effect of the drug-fuelled ‘psychedelic’ scene
that he became part of pushed him towards individualist, idealist and
even religious answers to the questions he was asking. These were both
political in nature, about the suffering of the masses in the
neo-colonial world in particular, but also personal for him, about the
ephemeral nature of his extreme fame.
The Beatles famously went to a spiritual retreat in
India organised by the Maharishi Yogi in 1968. During this time, they
wrote many of the songs that went on to become the White Album. Lennon’s
experience there led him to become disillusioned with many of the
spiritual ideas that he had been pursuing. This was summed up by the
song Sexy Sadie, which was a sarcastic dismissal of the Maharishi. The
retreat also coincided with the historic events of May 1968 in France,
where the greatest general strike in history was unfolding. An avid
reader of newspapers, Lennon followed these events from afar and was
pushed to ask pertinent questions about how society could be changed and
what sort of society we could have instead.
His ambiguous response to these questions was the
song Revolution, of which two different versions were released. Lennon’s
pacifist ideals meant that he feared calls for revolution could fuel
violent oppression from the state and the first version of the song
released states "you can count me out". However, in the version included
on the White Album, the lyrics alternately state that you can "count me
out, in". This was a big step for Lennon, moving from a desire to change
the world that centred on idealism and individual change – ‘revolution
in the mind’ – to looking towards mass movements and collective
struggle.
From here, Lennon and his partner Yoko Ono became
more involved with protest, conscious of how his position and profile
could be used to inspire struggle. The ‘Bed-in’ protest, for example,
although quirky and slightly naive, was genuinely motivated.
The break-up of the Beatles in 1969 coincided with
an increasing disillusionment with hippy ideals and a desire for real
change. Lennon summed this up himself: "Of course, there are a lot of
people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle-class
kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we dressed up a
bit, leaving the same bastards running everything".
The period of 1970-1973 was probably Lennon’s most
overtly political in his music. Lyrically and rhythmically, he was
influenced by the chants and slogans heard on demonstrations. He
composed certain songs with the explicit aim of having them taken up by
workers and young people in struggle. Power To The People is a prime
example of this: "Say we want a revolution/We better get on right
away/We're going to bring you down/when we come into town/Singing power
to the people".
It could be argued that others have more effectively
summed up working-class life in their music and have expressed the need
for change more subtly, but Lennon’s aspiration to help push forward
mass movements and the sloganeering of some of his music in this period
came from a commitment to the idea of struggle and personal questioning
about how he could add to this, which should be respected.
He also expressed this support financially, as Roy
Coleman explains: "The civil disturbances in Northern Ireland were
erupting into civil war. The Nixon administration had taken the gloves
off when they murdered four students from Kent State University during a
demonstration in 1970. The Lennons became more and more active in
radical politics. They donated money to Michael X’s Black House,
recorded a single, ‘Do the Oz’, for the defendants of the infamous
‘Schoolkids Oz’ trial".
The alternative society that he aspired to, which at
the time he would have seen as socialism, was summed up in the song
Imagine. The continuing popularity of this track attests to the appeal
that these ideas have amongst ordinary people.
Following Lennon’s move to the US, he continued his
involvement in politics, singing at benefit concerts organised by the
American trade union movement, recording songs about, and to raise funds
for, the Irish civil rights movement and continuing his involvement in
anti-war politics.
Lennon planned a 33-date tour of the US in the run
up to the 1972 election as part of a drive to get Nixon kicked out of
the White House. However, fearful of the effect that this could have,
the Nixon administration tapped Lennon’s phone, put him under FBI
surveillance and initiated deportation procedures.
Tied up in the fight against deportation, plans for
the tour were dropped and Lennon became disillusioned after Nixon’s
re-election. Through a combination of burn-out from his deportation
struggle and a move away from the organised working class in the radical
US movement, Lennon became less actively involved in politics.
But the ideals that Lennon had looked towards in
this period stayed with him until his death. The central question that
faced him was how to reconcile his position in society and his own fame
with the idea of mass struggle. Nearly thirty years since his death and
forty years since the break-up of the band that brought about his fame,
we can still enjoy a body of musical work without parallel, be inspired
by the same struggles that inspired him, and help build a movement that
can effectively bring about the change in society that he looked
towards.
Correction: This website article corrects
the print version which stated that John Lennon donated money to Malcolm
X. It should have read, Michael X.
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