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Killing the Messenger: The Lives of John Lennon |
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Monday, 06 February 2006 05:32 |
Killing the Messenger
The Lives of John Lennon
Albert Goldman
William Morrow & Company
By John Sinclair
The lives of John Lennon hold great fascination for people of his age and generation. The great singer/composer of the Beatles, the anti-pop avant-gardist who broke up the Beatles and embraced the underground art world of Yoko Ono, the political journalist of left-wing song, the drunken pop icon on the loose in Los Angeles, the reclusive "house-husband" holed up for years in Manhattan, the idol of millions in the middle of a triumphant comeback when he was cut down coming home from the recording studio by a media-warped assassin--these are just some of the John Lennons of legend we seem never to tire of studying for some clue to what happened to that incredible era we call "the 6Os."
John Lennon was surely a man of his time, moved by the great currents of modern life and moving with unparalleled force to shape the response of millions of young white people throughout the western world. No one had a larger or more intense impact on his generational peers and the people who followed them. His triumphs and struggles, his successes and failures, his musics and life-styles--all made bigger than life by constant media attention over a period of more than 15 years--seemed always to point the way and yet to reflect the motion of the youthful masses as they groped their way through the world they had never made.
The public John Lennon was as complex a popular entertainment figure as the marketplace will allow, a fierce artist of pop music who first embodied and then railed violently against the hallowed conventions of commercial mega-success and modern celebrityhood.
While Lennon despised both the reductive machinery of the mass media and the carefully reduced intelligence of its victims in the mass audience, he was also a master manipulator of both, using them to articulate his artistic vision, feed his starving ego, and make him wealthy almost beyond measure.
Yet the private John Lennon was an even more complex individual, as the many accounts of his life and career published since his untimely death have revealed, and his private reality was often at great odds with the public myths generated by his own hype-meisters and their eager accomplices in the media.
If, indeed, any of the several biographies and memoirs available now can be believed--and their near unanimity of vision certainly lends them considerable credence--Lennon's real daily life activity as a Beatle and afterwards was just about as far removed from the details of his official legend as that of the notorious Memphis drug-gobbler, sexual weirdo and Nixonite was to the cherished persona of "Elvis Presley".
Peter Brown, a Beatles factotum and intimate of Brian Epstein, revealed the orgiastic activities of the Mop Tops on tour as well as the secret homosexual relationship between Beatle John and his manager in The Love You Make (1983).
May Pang, a "personal assistant" to Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early 70s, confessed every staggering particular of her long Ono-sanctioned love affair with John and painted a sordid picture of his personal and professional peccadilloes during his 18-month "Lost Weekend in Los Angeles" period in her book Lovinq John (1983).
John Green, Ono's tarot reader and "personal advisor" during the 70s, drew a fascinating portrait of John and Yoko's fantastic, incredibly twisted lifestyle of the rich and famous in Dakota Days (1983).
And Jon Wiener, in Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (1984), examined Lennon's "political" period of 1971-72 and his resultant troubles with the Nixon government which sent the great singer/songwriter who wished to be an American scurrying 180 degrees in the other direction.
Lennon himself has provided reams of scandalous revelations. In Lennon Remembers--a collation of John's Rolling Stone interviews of early 1971 published as "by" RS editor/publisher Jann Wenner--he trashes the Beatles and their fanatical audience of 60s teens and hippies, asserting "I resent performing for fucking idiots" and characterizing his long-haired fans and followers as "uptight maniacs going around wearing fucking peace symbols."
The entire Beatles phenomenon is exposed by a bitter ex-Beatle John as having been a carefully orchestrated and wholly insincere promotional stratagem concocted by a bunch of British sexual deviates and drug fiends to relieve an innocent public of millions of dollars. It was all a shuck and a sham, Lennon claims, and his partner Paul McCartney was merely a tasteless, money-grubbing schmuck. Why, they didn't even write those glorious Lennon-McCartney songs together. In Lennon's view the whole thing was a hype, a monstrous put-on only fools could fall for.
Now comes Albert Goldman, best-selling and somewhat contrary biographer of culture heroes Lenny Bruce and Elvis Presley, to examine the lives of John Lennon from his unchallenged position as prime debunker of the sappy but almost universally accepted media myths generated by and around America's most sacrosanct pop demi-gods.
Goldman, born in 1927, holds no emotional stock in any of the Lennon myths. He never "believed in Beatles," for example, any more than he "believed in Elvis" or any of the other show-business saviors whose charisma was cynically packaged by the entertainment industry to sell billions of dollars worth of records and concert tickets to teenagers and young adults desperately seeking an identity.
For Albert Goldman, John Lennon is simply a vastly popular entertainer whose life story is characterized principally by the immense contradictions which give it definition. His job is to report as fully as possible the Lennon saga in all its glory and horror, without regard for the accepted pop scripture or the tender feelings of its many subscribers.
Accordingly, Goldman has synthesized the information presented in the many previous books on Lennon with material collected from his own 1200 interviews for this project to essay a definitive biography of John Lennon. He doesn't really break any shocking new ground here, but he does a masterful job of pulling together the many previously-examined strands of the fabric of Lennon's life to weave a compelling tale which proved very difficult to put down.
Yet no recent book has been so relentlessly put down by its critics, starting with pop iconographer Dave Marsh and his former employer Jann Wenner, a man who felt no such compunction against appropriating Lennon's own words to feather Rolling Stone's nest with dollars from the sale of the unauthorized Lennon Remembers.
Goldman has been raked repeatedly over the coals of self-righteous indignation by people whose livelihood depends on the perpetuation of the one-dimensional myth of Beatles and of Lennon as "working-class hero"--and, further, of "rock" as something more than the soundtrack for beer commercials, corny movies and advertisements for everything they're trying to sell you in the age of Reagan and Bush, from new automobiles to the New Action Army.
Throughout the book Goldman pays consistent homage to the magnificent musical output, the wit and intelligence and creativity of John Lennon, but he refuses to separate these positive aspects of Lennon's existence from the negative vectors of the great star's life. Nor will he deny Lennon his humanity by ignoring the deep contradictions in his behavior which rendered John so very human indeed.
We hate to face the fact that our idols are as confused, miserable, and emotionally messed-up as we are--if not even more so. We want their lives to be as rewarding for them as their creative output is for us, but our dreams of their happiness and virtue are simply fantasies which will never be realized here on Earth.
John Lennon was as human as they come, an idol with feet of clay, a walking bundle of contradictions who made some of the most satisfying music ever issued by human beings. The actualities of his life in no way diminish the power and beauty of his aesthetic contribution--they are in fact the very seedbed of his creativity, the very roots of his incredible genius.
Albert Goldman's biography of Lennon should neither shock nor offend anyone who has read the earlier works cited above. But those books were almost ephemeral and had little impact on the mass consciousness of the Lennon generation compared to Goldman's best-selling bombshell. Thus he has had to bear the burden of opprobrium which accrues to the bearer of bad tidings about the lack of clothing evidenced by the cultural emperor.
Even utterly naked, however, John Lennon is an imposing figure whose every movement is worthy of study for the many lessons to be learned about modern life. That motion is chronicled here, in stultifying detail, and you would do well to read Albert Goldman's account of The Lives of John Lennon. Your love for John's music and the inspiring images he produced in his time will only be enriched by an awareness of how much he suffered to give them birth.
--Detroit
1988
(c) 1988, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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