The Lennon Legend Continues
I have just spent hours, after having been sucked in by the allure of the site, reading frightening stories of occult and murder and hauntings that drive the new homeowners to replicate the murders of yore, and have returned to feed upon the gore of another relevant site, The True Crime Library. By process of association, I had watched a TV special on the John Lennon legend and the murderer, Mark David Chapman, and had out of extended curiosity about Chapman gone online to read more. The Lennon legend exists not because of Chapman but in spite of him. Or, I should say, the Lennon legend would still be the Lennon legend had the freak not shortened Lennon’s life.
Lennon founded The Beatles. Like Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (drummer after Pete Best), John Lennon was young, beautiful, and creative, appealing to millions of young women who would get so apoplectic at seeing him and his fellow musicians they would faint. Fainting of fans was known only to The Beatles and Elvis in those early touring days, suggesting how popular these performers were, how loved they were, how revered.
Lennon co-wrote the Beatles’ songs, pieces that range from pop and love lyrics and ballads to revolutionary statements for change and for peace. By the time Lennon and the others were going their separate ways—in the sixties they had finished touring—the John Lennon legend was separating from the Beatles legend. He had made an impact on the music world and industry in general and on the mindset of the culture in particular. He was open-minded, progressive I spirit, quick-witted, and outspoken. The press followed his comments; the fans swore by them or lived by them.
By the time he married second wife, Yoko Ono, he was on his way toward becoming elevated to guru for many of us: in keeping with or leading the “trends” of the time (and I say this loosely, for Lennon was not “trendy”, per se), his hair was past his shoulders, he had a beard and moustache, his clothes were looser linens, his jewelry suggested spiritual seeking, and his speeches were directed away from violence and war and toward higher consciousness and peace. For example, a major impression—one which contributes to the best of the Lennon legend—is one wherein he and Yoko, having just married, spent their honeymoon not at Niagara Falls or in some island resort drinking Pina Coladas but in a bed in a Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam: they were staging a “bed-in” for peace, promoting, they told the press, nonviolence, anti-war approaches, and revolutionary social change…the latter of which Lennon and Yoko would pursue over and again, with such song lyric headers as, “All we are saying…is give peace a chance.”
The Lennon legend, again, comprises so much more than that ironic and antithetical moment when Chapman, thinking he was identifying with Holden Caulfield, an anti-celebrity fictional character in the classic, CATCHER in the RYE, shot him to death. The Lennon legend was built, or crafted, by a higher consciousness most humans of the Vietnam and other disgrace periods did not, do not, and will not ever attain.
The irony continued, as did (and does) the Lennon legend: The morning of September 12, 2001, the deejays played what is likely the finest song of all time: they played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He wrote and sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us/and the world can live as one.” I wonder how Lennon would us the global auspices of the Internet.
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