John Lennon was the most iconic
Beatle. He was group's most committed rock & roller, its social conscience,
and its slyest verbal wit. With the Beatles, he wrote or co-wrote dozens of
classics – from "She Loves You" to "Come Together" – and delivered many of
them with a cutting, humane, and distinct voice that would make him one of
the greatest singers rock has ever produced.
Lennon's brutally confessional solo work and his political activism were a
huge influence on subsequent generations of singers, songwriters and social
reformers. After the Beatles' breakup, he and wife Yoko Ono recorded
together and separately, striving to break taboos and to be ruthlessly,
publicly honest in their music and public performances. When Lennon was
murdered on December 8, 1980, he seemed on the verge of a new, more
optimistic phase. In the years since, his image has become a staple of
T-shirts and posters, used by rock fans and activists alike as a symbol of
peace.
He was born John Winston Lennon on October 9, 1940. Like the other three
Beatles, Lennon grew up in a working-class family in Liverpool. His parents,
Julia and Fred, separated before he was two (Lennon saw his father only
twice in the next 20 years), and Lennon went to live with his mother's
sister Mimi Smith; when Lennon was 17 his mother was killed by a bus. He
attended Liverpool's Dovedale Primary School and later the Quarry Bank High
School, which supplied the name for his first band, a skiffle group called
the Quarrymen, which he started in 1955.
In the summer of 1956 he met Paul McCartney, and they began writing songs
together and forming groups, the last of which was the Beatles. As half of
the official songwriting team Lennon/McCartney, Lennon himself penned some
of the Beatles' most well-known songs over the next decade including "A Hard
Day's Night," "Help!" "Nowhere Man," "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),"
"Ticket To Ride," "All You Need Is Love," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,"
"Strawberry Fields Forever," "Across the Universe," "Revolution," and "Come
Together." Lennon, who had wanted to quit the Beatles just before the band's
official breakup in 1970, began his career apart from the band in 1968 when
he and Ono recorded Two Virgins. It was an album of avant-garde music most
notable for its controversial cover featuring the couple fully nude; the
album was shipped in plain brown wrapper. He would go on to record more than
half of his solo albums with Ono.
Lennon and Ono had been corresponding since he met the artist at a 1966
showing of her work at the Indica art gallery in London. The following year
Lennon sponsored Ono's "Half Wind Show" at London's Lisson Gallery. In May
1968 Ono visited Lennon at his home in Weybridge, and that night they
recorded the tapes that would be released as Two Virgins. (The nude cover
shots, taken by Lennon with an automatic camera, were photographed then as
well.) Lennon soon separated from his wife, Cynthia (with whom he had one
child, Julian, in 1964); they were divorced that November. Lennon and Ono
became constant companions. Frustrated by his role with the Beatles, Lennon,
with Ono, explored avant-garde performance art, music, and film. While he
regarded his relationship with Ono as the most important thing in his life,
the couple's inseparability and Ono's influence over Lennon would be a
source of great tension among the Beatles, then in their last days.
On March 20, 1969, Lennon and Ono were married in Gibraltar; for their
honeymoon, they held their first "Bed-in for Peace," in the presidential
suite of the Amsterdam Hilton. The peace movement was the first of several
political causes the couple would take up over the years, but it was the one
that generated the most publicity. On April 22, Lennon changed his middle
name from Winston to Ono. In May the couple attempted to continue their
bed-in in the United States, but when U.S. authorities forbade them to enter
the country because of an October 1968 arrest on drug charges, the bed-in
resumed in Montreal. In their suite at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, they
recorded "Give Peace a Chance," with background chanters including Sixties
luminaries such as Timothy Leary and comic folksinger Tommy Smothers, as
well as numerous Hare Krishnas. Soon afterward, "The Ballad of John and
Yoko" (Number Eight, 1969) came out under the Beatles' name, though only
Lennon and McCartney appear on the record.
In September 1969, Lennon, Ono, Eric Clapton, Alan White, and Klaus Voormann
performed live as the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto at a Rock 'n' Roll Revival
show. The appearance, released as Live Peace in Toronto, 1969, was Lennon's
first performance before a concert audience in the three years since the
Beatles had stopped performing live. Less than a month later he announced to
the Beatles that he was quitting the group, but it was agreed among them
that no public statement would be made until after pending lawsuits
involving the band's Apple record label and manager Allen Klein were
resolved. In October the Plastic Ono Band released the searing song about
heroin withdrawal, "Cold Turkey" (Number 30, 1969), which the Beatles had
declined to record. The next month Lennon returned his M.B.E. medal to the
Queen. In a letter to the Queen, Lennon cited as reasons for the return
Britain's involvement in Biafra and support of the U.S. in Vietnam, and –
jokingly – the poor chart showing of "Cold Turkey."
The Lennons continued their peace campaign with speeches to the press; "War
Is Over! If You Want It" billboards erected on December 15 in 12 cities
around the world, including Hollywood, New York, London, and Toronto; and
plans for a peace festival in Toronto. When the festival plans deteriorated,
Lennon turned his attention to recording "Instant Karma!" which was produced
by Phil Spector, and also editing hours of tapes into the album that would
be the Beatles' last official release, Let It Be. In late February 1970
Lennon disavowed any connection with the peace festival, and the event was
abandoned. In April, McCartney – in a move that Lennon saw as an act of
betrayal – announced his departure from the Beatles and released a solo
album. From that point on (if not earlier), Ono replaced McCartney as
Lennon's main collaborator. The Beatles were no more.
At the time, much attention was focused on Ono's alleged role in the band's
end. An Esquire magazine piece with the racist title "John Rennon's
Excrusive Gloupie" was an extreme example of the decidedly antiwoman,
anti-Asian backlash against Ono that she and Lennon endured for years to
come. As Ono told Lennon biographer Jon Wiener in a late 1983 interview for
his book Come Together: John Lennon in His Time, "When John and I were first
together he got lots of threatening letters: 'That Oriental will slit your
throat while you're sleeping.' The Western hero had been seized by an
Eastern demon."
In late 1970 Lennon and Ono released their twin Plastic Ono Band solo LPs.
Generally, Ono's '70s LPs were regarded as highly adventurous works and were
thus never as popular as Lennon's. Lennon's contained some of his most
personal and, some felt, disturbing work – the direct result of his and
Ono's primal scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov. In March 1971 the
non-album single "Power to the People" hit Number 11, and that September,
Lennon's solo album Imagine came out and went to Number One a month later.
By late 1971 Lennon and Ono had resumed their political activities, drawn to
leftist political figures including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Their
involvement was reflected on Some Time in New York City (recorded with New
York band Elephant's Memory), which included Lennon's most overtly political
writing (his and Ono's "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" and his "John
Sinclair," an ode to the political activist and leader of the anti-racist
White Panther Party). The album sold poorly, only reaching Number 48.
Over the next two years Lennon released Mind Games (Number Nine) and Walls
and Bridges (Number One), which yielded his only solo Number One hit,
"Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," recorded with Elton John. On November
28, 1974, Lennon made his last public appearance, at Elton John's Madison
Square Garden concert. The two performed three songs, "Whatever Gets You
Thru the Night," "I Saw Her Standing There," and "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds," released on an EP after Lennon's death. Next came Rock 'n' Roll,
a collection of Lennon's versions of Fifties and early-Sixties classics like
"Be-Bop-a-Lula." The release was preceded by a bootleg copy, produced by
Morris Levy, over which Lennon successfully sued Levy. Rock 'n' Roll (Number
Six, 1975) would be Lennon's last solo release except for Shaved Fish, a
greatest-hits compilation.
Meanwhile, Lennon's energies were increasingly directed toward his legal
battle with the U.S. Immigration Department, which sought his deportation on
the grounds of his previous drug arrest and involvement with the American
radical left. On October 7, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the
deportation order; in 1976 Lennon received permanent resident status. On
October 9, 1975, Lennon's 35th birthday, Ono gave birth to Sean Ono Lennon.
Beginning in 1975, Lennon devoted his full attention to his new son and his
marriage, which had survived an 18-month separation from October 1973 to
March 1975. For the next five years, he lived at home in nearly total
seclusion, taking care of Sean while Ono ran the couple's financial affairs.
Not until the publication of a full-page newspaper ad in May 1979 explaining
his and Ono's activities did Lennon even hint at a possible return to
recording.
In September 1980 Lennon and Ono signed a contract with the newly formed
Geffen Records, and on November 15 they released Double Fantasy (Number One,
1980). A series of revealing interviews were published, "(Just Like)
Starting Over" hit Number One, and there was talk of a possible world tour.
But on December 8, 1980, Lennon, returning with Ono to their Dakota
apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, was shot seven times by Mark
David Chapman, a 25-year-old drifter and Beatles fan to whom Lennon had
given an autograph a few hours earlier. Lennon was pronounced dead on
arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. On December 14, at Ono's request, a 10-minute
silent vigil was held at 2 p.m. EST in which millions around the world
participated. Lennon's remains were cremated in Hartsdale, New York. At the
time of his death, he was holding in his hand a tape of Ono's "Walking on
Thin Ice."