The Beatles: The Final Chapter

Wednesday marks the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, so I'm going to take this opportunity to put the final touches on my reflections on his former band the Beatles.  In that first post back in October I referred to the myth that had built up around Lennon, and that I had stopped believing it a long time ago.  I stand by those words, but my purpose is not to criticize him in particular, or at all, really.  There is a mythology that has been constructed around the 1960's in general that I have grown weary of.  But we can only evaluate John Lennon's legacy fully if it is seen in the context of the Beatles.  If we do that we see a highly talented man who contributed to an extraordinary musical force, but not an individual genius who forged his own unique vision.

The Beatles were, as I wrote earlier, a band whose cultural and musical impact simply can't be over estimated.  But their success was very much a team effort, and that team included producer George Martin and manager Brian Epstein.  If Martin was the musical translator who took their innovative concepts and put them in conventional musical language, it was Epstein who kept the egos in line and the more easily distracted members of the outfit focused.  Lennon would say later that it was Epstein's death in 1967 that was the real beginning of the end of the Beatles.  Once it was over none of the individual members had anything like the creative or commercial triumphs they did as a functioning unit.

It's in this light that I assess the legacy of not only John Lennon, but of his other three band mates as well.  Together, with the proper guidance, no one could touch them.  But apart their efforts suffered by comparison.  Even their one attempt to self produce, the sessions that would eventually become the album Let It Be, was a messy, acrimonious affair that took over a year put into it's final shape, and this only after the mad genius Phil Spector was given run of the master tapes.  Individually each had solid solo careers, to be sure, but it all pales in comparison to what they accomplished in their time as the Beatles.

And so, when I'm asked if I think John Lennon was a genius, I have to say no.  He was a talented song writer, to be sure, but it's hard to argue that his solo work did much to push Rock music ahead.  I could say the same thing about Paul McCartney, and for Sir Paul I think this is a far more damning indictment.  Of all the Beatles McCartney was the natural showman who reveled in the lime light.  He wanted to be a star, and grabbed at it with both hands.  He also paid the most attention in the studio, playing a big role in making their final album, Abby Road, the artistic success it was.  But for all his clever studio work and world tours during the 1970's, his work was very good at best, but never genius.  John Lennon and George Harrison both knew, way before the Beatles broke up, that there was more to life than the fame and fortune that came with being international Rock stars.  Harrison was more up front about it, but if you look at how Lennon conducted his post-Beatle years, you can see he felt the same way.

After a few productive years his output sputtered, punctuated by his legendary "lost weekend" of excessive living.  Once he settled down, the last five years of his life were spent in relative anonymity in New York City.  The nature of these years is debated, some holding to the official narrative that he was a house husband quietly raising his child at the Dakota Apartments, others claim that he was under the evil spell of his wife Yoko Ono who jealously sabotaged his career.  What ever the truth is, when he emerged in 1980 to resume his music career he comes off as a man comfortable being himself (maybe for the first time in his life), content with or without fame, as expressed in his song "Watching the Wheels."  I don't think it's a crime or an insult to say that John Lennon wasn't a genius.  His accomplishments are great, and was a part of something unique; a musical and cultural phenomenon that still makes news after more than 40 years.

In the end what we can say for certain is that John Lennon was a man searching for meaning in his life.  The bed-ins, the war protests, the primal scream therapy, the passive aggressive struggles to get out of the Beatles and the confusion and disillusionment that followed were all a part of a journey to find out what his place in the world really was.  While he was publicly critical of Bob Dylan's famous Born Again phase in the late 70's, I've read articles that speculate that he had his own private flirtation with Christian Fundamentalism during those last Dakota Years, as ironic as that may sound.  As I wrote, I do believe Lennon reached a certain peace before he was killed, but how much I'm not sure we can really say.  The tragedy of John Lennon's murder was more than that we lost a great artist.  It is that a son lost a father and a wife lost her husband, and a man's journey to find himself was cut short.