JOHN LENNON, THE ORIGNATOR OF THE BEATLES

John and Yoko soon after they got married

John Lennon has finally become a grandfather - more than forty five years after his death. He was shot at his home in the Dakota Building in New York. The man who shot him, Mark Chapmen, is still in jail. He would normally have been released on parole but Yoke Ono, who evidently has a vindictive streak, has always opposed his release and so he continues to rot in jail until she changes her mind or dies. She is ninety now so the latter is more probable.

 The Beatles stayed together until she came into John’s life so she is often blamed for breaking the group up. In fact, they had been having problems before that, as George Harrison has said. He was the one was probably most hemmed in the group and spread his wings when they split up, so he may nave an agenda of his own, but what he said had a grain of truth in it. The Lennon-McCartney partnership was running out of steam.

 

Paul was always my favourite Beatle and had had a successful solo career after the band broke up in 1970. John had always said that the group would only last so long and he retreated into a post-Beatles life with Yoko and, eventually, their son Sean who he spent a lot of time with, possibly to make up for his failure with Julian, his son with his first wife Cynthia. Julian, who is named after John;s mother Julia, has not had children.

 

It is Sean, who at the age of fifty has finally become a father, with his partner who is thirty nine. I can imagine John as a parent but not as an indulgent grandparent so it is probably just as well that he did not live to see his only grandson grow up. He would probably dismiss grandparenting as the ultimate sell-out but maybe he would take to it, We shall never know.

 

Yoko, who had a daughter she was estranged from for a time but was eventually reconciled with, has become a grandma (again) at ninety. She was married for a time to Anthony Cox but the relationship with John got in the way of that marriage and motherhood and she left them for John, who took to her and stayed loyal despite his well-documented infidelities during the infamous ‘lost weekend’ period when he left her to search for his adolescence.

 

They were eventually reconciled and settled into domesticity with Sean in the Dakota building where John bought up flats to keep his fur coats. When asked why he did this, Yoko said simply that ‘John had never had a home of his own’. His post Beatles life of about ten years, was almost as eventful as his time in the group. Paul, for whom composing was as natural as breathing, was pursuing a solo career while John was baking bread in the Dakota.

 

Paul tried to renew the song-writing partnership with John, which had been sealed with a handshake years earlier, but felt rebuffed when John said that it was not Liverpool now but New York and Paul could not simply show up at the door of his house to compose together. That house, incidentally, was Mendips, a middle-class home that John’s Aunt Mimi (who he phoned every week) was very proud of.

 

John remained in New York for the rest of his days, He does not have a grave but is remembered in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields memorial. Strawberry Fields is the children’s home near Mendips which Mimi was always telling him to stay away from and which he sang about in Strawberry Fields Forever, while Paul was more jauntily singing about Penny Lane where the group met in their early days.

 

Nowhere is the contrast between John and Paul more marked than in the songs they wrote about their early days in Liverpool at Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. Somebody (I think it was Coleridge or Thackeray) said the job of the poet was to make the new familiar and the familiar new.  John does the first in Strawberry Fields Forever while Paul does the second in Penny Lane. Together they had a brilliant combination but eventually, inevitably, they fell out.

 

Paul became the dominant Beatle in the later years and continued to pour out songs, composing continuously. John was the founder and unofficial leader of the group from their days as the Quarrymen to the later years when Paul increasingly took over. It was Paul’s desire to go back on the road that finally killed the band. Eventually they all performed live again but with their separate groups. The magic was gone and they never reformed.

 

I was glad that they did not because they could easily have become their own tribute band – which would have been a shame. Their music lives on and John’s songs, especially from A Hard Day’s Night when he was it his strongest, remain as fresh as ever. A Hard Day’s Night, by the way, is the first album I owned and is the only Beatles one to consist entirely of songs written by Lennon and McCartney.

 

The more liberal gun laws in the USA led to John’s death in 1980. He found a king of peace there – although he was pursued by the authorities for his admitted drug use – and he lived in the Dakota building until Chapman ended his life. No-one knows why he did so and his motives will be forever shrouded in mystery. Somehow, I cannot imagine anyone gunning down Pail McCartney in similar fashion.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner