What John Lennon Failed to Imagine

Its a landmark event for Beatledom.  John Lennon, dead these 30 years, would have turned 70-years-old today.

For many 60′s survivors who grew up in thrall to the Fab Four, the idea that such an important symbol of the youth culture had arrived at the threshold of old age (if such a category still exists in our teen obsessed culture) must be profoundly unsettling.

It is as if that entire generation had finally found itself washed up at the very doorstep of senility.

There can be no doubt Lennon, in his partnership with the brilliant tunesmith Paul McCartney, did craft some of the most memorable pop tunes of the 20th Century. That might be reason enough to celebrate his life. Yet the failure to complete his life’s journey has frozen his memory in perpetual mid-life. There he presides as the guru of peace and love, an unfazed and unrepentant hippie whose vision for world peace remains unfettered by reality or subsequent historical events.

Forgotten, or perhaps conveniently overlooked, is that Lennon’s solo work in his ten post-Beatles years was far inferior to anything he did as a member of the group and was weak even by comparison to the output of his fellow Beatles ( and yes, I include Ringo Starr in that assessment). His coda, the cloying and maudlin Double Fantasy (1980) was an embarrassment for such a great talent, and evidence that perhaps his muse had permanently fled.

Part of this can be attributed to Lennon’s early 70s determination to make political statements rather than music.  Moving permanently to New York City in 1970, he and his wife Yoko Ono became lightening rods for radicals and far left causes. Feminists, Black Panthers, Yippies and peace movement activists, all pitched their tents under the Lennon/ Ono carapace to propagate their liberation politics. The recorded product of this eclectic jamboree, Sometime In New York City (1972), is a rather tuneless and bleak attempt to capture the radical zeitgeist. It bombed and is regarded universally as one of the worst post break up efforts by any of the Beatles.

While Lennon’s post-Beatles recordings, save for the very early ones, can be largely dismissed, what can’t be dismissed is his cultural influence. Lennon stands today as the most revered icon in the pantheon of the peace movement – a figure of such sainted majesty that he has been practically beatified by secular humanists. This reputation balances precariously on the foundation of just one song – the anthemic Imagine.

Imagine dredged up some half baked Romantic notions and presented a vision of a world free of conflict. Attached to an ethereal melody it seem to float in a sea of mysticism, painting a picture of a utopia that most Communist leaders in the 1970s would have recognized.

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…”

Would Lennon have matured intellectually as he aged – ultimately recognizing that this formula for world peace, written in a swishy mansion in the English countryside, far from the Communist despots and authoritarians who at that time imprisoned nearly half of humanity, could not work? Would he have understood that there was something a little skewed about attempting to denude the world of religion, governments, sovereignty and wealth?

Would he have finally understood that his adopted home, the United States, actually stood as the last best chance for humanity to preserve the liberty that had allowed him to pen such masterpieces such as Across the Universe and A Day In the Life….?

Probably not. Naivete is one of the great privileges of the rich and famous. Insulated from the hard realities of life, our pop icons are safe and free to make ignorant guesses about the world and pose solutions that suggest more, not less, misery for its human population. Once having made such a statement of principle, it is highly unlikely that Lennon would ever have retired his Imagine philosophy. Unlike McCartney, who has revealed himself to be comparatively sensible on a number of important security issues, Lennon, socially alienated as a child and conditioned to reject convention, would have continued to find some gratification in oppositional politics and ideologies. It is doubtful he could ever have written a song such as Freedom, which McCartney penned in outrage following the attacks of 9/11.

But his legacy remains and his Imagine vision continues to inspire the contemporary anti-war movement, a fact of which he would doubtless have been proud. Yet as the threat of a nuclear Iran grows and Islamic terrorism sets Western society in a state of constant alert, the notion that we can embrace those sworn to our destruction in a ‘brotherhood of man’ is a chimera reflecting nothing more than an irresponsible failure of imagination.

This article first appeared in The American Thinker.

Is Love All You Really Need?

Forty years ago today the world received the staggering news: Paul McCartney was leaving the Beatles.  Together with the release of   McCartney’s  self-titled solo album on that day in London, came an announcement that he had no further  intention of recording with the group.  A Beatles without Paul in the line up seemed unimaginable.  The Beatles, it became evident to everyone, were over.

The Beatles had not only dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for better part of a decade.  They had been a leading force in 60s cultural revolution and had shaped an entire generation’s consciousness with their hairstyles, clothing, conduct and musical messages.

What brought about the end of such a successful musical partnership and cultural odyssey?   Countless books and articles have been devoted to that subject but it boils down to infighting, bad business decisions and increasingly strained personal and artistic differences.

Subsequent accounts by group members (poignantly recounted in their own words in The Beatles Anthology) indicated that the rot has set in years before.   Following the death of their manager Brian Epstein in August 1967, the four men had chosen not to appoint a new manager but to steer their own course.   By that time, however, liberated from the social and musical constraints of  their mop top selves and having given up the exhausting rigors of touring, they were all headed in very different directions.

John Lennon was soon to meet Yoko Ono and become immersed in the avant garde and the lure of radical politics; George Harrison was undergoing a spiritual transformation that would draw him deeply into introspection and far from the limelight; Ringo Starr was increasingly anchored to family life and had become a homebody.

It was only Paul McCartney, at the height of his powers as a musician and producer – and the only member of the group  to remain unmarried – who retained the enthusiasm and drive  to propel the group forward.

The tension between their competing drives and needs can be heard in the pastiche nature of 1968′s White Album, released in November, in which the group members often recorded their compositions on their own or with hired help.  The January, 1969  filming of the Let It Be recording sessions was, by the group’s own admission, a disaster, at which George Harrison, incensed over McCartney’s officiousness and Lennon’s seeming indifference, actually left the group.

Still the musical chemistry between the four men remained vigorous, resulting  (in their last eighteen months together) in such extraordinary pop classics as Hey Jude, Something, Here Comes the Sun, Across the Universe and Let It Be.    Not to mention the second side of their final recorded LP Abbey Road, which remains one of the great masterpieces of modern  popular music.

There is no telling what they might have achieved had they had remained together.  Certainly all four men produced great  pop tunes on their own in the years following the break up.   Lennon’s Imagine (1971), McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed (1970), Harrison’s My Sweet Lord (1971) and Ringo Starr’s  Photograph (1973)  all stand as equal to almost anything in their Beatles canon.   The reunion of the surviving members, in the early 90s to complete two unfinished Lennon tunes, suggests that they had not lost touch with their musical sympatico.

But now 40 years after they left the scene as a united group, we might ponder their ultimate legacy.   Sunny, sparkling pop, with a hint of humor and broad optimism about life, may be one of them.   The Beatles were working class lads from Liverpool who as individuals never forgot their modest origins and showed no reluctance in celebrating their childhood haunts and antics.   Songs such as Penny Lane, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever and Julia gave us a window into their lives and the opportunity to meet  some of the characters with who had populated their youth.    A deep loyalty to family and friends threaded its way through their music and imbued it with a sentimentality that was never twee nor forced, but profoundly affecting.  Beatles music was buoyed by a sense of possibility and a celebration of  the wonder, miracle and beauty of life – a euphoric element that can be heard in even their earliest recordings.

Yet there is another sense in which the Beatles’ influence may not have been all positive.  Lennon’s All You Need Is Love, composed in time  for the first satellite television broadcast  in June, 1967, was a statement of the the emerging Beatles credo – that love could cure all societal ills  and heal all problems.  Brotherly love, free love, maternal love,  sex as love, love as sex -  it was all the same.   Little wonder that ‘Love’ then was the title chosen for  the Cirque de Soliel extravaganza which co-opted Beatles songs for a lavish production in Las Vegas.  All four Beatles in their solo careers would harp on love as the world’s panacea.  In fact, almost every one of Ringo Starr’s latter day albums sports a song devoted to peace and love, words now adopted as his motto.

The problem is that love doesn’t always cure all society’s ills and it is dangerous to believe that it can.  The Beatles saw the Cold War, not as a conflict between good and evil, or a contest between democracy and totalitarianism, but as a misunderstanding between individual leaders  (the tongue -in-cheek  Back in the U.S.S.R. notwithstanding);  they saw the cultural revolution which they helped ignite, with its sweeping rejection of adult moral authority and the elevation of teenage sensitivity as a value in itself, as a sign of human progress;  they felt that authority always needs to be questioned and political leaders of  all parties (see Harrison’s Taxman where he expressly names them), not to be trusted.  They failed to accept and appreciate that their own system of government, built after centuries of bloodshed and the struggle between the people and the Crown, was the one thing that guaranteed their freedom to sing and perform largely without constraint or control.

A generation that grew up singing along to Can’t Buy Me Love and I Wanna Hold Your Hand also was deeply affected  by the idea that all war is wrong and that conflict could be avoided through demonstrations of  compassion and sympathy.  But the Cold War was not eventually won through displays of love but determined policies that quarantined the Russian communist regime and threatened aggression when challenged.  Love would certainly not have defeated Nazi Germany or a militarized Japan in the 1940s, nor will it defeat militant Islam.

Perhaps Paul McCartney finally understood this when, in 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks –  having been in New York at the time of their perpetration, he composed the song Freedom

” I’m talkin’ about freedom  …….. freedom!

I will fight  for the right

To live in freedom……”

McCartney is said to regret the fervor  of the song and has not preformed it in public since that year.   But the shock of the attacks on the World Trade Towers must have aroused  in him the devastating realization that in fact the world isn’t necessarily a loving place and that there are people and societies for whom talk of love and compassion is not a sign of openness and tolerance but a demonstration of  a weakness that is open to  exploitation.

We can’t forget that in Soviet Russia, teenagers did not have the same  luxury of buying and listening to Beatles music.   The  Beatles were banned there as subversive and their albums needed to be smuggled into the country, under fear of stiff penalties for violations.   When McCartney eventually played Red Square in Moscow in 2003, he was told repeatedly that his group’s contraband music offered hope and inspiration to a closed society.

Perhaps McCartney didn’t include Freedom in his set list at that performance or remind his audience that Back in the U.S.S.R. was originally conceived (in 1968) as a satire on a repressive system that had banned Beatles music.  But surely he must have ruminated on what eventually broke the back of the Soviet tyranny.  Suffice to say it wasn’t Western expressions of  peace, love and friendship.    Soviet Russia collapsed because of a siren song of freedom, but not in swoon of All You Need Is Love.  This freedom was conveyed through the implacable stand of the United States in meeting Soviet aggression with force and defiance. It came because the Soviets could not adequately feed their people or offer them a high quality of life.  And it came most of all because Soviet citizens and their the peoples populating the Soviet satellites in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Roumania had begun to understand they were living in a prison, when a free world existed just beyond their borders.

The world may be  a different place than the one in which the Beatles lived, but there are  many ways in which  it remains the same.  A new menace to Western freedom looms – one even more insidious and potentially devastating than the threats presented in the 1960s.   This time, no amount of Western music or expressions of amity will sway our enemies in Iran or within the ranks of Islamic terrorist organizations.  Unfortunately, the love motif has crept back into the U.S. government’s diplomatic vocabulary, taking its form in policies of appeasement.

To remember how devastating such policies can potentially be,  perhaps the Beatles own lyrics, when  placed in the mouths of the freedom starved peoples of today and addressed to the U.S.  and the West, might offer us a guide:

“And now my life has changed in oh so many ways

My independence seems to vanish in the haze

But every now and then I feel so insecure

I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before.”

                            (Help! 1964)

Imagining John Lennon’s World

Would the world have been a better place without John Lennon?

Such a question will  engender a surge of rage in members of my generation. Questioning Lennon’s role and importance in modern culture is tantamount to pop heresy.  After all, much of Lennon’s music and late 60s antics were embedded in our adolescent consciousness. Even amongst conservatives it is somewhat gauche to suggest that Lennon was anything other than one of the greatest cultural figures of the modern era, whose signature tunes Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day In the Life….… and Imagine defined the modern sensibility.

I can’t claim to have ever really disagreed with that sentiment.  I am as big a Beatles fan as any.  But since this year marks the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s murder (preceded by the 40th anniversary of the Beatles break up), maybe its finally time to take a closer look at Lennon’s real legacy, divorced from the hagiography that has accumulated around his memory.

I had the opportunity to think more about this after seeing a show celebrating his music, presented by Tim Piper and his band in North Hollywood last Sunday afternoon.  Piper did a commendable enough job impersonating Lennon (although there were so many Lennons over the 20 years of his public career it would have been hard to represent all his incarnations on stage).  He offered serviceable renditions of Beatles songs, as well as Lennon’s solo efforts and the intimacy of the nightclub made the performance feel warmly nostalgic.

 It was only on the drive home, listening to Imagine , that I began to think more deeply about how disagreeable some of Lennon’s messages seem today and how deeply flawed was his global perspective. Imagine itself of course, is not a song as much as an anthem, a fragile vision of an unobtainable world, wiped clean of religion, war, conflict, sovereignty and possessions.

Lennon wasn’t so stupid to believe his nirvana achievable immediately. And he certainly liked expensive cars, beautiful homes and the freedom to travel whenever and however he wished, as much as anyone else.

But listen again to the lyrics of that song – 

Imagine no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too.

 Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

 

      - and you can begin to hear the first philosophical rumblings of the environmental movement, the U.N.’s global governance campaign and the human rights industry.  All of these forces are posed against capitalism, free enterprise, sovereign jurisdiction and representative government. They are supranational in scope, claiming allegiance to nothing and no one, save a nebulous concept of truth and justice.

Lennon was in essence promoting a world without boundaries – and his program would extend beyond bulldozing physical borders, to demolishing sexual, political and economic restrictions as well.  But truth and justice, or as, in Ringo Starr’s repetitive mantra “peace and love,” are impossible to imagine without the imposition of boundaries. With no restrictions on sexual impulses, economic transactions or property claims, humanity could not effectively function.  Even the primitive tribes in the world’s most remote jungles maintain boundaries over these aspects of human interaction.

Imagine’s world, in the end, sounds more like a place where conflict would be a constant as those seeking to protect what they have and need for sustenance are forced to share it with others, who have not contributed to its growth, harvesting or development.

Of course we had seen this kind of utopianism before. It began once as starry eyed dreaming in the villages of the Ukraine and Hunan Province and ended as inhuman Five Year Plans in the Soviet Union, a crushing Cultural Revolution  in China and the murderous Relocation Farms in Cambodia.  Commencing with the same brand of utopianism, they degenerated into ruthless campaigns to consolidate power. The misery inflicted on the world by such ideas and their idealogues is something Lennon perhaps didn’t quite link with his own brand of utopianism.

A more realistic world view, one schooled in practicalities of human existence and human nature might take a more jaundiced view of utopianism and embrace the realities of life. Perhaps a more mature Lennon, steeped in these realities, might have written this update to his earlier vision:

             Imagine there’s no evil

                  You know it isn’t too late

                  Just take goodness and kindness

                        And fight against those who hate 

               Imagine no terror

                The West’s haters wiped away

                  Love of democracy and freedom

                 Might save us all one day

               Imagine all the people

                 Respecting individuality

 

 

 

 

 

Al Stewart in Concert

OK.  So anyone working to save Western civilization deserves a break every now and then.  And this was a good one.  I have been an Al Stewart fan since I picked up a copy of Past, Present and Future, Stewart’s fifth LP, in 1973.   Since then I have become an avid collector of Stewart albums, noted for their lilting vocals, elegant fret work and preponderance of historical themes. 

I guess its the historical songs which always grab me because there is not all that much to distinguish one Stewart melody from the next and his voice, even at age 65, still flutters above the song in that thin, fey tremolo he possessed when he was still a starry-eyed folkie sharing digs in London with Paul Simon.  

But I enjoyed this concert as much for Stewart’s banter, which revolved largely around dead and forgotten presidents, than his explanations for the provenance of his songs.    Accidental president Millard Fillmore became a staple of the evening, as did Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison( president in 1841 for only six weeks); his grandson , the humorless Benjamin Harrison; Warren G. Harding ( who once received his own song on a Stewart disc) and ‘Silent Cal,’ – Calvin Coolidge.  He peppered the concert with gossip about all these men, which I, at least, appreciated since I knew almost every anecdote he told (which makes me, I guess, as a much of a historical geek as the singer himself). 

But beyond that there were some lovely moments on stage.  I mean, you just can’t beat that wailing sax on Year of the Cat, or the great guitar riff of Time Passages – especially  in an intimate setting like McCabes in Santa Monica, since the crispness of the  horn and the rolling thunder of  the guitar almost lifts you off your seat.  Other joyous moments came with the Django Rheinhardt- influenced Night Train to Munich (from Between the Wars) and chilled atmosphere of Antarctica ( from Last Days of the Century). 

Adding to the resonance of the music were his two band mates, the scintillating guitarist Dave Nachmanoff and the multi-instrumentalist (bongos, maracas, harmonica, alto, tenor and soprano sax) Louis Marcias.  The easy interplay between the three of them was quite lovely to behold.