John Lennon

"If there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles."

John Lennon said it, without beating about the bush. Before he was Lennon he was a Liverpool boy whose life was set alight by the voice of Elvis Presley, a voice that put a guitar in his hands. Elvis was the big bang; the Beatles, and a good deal of the music that came after, were the explosion.

That is why the best way into Lennon is through that door: he was the King's most famous disciple.

The disciple who buried the master

And as sometimes happens with disciples, he ended up surpassing him.

In August 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, the Beatles went to meet Elvis at his house in Bel-Air. It was a dream come true, an audience with the King. It was a letdown. According to his biographer Bob Spitz, Lennon dismissed it afterwards by saying: "It was like meeting Engelbert Humperdinck", a middle-of-the-road lounge crooner.

The idol, in person, was a dimmed man, lost in his films and his myth. The disciple had already flown further.

And it was Lennon himself who wrote the cruellest epitaph for that fall: "Elvis died when he went into the army." The boy who had idolised Elvis ended up burying him in a single sentence. That is the thread running between the two stories: the King lit the fire, and the disciple was the next one that same fire, the fire of total fame, would eventually reach.

The Beatles' cutting edge

Inside the most important band in history, Lennon was the edge. The acid one, the ironic one, the restless one, the one who pushed towards experiment and brutal honesty, against Paul McCartney's melodic sweetness.

"Strawberry Fields Forever", "A Day in the Life", "Come Together". And on his own, "Imagine", "Working Class Hero", "Instant Karma". He even went into the studio with David Bowie to write and sing "Fame".

He was the voice of a generation's idealism. With Yoko Ono he turned his life into a manifesto — the bed-ins for peace, "Give Peace a Chance" — and "Imagine" became the secular hymn of every vigil and every march from then on. His face ended up on a million posters: Saint John of Peace.

The plaster saint was not the man

And the first to say so was him.

In his last major interview, in 1980, he spoke without make-up about his own shadow. He admitted he had been violent, that he had been "a hitter", and that fighting that violence of his was part of what peace meant to him. A violent man preaching peace to himself first.

He was also an absent and harsh father to his first son, Julian, whom he sidelined for years. And there is the contradiction his critics love: he asked us to imagine a world without possessions while living as a millionaire in one of the most expensive buildings in New York.

There is no point covering it up. The contradictions were real and he knew them. But far from making him less interesting than a saint, that makes him more so: he was a flawed man reaching towards something better than himself. The peace he preached was, in large part, the peace he could not find within.

Learning late

And he tried to change, which is the part that redeems him without whitewashing him.

In his last five years he stepped away from music and fame to raise his second son, Sean. He became a stay-at-home father: he baked bread, he was present, he did for Sean what he had not known how to do for Julian. The man who had been absent and violent spent his final stretch learning, late, to be tender and to be there.

He was coming back to music, with a new album just released, when he was killed.

Outside the Dakota

On 8 December 1980, outside his building, the Dakota, a man shot him in the back as he was coming home with Yoko. That same afternoon Lennon had signed an album for that very man, Mark Chapman, without knowing who he was signing it for.

He was forty. The man who had sung "All You Need Is Love", who wrote the greatest anthem against violence, died by the most absurd and gratuitous violence: the very thing he had spent his life preaching against, and fighting inside himself.

Hearing it another way

Elvis lit the fire; Lennon carried it further than anyone, and a bullet put it out at forty. Two idols who changed music for ever, both overtaken by what they became, both gone before their time, each in his own way.

Lennon deserves to be remembered whole: not the saint on the poster, but the real man. The disciple who surpassed his king, the genius who made a generation dream of peace, the flawed and at times violent man who spent his life reaching towards a tenderness he found late and lost quickly.

And if you put on "Imagine", hear it not as a saint's hymn but as the prayer of a difficult man trying to become better. That way it is harder to believe, and far more human.

Sources

John Winston Ono Lennon (Liverpool, 9 October 1940 – New York, 8 December 1980), musician, singer-songwriter and activist, co-founder of The Beatles. He is credited with the line "If there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles", along with "Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis". The Beatles visited Elvis Presley at his house in Bel-Air on 27 August 1965; according to Bob Spitz's biography, Lennon later compared the encounter to "meeting Engelbert Humperdinck". The line "Elvis died when he went into the army" is attributed to Lennon. With the Beatles and as a solo artist he wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever", "A Day in the Life", "Come Together", "Imagine", "Working Class Hero" and "Instant Karma!", among many others; he co-wrote "Fame" (1975) with David Bowie and Carlos Alomar. His peace activism with Yoko Ono included the 1969 "bed-ins" and "Give Peace a Chance". In the interview he gave David Sheff for Playboy (1980) he acknowledged having been violent towards women in the past and reflected on it. He had a distant relationship with his first son, Julian, from his marriage to Cynthia Lennon, and between 1975 and 1980 he withdrew from music to raise his second son, Sean; he returned with "Double Fantasy" (November 1980). He lived in the Dakota building in New York, where he was murdered by Mark David Chapman, who hours earlier had asked him to sign a copy of that album; he was shot four times in the back and died aged 40. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Wikiquote, The Beatles Bible, Ultimate Classic Rock and other press coverage.