John Lennon

The most influential rock voice of its generation belonged to a man who could not stand the sound of it. John Lennon spent his recording life asking to be disguised: doubled, drenched in echo, fed through a rotating organ speaker, anything to keep from hearing himself plain. In the spring of 1966 the Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend built a machine to do exactly that, artificial double tracking — a second tape running a hair behind the first, invented mostly because Lennon refused the tedium of singing every vocal twice.¹ He kept telling George Martin to “smother” the voice, to make him sound like someone else, “the man on the moon.”² The irony holds the whole story. The voice he wanted hidden, adenoidal and cutting and intimate even at full cry, is the one the next sixty years of singers tried to find their way back to. Lennon turned the rock song into an act of confession, and turned the rock star into a public conscience the government thought worth a surveillance file. He paid for both.

Influences and inheritance

Lennon’s awakening had a date and a sound. He was fifteen when Elvis Presley reached England, and the encounter reorganized him; “Before Elvis there was nothing,” he said later, the line less a judgment than a memory of how total the conversion felt.³ The skiffle craze gave him the means — a few chords, a cheap guitar, Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” as a starter kit — and in 1956 he formed the Quarrymen and taught himself out of American records: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent. The first chords had come from closer to home. His mother, Julia, taught him banjo fingerings before he owned a guitar, then was killed by a car in July 1958, when he was seventeen.⁴ That loss is the underground river of his songwriting, surfacing years later in the rawest things he wrote, and the flat refusal of consolation it left in him runs under even his gentlest records.

Two later infusions pushed him past rock and roll. The first was verbal: the radio surrealism of the Goons and the nonsense logic of Lewis Carroll gave him an ear for language that buckles under its own sense, the strain he would pour into “I Am the Walrus” and into two books of comic prose, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965). The second was Bob Dylan. Hearing Dylan in 1964 and 1965 turned Lennon’s lyrics inward; the man who had written “She Loves You” began writing in the first person, and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” is so plainly an apprentice’s homage that Lennon himself called it his Dylan period.⁵ The last turn was Yoko Ono, the conceptual artist he met in 1966, whose Fluxus background and avant-garde nerve gave him permission to follow the studio all the way out, into tape collage and the eight-minute sound-painting of “Revolution 9”.

Core musical identity

Lennon described his own playing without flattery. “I’m not technically good,” he told Jann Wenner in 1970, “but I can make it howl and move … I was rhythm guitarist. It’s an important job. I can make a band drive.”⁶ That is an exact account of what he did. His rhythm playing is percussive and a touch ahead of the beat, all downstroke and forward push, the chassis the band rode on while Harrison and McCartney decorated the top. He rarely soloed and never needed to; his hands kept a song moving the way a heartbeat keeps a body moving, without being noticed until they stop.

The voice was the real instrument, and his discomfort with it shaped the Beatles’ sound as much as any arrangement did. Because Lennon wanted to be transformed, the records kept inventing ways to transform him: the doubled and flanged vocals across Revolver, the Leslie-cabinet swirl that makes “Tomorrow Never Knows” sound beamed in from orbit. The studio wizardry the Beatles are credited with was often, at bottom, a solution to Lennon’s refusal to sing a line straight. And when he did sing it straight, nothing in the era hit harder. He cut “Twist and Shout” last, at the end of a ten-hour day, with a cold and a throat he said felt like sandpaper, in a single take because a second was beyond him; the shredded howl on that record is the sound of a voice spending itself to nothing.⁷

As a writer he worked a few veins the Beatles kept in balance and his solo records would lay bare. The most disarming was confession: “Help!” was a real distress call, he said later, written so uptempo that nobody heard it as one.⁸ Against that ran the wordplay, the Carroll-and-Goons surrealism of “I Am the Walrus”, for which he mixed a live BBC broadcast of King Lear into the fade just to thicken the nonsense.⁹ And under both lay a pull toward stasis and the blues: the one-chord trance of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and the lifelong habit of boiling a song down to a single repeatable line, from “All You Need Is Love” to “Give Peace a Chance”, slogans that worked like incantations.

His half of the Beatles

Inside the partnership credited to Lennon-McCartney, Lennon’s share carries a recognizable signature. Early on he was the band’s hard center, the throat that sang the covers nobody else could (“Twist and Shout,” “Money”) and the source of the minor-key tension in the singles. As the writing deepened he turned autobiographical and oblique at once: “Norwegian Wood” smuggles an affair into a folk waltz, “In My Life” sets a list of remembered places to a melody plain as a hymn, and “Strawberry Fields Forever”, named for a Salvation Army home near his boyhood house, dissolves memory into a haze no pop single had attempted.¹⁰ Then he kept going: “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “I Am the Walrus,” and the musique-concrète sprawl of “Revolution 9” pushed the Beatles toward the avant-garde faster than the other three wanted to travel. By the band’s last years he had largely receded, outworked on the albums by McCartney and dug deep into his life with Ono; his late masterstroke, “Come Together”, is half a Chuck Berry lift and half a private language, delivered in a mutter.¹¹ The full band story lives in The Beatles and the partnership’s mechanics in Lennon-McCartney; what matters here is that every tendency Lennon brought to the group — the confession, the wordplay, the avant-garde nerve — he would soon pursue without a counterweight.

The solo years: confession and cause

Lennon’s solo career began before the Beatles formally ended, and it began as agitation. With Ono he staged the bed-ins of 1969, week-long press conferences for peace held from hotel beds, and from the second of them, in Montreal, he walked out with “Give Peace a Chance” — a chant recorded in the room, his first single under the Plastic Ono Band name, and a number-fourteen hit in America while he was still a Beatle. “Cold Turkey” followed, a clammy first-person account of heroin withdrawal and the first song he signed alone, without the Lennon-McCartney byline. Then “Instant Karma!”, cut and mixed with Phil Spector in a single day and on the radio within ten, a top-three record made almost as a dare.¹²

The agitation cleared for the starkest record he ever made. After months of Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, which sent patients back through childhood pain to scream it out, Lennon made John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) with a group so bare it sounds like a confession taken down live: his own guitar or piano, Klaus Voormann’s bass, Ringo Starr on drums, almost nothing else.¹³ “Mother” opens on a tolling funeral bell and ends with Lennon screaming for the parents who left him; “Working Class Hero” is a folk indictment delivered in a flat Liverpool drawl; “God” recites everything he no longer believes in, idols and saviors and finally the Beatles, before landing on “the dream is over.”¹⁴ No star of his size had recorded anything so unguarded, and the singer-songwriter decade that followed drew much of its nerve from it.

Imagine (1971) softened the approach and widened the room. Where the primal album was dry and close, Imagine was lush, Spector’s strings carrying songs built for the charts, and it gave Lennon his first solo number-one album in America. The title track set a few plain wishes against a slow piano figure and became a secular hymn sung at funerals and Olympic ceremonies, its author a millionaire imagining no possessions, a contradiction he cheerfully owned.¹⁵ The album also showed his cruelty: “How Do You Sleep?”, a venomous open letter to McCartney built on a sneering slide-guitar line, sits a few grooves from “Jealous Guy”, one of the tenderest melodies he ever wrote. Both were true, and the same man held them.

The activism hardened, then overreached. Some Time in New York City (1972), a set of topical songs about Attica, Northern Ireland, and women’s rights cut with a New York bar band, was his first real failure, agitprop that mistook a headline for a song. But the politics were not a pose, and the United States government did not treat them as one. Beginning in 1971 the FBI put Lennon under surveillance for his antiwar organizing, and in the spring of 1972, after a memo from Senator Strom Thurmond warned that Lennon might turn young voters against Nixon’s reelection, the immigration service moved to deport him.¹⁶ He fought it for years and won, the order overturned in 1975 and his green card granted in 1976; the historian Jon Wiener spent decades suing to pry loose the surveillance files, and his Come Together: John Lennon in His Time remains the fullest account of how seriously a government took a rock star with a cause.

His life then came apart and reassembled. Separated from Ono through 1973 and 1974 — the stretch he called his “lost weekend,” spent mostly in Los Angeles with May Pang — he drank hard and worked anyway, making the slick, sad Mind Games (1973) and Walls and Bridges (1974). The latter carried “Whatever Gets You thru the Night”, a horn-driven duet with Elton John that became the only number-one single Lennon scored in his lifetime. He had bet Elton it would never top the chart; the forfeit was a guest spot at Elton’s Thanksgiving show at Madison Square Garden on November 28, 1974, where Lennon played three songs to a roaring house and then walked off for good. It was the last concert of his life.¹⁷ A covers album, Rock ‘n’ Roll (1975), closed the circle on the Presley and Berry sides that had started him.

Then he stopped. When his son Sean was born in October 1975, on Lennon’s own thirty-fifth birthday, he left music to raise him, and for five years the most restless man in rock baked bread and watched a boy grow, a withdrawal that was itself a kind of statement.¹⁸ He returned in late 1980 with Double Fantasy, a married couple’s record split with Ono, the two of them trading songs about domestic peace; “(Just Like) Starting Over”, “Woman”, and “Watching the Wheels” are a man at ease, which is what makes the ending unbearable. On December 8, 1980, three weeks after the album’s release, Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota, his apartment building, by a man who had asked for his autograph that afternoon.¹⁹ He was forty. Double Fantasy went to number one and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, turning overnight from a comeback into a last testament.

Legacy, and the reckoning

Lennon left rock three things it kept. The first is the confessional voice: Plastic Ono Band made unmediated self-exposure a legitimate subject, and the singer-songwriters who filled the 1970s and the punks who tore through the end of it both drew on his license to sound raw and mean every word.²⁰ The second is the figure of the rock star as public conscience, the celebrity who spends fame on a cause, a role so ordinary now that the FBI file the habit earned him reads as a period piece. The third is the avant-garde’s foothold in the mainstream: a man who sold a hundred million records also put out albums of tape loops and feedback, and made the experiment look like part of the job.

What complicates the sainthood is that Lennon told on himself. In his last long interview, with David Sheff for Playboy in 1980, he looked back at the Beatles’ “Getting Better” and owned the line about cruelty: “I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women.”²¹ He had been violent toward women and largely absent for his first son, Julian, and he said so plainly, without the softening that confession usually buys. The peace campaigner and the man who admitted to beating his wife were one person; he could be a hypocrite about peace and still write its anthem, and that contradiction sits at the center of the legend, the part of it that stays honest. His real subject was always himself, examined without mercy. The myth has been argued over ever since, by Wiener on the politics and by Philip Norman across eight hundred biographical pages, and it survives the argument largely because Lennon supplied the damning evidence first.

MAP

Explorer

John Lennon

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

His half of the Beatles

The solo years: confession and cause

Legacy, and the reckoning

See also

MAP

Explorer

John Lennon

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

His half of the Beatles

The solo years: confession and cause

Legacy, and the reckoning

See also

Footnotes