What if John Lennon hadn't been killed?
Thom Gibbs looks back at the Beatle ... warts and all.
You know The Beatles's story: 1960s Liverpool, the Cavern, Beatlemania, “more popular than Jesus,” Sgt. Pepper, India, squabbles, Yoko, rooftop gig and, in 1970, a bad-tempered split ...
But it was the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 that not only put a sad full stop on the greatest band of all time, but also gave their arc special resonance, turning it into a 20th-century fable.
In the public imagination at least, Lennon is one half of an epochal creative marriage, the man who wrote Imagine. After he was shot four times in the back outside his New York home, he instantly became a modern-day saint.
Had he survived, however, how might we have perceived Lennon, who would have turned 80 on Oct. 9?
Here, we imagine ...
On the day he was killed, Lennon was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, curled naked next to a clothed Yoko Ono. Following the success of Double Fantasy, his comeback album with Ono after five years spent as a “house husband” raising their son, what would he have done next? “Yoko Ono said that Lennon was very into the formative years of hip hop,” says Robin Allender, co-presenter of the Your Own Personal Beatles podcast. “The John Lennon hip-hop album ... I'm not sure if that would have done his legacy any good. But everyone had a dodgy '80s: Neil Young, David Bowie...”
Ever since his death, Lennon's birthday has meant commemorative activity. A statue was unveiled in San Francisco in
1981 and the Strawberry Fields memorial opened four years later in New York's Central Park.
The release of the Imagine John Lennon documentary in 1988 was a high point. It included footage of the artist at work, strolling around his Tittenhurst Park home with Yoko, and inviting a haunted fan into the kitchen for bread and butter after patiently trying to explain that he was not writing all of his lyrics with him specifically in mind.
In October 1990, his 50th birthday was marked with a box set of solo work, a worldwide broadcast of the song Imagine and a limp tribute concert in Liverpool with no Beatles present. Tickets did not sell out. “(Lennon's estate) were finding their feet in what commemorating John means,” says Jason Carty, co-host of Beatles podcast Nothing is Real.
But Lennon's 60th birthday was a global event. Planes wrote Remember Love in the sky above New York, Ono opened a Lennon
exhibition at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, an entire museum was dedicated to him in Japan, and an ice sculpture of his head was displayed outside the Sydney Opera House.
The '90s anointed Lennon as unimpeachably great. A large part of that was thanks to the Anthology project of 1995, an eight-episode documentary
accompanied by three double albums of Beatles rarities. The Beatles 1 album followed, a compilation of every song that topped the charts on either side of the Atlantic. It became the bestselling album of the Noughties.
Lennon's stock had rarely been higher. But some dissent also began creeping in, not least from his sons. In December 2000,
Julian stated: “I had a great deal of anger towards Dad because of his negligence and his attitude to peace and love. That peace and love never came home to me.”
Come Lennon's 70th birthday, in 2010, there was a sense that those wishing to pay tribute were running out of ideas. A photo was projected on to Royal Albert Dock. Google released its first video Doodle, Imagine the inevitable backing track. There was even a video game.
As for Lennon's big 8-0, his son, Sean Ono Lennon, honoured his late dad this past Wednesday at a lighting ceremony at New York's Empire State Building.
The iconic building was lit with blue lights and a rotating white peace sign to honour Lennon. Sean recently spoke about how listening to his dad's music makes him emotional, telling BBC Radio 2: “I honestly do worry about crying because sometimes I think sometimes when I talk about certain songs that Dad wrote, they're just so emotional.
“They are hard for me to even think about, let alone listen to some of them, especially the later stuff just because I have so many memories of them making Double Fantasy and some of that stuff just breaks my heart because ... it's like a time machine, it takes me right back to those moments before (he was killed), pretty tough.”
Sean spoke with Julian, Paul McCartney and Elton John as part of the station's John Lennon at 80 series, which aired in the U.K. last weekend.
So where would we find John Lennon today, aged 80?
McCartney, benefiting from nearly 40 years of being able to argue his corner, now seems to be implicitly perceived as the dominant partner of the greatest songwriting team ever.
Have we passed peak Lennon? Some of his legacy endures in unexpected places, says Carty. “I think the truest thing John ever said about his activism was `we're an advertising campaign for peace.' There is a bit of a reflection in modern activism where someone like Greta Thunberg can say `look at this thing, I am not going to fix this thing, but I'm going to draw your attention to this thing, make you think about it, and see what side you're on.'”
However distasteful we found Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot leading celebrities in a singalong of Imagine to cheer us up during lockdown, it seems likely Lennon will remain sentimentalized in the public imagination.
“Lennon had a lot of unsavoury aspects,” says Carty. “He wasn't even the perfect husband to Yoko throughout their marriage. But it's a bit like a holiday. You forget all the crap bits after a couple of months, you just remember the good times.”
Perhaps George Harrison had it right in 1974: “John Lennon is a saint and he's heavy-duty, and he's great and I love him. But at the same time, he's such a bastard — but that's the great thing about him, you see?”