John Lennon

A squidoote (tribute) to John Lennon, The Beatles, the 60's, psychedelic rock and classic rock music.

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Introduction

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 ? 8 December 1980) was an English rock musician, singer-songwriter, author, and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles. With Paul McCartney, Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century and "wrote some of the most popular music in rock and roll history". He is ranked the second most successful songwriter in UK singles chart history after McCartney.

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and biting wit in his music, on film, in books, and at press conferences and interviews. He was controversial through his work as a peace activist and visual artist. After The Beatles, Lennon enjoyed a successful solo career with such acclaimed albums as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After a self-imposed "retirement" to raise his son Sean, Lennon reemerged with a comeback album, Double Fantasy, but was murdered less than one month after its release. The album would go on to win the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

In 2002, respondents to a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted Lennon eighth. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Lennon number 38 on its list of "The Immortals: The Fifty Greatest Artists of All Time" (The Beatles being number one). He was also ranked fifth greatest singer of all time by Rolling Stone in 2008. He was posthumously inducted into both the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

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Introduction To The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, who became one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. From 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon (rhythm guitar, vocals), Paul McCartney (bass guitar, vocals), George Harrison (lead guitar, vocals) and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals). Rooted in skiffle and 1950s rock and roll, the group later worked in many genres ranging from folk rock to psychedelic pop, often incorporating classical and other elements in innovative ways. The nature of their enormous popularity, which first emerged as the "Beatlemania" fad, transformed as their songwriting grew in sophistication. The group came to be perceived as the embodiment of progressive ideals, seeing their influence extend into the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s.

With an early five-piece line-up of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums), The Beatles built their reputation in Liverpool and Hamburg clubs over a three-year period from 1960. Sutcliffe left the group in 1961, and Best was replaced by Starr the following year. Moulded into a professional outfit by music store owner Brian Epstein after he offered to act as the group's manager, and with their musical potential enhanced by the hands-on creativity of producer George Martin, The Beatles achieved UK mainstream success in late 1962 with their first single, "Love Me Do". Gaining international popularity over the course of the next year, they toured extensively until 1966, then retreated to the recording studio until their breakup in 1970. Each then found success in an independent musical career. McCartney and Starr remain active; Lennon was shot and killed in 1980, and Harrison died of cancer in 2001.

During their studio years, The Beatles produced what critics consider some of their finest material including the album Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), widely regarded as a masterpiece. Nearly four decades after their breakup, The Beatles music continues to be popular. The Beatles have had more number one albums on the UK charts, and held down the top spot longer, than any other musical act. According to RIAA certifications, they have sold more albums in the US than any other artist. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the all-time top-selling Hot 100 artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with The Beatles at number one. They have been honoured with 7 Grammy Awards, and they have received 15 Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. The Beatles were collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of Category: Time 100 - : The Most Important People of the Century|the 20th century's 100 most important and influential people.

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Biography

By Anthony DeCurtis

If John Lennon had only been one of the four members of the Beatles, his artistic immortality would already have been assured. The so-called "smart Beatle," he brought a penetrating intelligence and a stinging wit both to the band's music and its self-presentation. But in such songs as "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," "Rain" and "In My Life," he also marshaled gorgeous melodies to evoke a sophisticated, dreamlike world-weariness well beyond his years. Such work suggested not merely a profound musical and literary sensibility - a genius, in short -- but a vision of life that was simultaneously reflective, utopian and poignantly realistic.

While in the Beatles, Lennon displayed an outspokenness that immersed the band in controversy and helped redefine the rules of acceptable behavior for rock stars. He famously remarked in 1965 that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" - a statement that was more an observation than a boast, but that resulted in the band's records being burned and removed from radio station playlists in the U.S. He criticized America's involvement in Vietnam, and, as the Sixties progressed, he became an increasingly important symbol of the burgeoning counterculture.

But it was only after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 that the figure the world now recognizes as "John Lennon" truly came into being. Whether he was engaging in social activism; giving long, passionate interviews that, once again, broadened the nature of public discourse for artists; defining a new life as a self-described "househusband;" or writing and recording songs, Lennon came to view his life as a work of art in which every act shimmered with potential meaning for the world at large. It was a Messianic attitude, to be sure, but one that was tempered by an innate inclusiveness and generosity. If he saw himself as larger than life, he also yearned for a world in which his ego managed at once to absorb everyone else and dissolve all differences among people, leaving a Zen-like tranquility and calm. "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one," he sang in "Imagine," which has become his best-known song and an international anthem of peace. "I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

Such imagery, coupled with the tragedy of his murder in 1980, has often led to Lennon's being sentimentalized as a gentle prince of peace gazing off into the distance at an Eden only he could see. In fact, he was a far more complex and difficult person, which, in part, accounts for the world's endless fascination with him. Plastic Ono Band (1970), the first solo album he made after leaving the Beatles, alternates songs that are so emotionally raw that to this day they are difficult to listen to with songs of extraordinary beauty and simplicity. Gripped by his immersion in primal-scream therapy, which encouraged its practitioners to re-experience their most profound psychic injuries, Lennon sought in such songs as "Mother" and "God" to confront and strip away the traumas that had afflicted his life since childhood.

And those traumas were considerable. Lennon's mother, Julia, drifted in and out of his life during his childhood in Liverpool - he was raised by Julia's sister Mimi and Mimi's husband, George - and then died in a car accident when Lennon was seventeen. His father was similarly absent, essentially walking out on the family when John was an infant. He disappeared for good when Lennon was five, only to return after his son had become famous as a member of the Beatles. Consequently, Lennon struggled with fears of abandonment his entire life. When he repeatedly cries, "Mama, don't go/Daddy come home," in "Mother," it's less a performance than a scarifying brand of therapeutic performance art. And in that regard, as well as many others, it revealed the influence of Yoko Ono, whom Lennon had married in 1969, leaving his first wife, Cynthia, and their son Julian in order to do so.

The minimalist sound of Plastic Ono Band was significant too. Lennon had come to associate the elaborate musical arrangements of much of the Beatles' later work with Paul McCartney and George Martin, and he consciously set out to purge those elements from his own work. Co-producing with Ono and the legendary Phil Spector, he built a sonic environment that could not have been more basic - guitar, bass, drums, the occasional piano -- whatever was essential and absolutely nothing more. Lyrically, he turned away from the psychedelic flights and Joycean wordplay of such songs as "I Am the Walrus" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" - as well as his books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works -- and toward a style in which unadorned, elemental speech gathered poetic force through its very directness.

On his next album, Imagine (1971), Lennon felt confident enough to reintroduce some melodic elements reminiscent of the Beatles into his songs. Working again with Ono and Spector, he retains the eloquent plainspokenness of Plastic Ono Band, but allows textural elements such as strings, to create more of a sense of beauty. The album's title track alone ensured its historical importance; it is a call to idealism that has provided solace and inspiration at every moment of social and humanitarian crisis since it was written.

From there Lennon turned to a style that was a sort of journalistic agit-prop. Sometime In New York City (1972) is as outward-looking and blunt as Imagine was, for the most part, soft-focused and otherworldly. As its title suggests, the album reflects Lennon's immersion in the drama and noise of the city to which he had moved with Yoko Ono. And as its cover art suggests, the album is something like a newspaper - a report from the radical frontlines on the political upheavals of the day. His activism would create enormous problems for Lennon, however. The Nixon administration, paranoid about the possibility that a former Beatle might become a potent leader and recruiting tool of the anti-war movement, attempted to have Lennon deported. Years of legal battles ensued before Lennon finally was awarded his green card in 1976.

Lennon's political struggles unfortunately found their match in his personal life. He and Ono split up in the fall of 1973, shortly before the release of his album, Mind Games. He moved to Los Angeles and later described the eighteen months he spent separated from Ono as his "lost weekend," a period of wild indulgence and artistic drift. Like Mind Games, the albums he made during this period, Walls and Bridges (1974) and Rock N Roll (1975), are the expressions of a major artist seeking, with mixed results, to recover his voice. None of them lack charm, and their high points include the lovely title track of Mind Games; Walls and Bridges' "Whatever Gets You Through the Night," a rollicking duet with Elton John that gave Lennon his first number-one single as a solo artist; and the sweet nostalgia of Rock N Roll, a covers album that was Lennon's tribute to the musical pioneers of his youth. But none of those albums rank among his greatest work.

In 1975, Lennon reunited with Ono, and their son Sean was born later that year. For the next five years, Lennon withdrew from public life, and his family became his focus. Then, in 1980, he and Ono returned to the studio to work on Double Fantasy, a hymn to their life together with Sean. The couple was plotting a full-fledged comeback - doing major interviews to support the album's release, recording new songs for a follow-up, planning a tour. Then, shockingly, Lennon was shot to death outside the apartment building where he and Ono lived on the night of December 8, 1980.

Lennon's death broke hearts around the world. In the U.S., it recalled nothing so much as the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, an event for which, ironically, the arrival of the Beatles a few months later had provided a welcome tonic. In the twenty-five years since, Lennon's influence and symbolic importance have only grown. His music, of course, will live forever. But he has survived primarily as a restless voice of change and independent thought. He is an enemy of the status quo, a bundle of contradictions who insisted on a world in which all the various elements of his personality could find free, untrammeled expression. Innumerable times since his death Lennon has been sorely missed. And just as many times and more he has been present - evoked by all of us who find ourselves and each other in the music he made and the vision that he articulated and tried to make real.

Discography

Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon

Discography II

Discography III

Videos

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Give Peace A Chance - John Lennon

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Working Class Hero - John Lennon

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John Lennon - Woman

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John Lennon - Jealous Guy

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John Lennon stand by me

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Instant Karma - John lennon

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JOHN LENNON / MOTHER

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Merchandise

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T-Shirts

John Lennon t-shirt vintage blue overdye 'Imagine Liberty' tee

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DVDs

Books

In His Own Write

by: John Lennon

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John

by: Cynthia Lennon

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Lennon: Definitive Biography, The

by: Ray Coleman

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John Lennon: The New York Years

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Instamatic Karma: Photographs of John Lennon

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Books II

The Private John Lennon: The Untold Story from His Sister

by: Julia Baird

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Lennon Legend

by: James Henke

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Lennon Remembers

by: Jann S. Wenner, John Lennon

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Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon

by: Robert Rosen

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John Lennon: The Life

by: Philip Norman

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Books III

The Lives of John Lennon

by: Albert Goldman

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Life: Remembering John Lennon: 25 Years Later

by: LIFE MAGAZINE EDITORS

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John Lennon: The Albums (Omnibus Press)

by: Johnny Rogan

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John's Secret Dreams: The John Lennon Story

by: Doreen Rappaport

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Come Together: JOHN LENNON IN HIS TIME

by: Jon Wiener

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Books IV

John Lennon: The Beatles and Beyond (People to Know)

by: David K. Wright

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Lennon in America: 1971-1980 Based on the Lost Lennon Diaries

by: Geoffrey Giuliano

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We All Want to Change the World: The Life of John Lennon (H Books)

by: John Wyse Jackson

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Lennon Revealed

by: Larry Kane

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Lennon - The Solo Years: Piano / Vocal / Guitar Artist Songbook

by: John Lennon

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John Lennon (Unseen Archives)

by: Marie Clayton, Gareth Thomas

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The Beatles Anthology

by: Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

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Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties

by: Ian MacDonald

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The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook (Guitar Chord Songbook)

by: The Beatles

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The Beatles - Complete Scores (Transcribed Score)

by: The Beatles

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Posters And Tapestry

Imagine (John Lennon) Music Poster Print - 27 X 40

Posters II

John Lennon (Statue of Liberty, New York City) Music Poster Print - 24

Posters III

John Lennon Acoustic Meditation 24x36 Poster

Sunglasses

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Great looking lens, with lots of great info. Thanks.

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John Lennon

John Lennon

Contents

2009 Calendars

Introduction

Introduction To The Beatles

Biography

By Anthony DeCurtis

Discography

Discography II

Discography III

Videos

eBay Auctions

Merchandise

T-Shirts

T-Shirts II

T-Shirts III

DVDs

Books

Books II

Books III

Books IV

Books V

Posters And Tapestry

Posters II

Posters III

Sunglasses

Want the look? Get it here!

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