Lennon Lives!

*News, views and pix on the great John Lennon*

Shot down in his prime at 40, John Lennon died in some sort of intense energy, just as he had lived. We might have expected it.

Lennon was a master singer-songwriter and a political activist, a hero to many and a villain to others. What is the real legacy of this man?

Lennon's influence from 1963-70 as a Beatle was profound. It was brought about by a combination of prodigious talent, aggressive self-promotion, and technological opportunities. The ability of a single musical act to have the vast reach that the Beatles enjoyed was only made possible by technological advances - satellites, recording techniques, advances in shipping technologies, air travel, even new printing technology aided the Fab Four.

Lennon's influence from 1963-70 as a Beatle was profound. It was brought about by a combination of prodigious talent, aggressive self-promotion, and technological opportunities. The ability of a single musical act to have the vast reach that the Beatles enjoyed was only made possible by technological advances - satellites, recording techniques, advances in shipping technologies, air travel, even new printing technology aided the Fab Four.

For example, in 1967, the Beatles recorded All You Need is Love in a London studio, watched live by millions of people all around the world in the first ever global telecast, Our World. Fortunately, it was also a great song (yet another Number One), though almost everything they did had the stamp of greatness on it. They never seemed to let their fans down and kept getting better and better.

However, despite that song, and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and a phenomenal 31 Number One Beatle hits (in Australia), John Lennon's intellectual star shone most brightly in the decade following the 1970 acrimonious demise of the band. It was then that full vent was given to the acuity of his mind in combination with his musical gifts.

His influence was profound in the realm of the personal/political. The song Imagine represented much of what Lennon was saying, and it became a standard. However, some of his best work, written and recorded in his first few years as 'former-Beatle John Lennon', did not sell as well and is not so well known.

Such songs as Woman is the Nigger of the World, Luck of the Irish and Attica State brought an overtly leftist political dynamic to pop music. The album Some Time in New York City was fiercely alternative and made Lennon many enemies, such that Sean Lennon, his son, claimed that his father might have been killed by the CIA. It seems a paranoid conclusion to draw, and it is not a theory I subscribe to, but certainly Lennon was a target of the Nixon administration and investigated by the USA's FBI and Britain's MI5 spooks. He had the same drug convictions as George Harrison, but he, and not George, was refused a Green Card by the US Immigration Department ...

Read on ...

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