John Lennon
| John Lennon | |
|---|---|
 Lennon rehearsing "Give Peace a Chance" in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1969 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | John Winston Lennon |
| Born | 9 October 1940 Liverpool, England, UK |
| Died | 8 December 1980 (aged 40) New York , New York, US |
| Genres | Rock, pop |
| Occupations | Musician, singer-songwriter, artist, peace activist, writer, record producer |
| Instruments | Vocals, guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, Mellotron, 6 string bass, percussion, recorder |
| Years active | 1957–1975, 1980 |
| Labels | Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor |
| Associated acts | The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, Yoko Ono |
| Website | JohnLennon.com |
| Notable instruments | |
| Rickenbacker 325 Epiphone Casino Gibson J-160E Gibson Les Paul Junior | |
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who achieved worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles. Lennon and Paul McCartney formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager, his first band, The Quarrymen, evolving into The Beatles in 1960. As the group began to undergo the disintegration that led to their break-up at the end of that decade, Lennon launched a solo career that would span the next, punctuated by critically acclaimed albums, including John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine".
Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, his writing, his drawings, on film, and in interviews, and he became controversial through his work as a peace activist. He moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him. His songs were adapted as anthems by the anti-war movement. Lennon took a sabbatical from the music business in 1975 to devote time to his family but reemerged in 1980 with a comeback album, Double Fantasy. Lennon was murdered three weeks after its release.
Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units,[1] and as performer, writer, or co-writer he is responsible for 27 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.a In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest BritonsRolling Stone ranked him the fifth greatest singer of all time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. voted him eighth, and in 2008,
Contents[show] |
1940–57: Early years
Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 in Liverpool Maternity Hospital, Oxford Street, Liverpool, to Julia and Alfred Lennon.[2] According to some biographers, a German air raid was taking place, and Julia's sister, Mary "Mimi" Smith, used the light cast by the explosions to see her way as she ran through the blacked-out back roads to reach the hospital.[3][4] Smith said later, "I knew the moment I saw John in that hospital that I was the one to be his mother, not Julia. Does that sound awful? It isn't, really, because Julia accepted it as something perfectly natural. She used to say, 'You're his real mother. All I did was give birth.'"[5] Lennon was named after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Winston Churchill.[3]
His father was a merchant seaman during World War II and was often away from home. At first he sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother, but the cheques stopped when Alfred Lennon went absent without leave in 1943.[6] When he eventually came home in 1944, he offered to look after the family, but his wife (who was pregnant with another man's child) rejected the idea.[7] Under considerable pressure, she handed the care of Lennon over to her sister after the latter registered a complaint with Liverpool's Social Services. In July 1946, his father visited Smith and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him.[8] Lennon's mother followed them, and, after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between his parents. Lennon chose his father—twice. As his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. Lennon then lost contact with his father for 20 years.[9]
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived with his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton. The couple had no children of their own. His aunt bought him volumes of short stories, and his uncle, who was a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles.[10] Lennon's mother visited Mendips almost every day, and when he was 11 he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool. She played him Elvis Presley records, and taught him to play the banjo. The first song he learned to play was Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame".[11] Lennon's mother bought him his first guitar in 1957, a cheap Gallotone Champion acoustic "guaranteed not to split". She arranged for it to be delivered to her own house, knowing that her sister, sceptical of Lennon's claim that he would be famous one day, hoped he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it".[12] Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School.[13] From September 1952 to 1957, after passing his Eleven-Plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, where he was known as a "happy-go-lucky" pupil, drawing comical cartoons and mimicking his teachers.[14] At the end of his third year, his school report was damning: "Hopeless. Rather a clown in class. A shocking report. He is wasting other pupils' time", he was 14 when his uncle died in June 1955.[15] In September 1980 Lennon said this about his childhood, his family and his rebellious nature:
Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not. Because of my attitude, all the other boys' parents ... instinctively recognised what I was, which was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their kids, which I did. ... I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... Partly, maybe, it was out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home. But I really did ... There were five women who were my family. Five strong, intelligent women. Five sisters. One happened to be my mother. ... She just couldn't deal with life. She had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and when I was four and a half, I ended up living with her elder sister ... those women were fantastic ... That was my first feminist education ... that knowledge and the fact that I wasn't with my parents made me see that parents are not gods.[16]
Lennon regularly visited his cousin Stanley Parkes in Fleetwood. Seven years Lennon's senior, Parkes frequently took him on trips, and the pair enjoyed films together at the local cinema. During the school holidays, Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila, another cousin, and they would all go to Blackpool on the tram two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss. Parkes recalls that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. They regularly passed Formby's house on the bus journey from Preston to Fleetwood, often spotting the singer and his wife sitting in deck chairs in their front garden and exchanging waves with them. Parkes and Lennon were keen fans of the Fleetwood Flyers speedway club and Fleetwood Town FC. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would bundle into the car and head up to the family croft at Durness. That went on from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16".[17]
Lennon failed all his GCE O-level examinations, and was only accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. Once at the college, he wore Teddy Boy clothes and acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. As a result, he was excluded from first the painting class and then the graphic arts course. He was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class.[18] He failed an annual exam, despite help from fellow student and future wife Cynthia Powell, and dropped out of college before his final year.[19] On 15 July 1958, when Lennon was 17, his mother, out walking near the Smiths' house, was struck by a car and killed.[20]
said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."[16] Political activism
Anti-war and civil rights activities
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as a Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton. The March 1969 event attracted worldwide media coverage, as did a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.[148] Recorded during the second Bed-In, and quickly taken up as an anti-war anthem, "Give Peace a Chance" was sung by a quarter of a million anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators in Washington, DC on 15 October, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day.[149]
When Lennon and Ono moved to New York City in August 1971, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, YippieJerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.[150] Another anti-war activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in the state prison for selling two joints of marijuana after a series of previous convictions for possession of the drug.[151] At the "Free John Sinclair" concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan on 10 December 1971, Lennon and Ono appeared on stage with David Peel, Phil Ochs, Stevie Wonder, Bob SegerBobby Seale of the Black Panther Party.[152] Lennon, through his newly written song "John Sinclair", called on the authorities to "Let him be, set him free, let him be like you and me." Some 20,000 people were present at the rally, and three days later the State of Michigan released Sinclair from prison.[153]John Lennon Anthology (1998) and Acoustic (2004). anti-war activists and other musicians, as well as Rubin and The performance was recorded, and later appeared on
Following the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, in which 27 civil rights protestors were shot by the British Army during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA he would side with the latter, and in 2000, Britain's domestic security service MI5 said that Lennon had given money to the IRA.[154] Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with a pro-IRA slant.[155]Tariq Ali's International Marxist Group; Ali, writing for The Guardian in 2006, called this "accurate".[156] Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000.[157] According to FBI surveillance reports, Lennon was sympathetic to
Deportation attempt
Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War is Over)", both strongly associated with the anti-Vietnam-War movement, the Nixon administration, hearing rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention,[158] tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his re-election;[159] Republican Senator Strom Thurmond[160][75] While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. Lennon and Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America.[161] In 1972 Bob DylanINS in defense of Lennon: suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. The next month the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanor conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next four years in deportation hearings. wrote a letter to the
"John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country’s so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country’s got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!"[162][163]
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days.[164] Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York chapter of the American Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people".[165] Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.[166] Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem" (three seconds of silence).[167] Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, Lennon received his green card, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.[168]
FBI surveillance and de-classified documents
After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files documenting the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt.[169] The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages.[170] The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991.[171] The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case.[172] In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.[172] Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges".[173] The story is told in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.[174]
