John Lennon 1940-1980

December 8th, 1980. Upper 72nd Street New York City. An unusually balmy pre-Christmas night. Just before 11pm, five gun shots shatter the hum of the city : four of them hitting a pedestrian point blank. 25 year-old loner Mark David Chapman clutches a red paperback copy of Salingers The Catcher In The Rye in one hand and a smoking .38 calibre handgun in the other while his victim bleeds to death on the sidewalk. That man was John Lennon.

Days In The Life

Forty years - 1940-1980. A lifetime. A tragically short lifetime, that of John Winston Lennon. Musician, genius, legend. One of the Fab Four. A man whose contribution to popular music history is unlikely to be surpassed. He was born on October 9, 1940 in Liverpool. The first and only son to Julia and Alfred Lennon. At the age of five, as his parents separated. John was entrusted to his beloved Aunt Mimi.

As a child John displayed artistic learning's, but an event occurred in 1956 which would change his life forever. Aunt Mimi bought John a guitar from Frank Hessy's Liverpool music store. However, this was not his first instrument, Pete Shotton, a childhood friend and one of the original Quarry Men, remembers that from the middle of 1955 onwards John " carried a harmonica with him everywhere in his back pocket, and hardly an afternoon passed without John leading the whole gang through rousing singalongs of recent popular hits like Frankie Lanes Cool Water and Johnny Rays Walking My Baby Home and the Little White Cloud That Cried." It was the fledging musical prowess which caught the attention of his aunt, so whoever paid for the £17 instrument has a lot to answer for.

Private Audition

Much of John's early musical tuition came from his mother Julia, who was making a big impact on John's life at this stage. She was a fiercely musical person, and fueled the young musician's fervour by teaching him banjo chords to get a coherent sound from the guitar. Rock 'n' Roll was still off-limits, although she did concede and show him how to play Fats Domino's Ain't That A Shame.

Impatience got the better of him, and so his first musical collaboration was born. He needed a band. Enter The Black Jacks. Roping in Shotton on washboard, a variety of players on broom handle and tea chest bass, including Ivan Vaughan - someone who will forever be recognised in Beatles folklore as the man who first introduced the baby faced Paul McCartney to John - Eric Griffiths on guitar, Rod Davis on Banjo and Colin Hanton filling the drummer's seat. Shortly after they became the Quarry Men - a subtle, tongue-in-cheek nod to Quarry Bank school were John and Pete were pupils. Fast Forward to September 15th, 1994 and a whacking £78,500 was coughed up to buy an original Quarry Men recording, highlighting John's precocious talent as a teenager. The 1957 performance captured two songs for posterity and has now given us the first experience of a Lennon solo career with a cover of Lonnie Donegan's Putting On The Style.

St Peters Church fete was to prove a pivotal day in John's life. July 6th, 1957 saw the Quarry Men perform three sets at the local parish's festivities. Here, John Lennon was to meet fellow guitarist Paul McCartney and the seeds for the long and fruitful association were planted. Some time later, as the skiffle craze was starting to die, Paul was invited to join the band. By February, 1958, Paul introduced one of his school friends into the band as lead guitar player - a 14 year old George Harrison. Internal squabbles saw the departure of some of the original band members, and by 1959, the Quarry Men were Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best on drums. Three of these men would go on to extraordinary heights under a different moniker.

No School Today

Going through names like they were out of fashion, the five piece eventually decided upon The Beatles. After finding a manager in the shape of one Brian Epstien ( a local record shop owner and entrepreneur ), the group were ready to make their mark on the world. The Beatles were John's new obsession. He remembered: " I always had a gang. I was always the leader and the Beatles just became my new gang. I always had a group of three or four guys around with me who would play various roles in my life - supporting and subservient - with, in general, me being the bully boy. " It was this bully boy who would coerce and encourage the others to become a force to be reckoned with as they headed out to the seedy Reeperbahn nightclub area of Hamburg to hone their craft and become a tight live unit.

Hamburg Nights

During their time in Germany the whole band improved as musicians, and as Stu Sutcliffe left to pursue his interest in art, McCartney switched to priorities to the bass, leaving more space for Harrison and Lennon to experiment with their guitar sound. Pete Best remembers: " John was a good lead guitarist, even though he played second fiddle to George. But on many occasions John had to play lead on the songs. He made a good job of it. But he would say at the time that hi strength was mainly rhythm and vocals. "

While this was certainly true, he wasn't your average three-chord-trick rhythm player. Even from the early days he would make use of interesting, probably accidentally discovered chords as the basis of his song writing. For example how many times have guitarists struggled with the opening chord of Hard Day's Night or the intricate rhythm part to All My Loving? Lennon is always remembered as a phenomenal songwriter, but what is often over looked is his extraordinary talent as a musician and guitarist.

The Fab Fours return to the UK and their popularity at Liverpool's Cavern Club has been exhaustively documented. In 1962 they secured a record deal with parlophone and the rest, as they say, is history. After lightning success with infectious guitar pop hits like Please Please Me, Love Me Do and From Me To You, Beatlemania began in earnest. Four lads from Liverpool ( Ringo Starr now occupied the Drum stool ) had already changed the face of popular music. Most girls in England wanted to marry a Beatle, while most boys wanted to be one.

One woman was to fulfill this dream , Cynthia Powell married John in secret, with Paul as best man. As the boy's image was that of available young bachelors, this union was kept as quiet as possible. The madness heightened, fans almost rioted outside concert venues and they almost caused a storm at the 1963 Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales theatre in London. 1964 saw their popularity cross the Atlantic Ocean as the baby boomers latched on to the latest fad. However, this was more than a craze, it had become a new way of looking at the world. The band was escorted from pillar to post, touring like demons. They undertook legendary performances at Shea stadium and Hollywood Bowl where the screams of their adoring following overpowered the sound of their instruments. The band themselves couldn't even hear what they were playing. John: " You knew it was terrible, your voice was always gone, you could never hear yourself, there was no bass and you could never hear the drums. Those places were built for fuckin' orchestras, not groups.

I'm Really Down

Touring pressures took their toll and The Beatles returned to the UK to prepare to record their fifth album, Help!. On Tuesday April 13th, 1965, the band went in to lay down tracks for the title track. It was a fairly straightforward song with an overwhelmingly simple lyric. John took up rhythm guitar duties and George added the descending guitar motif on the final take. The song was primarily John's, and he told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, " It's real , its about me and I don't know about anything else, really. The only true songs I wrote were Help! and Strawberry Fields ... " He confessed that there was no hidden meaning to the song. It was a cry for help - he needed someone to reassure him concerning the madness and furore that now surrounded his music. " I meant it, It's real. The lyric is as good now as it was then. It's no different and it makes me feel secure to know that I was that sensible, or whatever, not sensible, but aware of myself then. It was just me singing 'Help' and I meant it. I don't like the recording that much. We did it too fast, to try to be commercial.

The collection of songs was further bolstered by the Dylan-esque You've Got To Hide Your Love Away. Again, John's prowess as an acoustic player is brought right to the forefront. Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatle Recording Sessions notes the entire song was recorded in just one afternoon and in nine takes. It is also one of a scant few songs in the Beatles catalogue which features an additional musician - John Scott contributes both the tenor and alto flute heard in the mix. At this time John was being very strict about his songwriting practice. " every day I would attempt to write a song and You've Got To Hide Your Love Away is one of those you sort of sing a bit sadly to yourself. I started thinking about my own emotions - I would try to express what I felt about myself. I think it was Dylan who helped me realise that, just by hearing his work." There was an added ingredient in the mix now too, the Help! album was made on dope - Dylan had introduced marijuana to the band in New York the previous year.

The Drugs Do Work

Help! was released in the August of 1965 - the same month John met his hero Elvis Presley - and by December The Beatles were ready to release yet another album, Rubber Soul. Largely regarded as Lennon's album, it contained the classic Norwegian Wood. Throughout the recording process it went under the title This Bird Has Flown until after release that was relegated to bracketed status. The song was a thinly veiled comment on an extra-marital affair. He said that " I was trying to write about an affair without letting my wife know, so it was gobbledygook. I was sort of writing from my experiences, girl's flats, things like that." John provided the acoustic guitar accompaniment while George added his double-tracked sitar giving an extra dimension to the song.

After much frustration, Lennon lost his cool over the countless versions of songs they had recorded. The band finally said they would record the song however he wanted. John: " I said ' well, I want to do it like this.' They let me go and I did the guitar very loudly into the mic and sang it at the same time and then George had the sitar and I asked him if he could play the piece that I'd written, you know, ' dee diddly dee diddly dee ' - that bit. He learned it and we dubbed it on after."

Jann Wenner asked John whether he would just record himself and a guitar on to tape and bring it to the studio. To which John replied, " I would do that just to get an impression of what it sounded like sung and to hear it back for judging it. It would double-track the guitar or the voice or something on the tape. I think on Norwegian Wood and In My Life Paul helped with the middle eight, to give credit where its due." This acoustic part, played on a Gibson J160E - the ultimate Beatle acoustic, of which he and George had matching models - provided John with one his best chord progression.

Bigger Than Jesus

Following on from the success of both Help! film and album, the band returned to the states in 1966 for some intensive touring. It was on this fateful US jaunt that an event happened that would continue to dog the career of The Beatles ( and specifically Lennon ) for a long while. An off the cuff remark that John had previously given to the London Evening Standard regarding the devotion and popularity that now surrounded the band was taken to heart by Christian fundamentalists. Lennon had stated that " We are more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity."

Radio stations across America began banning Beatles songs and ritualistic record burnings were held. The Ku Klux Klan even got in on the act, demonstrating outside their concert venues. 1966 was also going to be a turning point ion both the personal and professional life of John Lennon: in November he met Yoko Ono, an avant-garde musician/artist at one of her art exhibitions at the indica Gallery in London.

Anything Is Possible

With all the Hullabaloo surrounding the Beatles' success the foursome started to look for other ways to expand their minds - spiritually and otherwise. George was continuing his exploration of foreign cultures and instrumentation, with a specific interest in India, the Maharishi and transcendental meditation. It was 1967 and the Summer of Love was in full swing. The Beatles reconvened for the recording of their ' magnum opus ' - Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

There have been countless myths surrounding the album, one of the most insistent concerning the psychedelic Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. In the spring of 1965 John Lennon was to experience his first LSD trip by way of a spiked cup of coffee at a friend's house - to this day it is maintained that the imagery of ' newspaper taxis ' and ' marmalade skies ' created by John and Paul are direct references to their drug-induced highs - and the fact that the acronym taken from the song spells LSD only served to reinforce the idea. John, however, always vehemently denied it.

The end of the year saw the release of the LP and film of Magical Mystery Tour, complete with the legendary Lennon composition I Am The Walrus, recently introduced to thousands of new fans courtesy of the Gallagher brothers' cover.

Sing Child Sing

During March and April of the following year, the Beatles upped and went to India to study transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While others in the group such as actress Mia Farrow and sister Prudence concentrated on their meditation, much of The Beatles free time was spent writing songs and playing guitar. In a recent radio interview Prudence Farrow remembered how John and George were never far from a guitar and were constantly somewhere in the creative process. 

Finger Picking Folk

The Beatles were not the only musicians to make the spiritual journey to India, popular English folkie Donovan had also ventured to the Maharishi's domain. " In India " he said ," I introduced John Lennon to fingerpicking style on the guitar that I had learned. I taught it to John and he taught it to George.

It was this very technique that John used to pen the White Album's Dear Prudence. A gentle reassuring song about the concern he felt over the amount of time Prudence Farrow was spending in deep meditation - she wouldn't come out and join the others singing, and was often upset. The introductory motif and the respective verse figure showed off a new dimension to Lennon's playing - straight chords too a back seat for a while. The white album, a double album packed full of classic songs was a turning point for the band. The majority of the tracks were written independently, and there were the first inklings of extreme experimental music coming from John's side of the camp - no doubt due to his deepening association with Yoko, who was introducing him to the concept of noise exploration, notably on the penultimate track of side four - Revolution 9.

In the final year of the 60's, trouble was now rife between the four Beatles; there was the beginning of business entanglements and resentment at wives and girlfriends being present during the recording process and a general break down of communication as the band found other things to occupy their minds.

However it was to prove a busy year for John. The Get Back sessions were a particularly fraught time - the initial concept was to Get Back to the thing that had first united the band some 15 years earlier - a profound love of music and its creation. It was also a call to abandon some of the more esoteric studio production techniques which the band had pioneered - this time they would perform live and capture the spirit of the band. Don't Let Me Down was one of John's primary contributions to this set and provided the B-side to the released Get Back single. On these sessions an American organist by the name of Bill Preston was present and he further reiterated the talent Lennon had as a musician. " John was a good rhythm player. He was a very funny guy. He was very witty and would keep you laughing ".

The most legendary performance of this song, however, would take place on Apple building's roof on Thursday 30th, January 1969 - the last ' live ' performance The Beatles would ever give as a band, with John playing the arpeggiated rhythm on his stripped-down Epiphone Casino.

I Want You So Bad

The last album released by the Beatles was Abbey Road - a fitting homage to the studios which had been such a fertile breeding ground for the Beatles' recorded works. The final track of the LP, coincidentally entitled The End, featured a lead guitar break from each of the six-string playing Beatles - however all the contributions on the album from John remained as strong as ever. I Want You ( She's So Heavy ) was to be a mammoth production - both John and George multitracked layer upon layer of guitar in order to create a huge sound - no less than 35 basic tracks were recorded.

John told Rolling Stone: " She's so heavy was about Yoko. When it gets down to it, when you're drowning you don't say ' you'd be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me and come and help. ' You just scream. And in She's So Heavy I just sang ' I want you, I want you so bad, she's so heavy, I want you, ' like that. I started simplifying my lyrics then."

Side two of Abbey Road also contained a gem, the riff-heavy Come Together. With its nonsensical lyric and infectious guitar line, it remains an often covered song today - among the throng who have recorded it are artists as diverse as Tina Turner, Michael Jackson and most recently a version on the War Child Bosnia benefit LP by Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher and Paul McCartney. Initially the song contained only one guitar part, but as it took shape, a funky rhythm pattern and a short melodic solo played foil to the unmistakable recurring lick.

White Lightning And Wine

Although still being a fully fledged member of The Beatles, John essentially started his solo career with the release of his Cold Turkey single under the name of the Plastic Ono Band in September 1969. It is a harrowing account of his heroin withdrawal, centred around a furious, repetitive guitar riff. In a recent interview Yoko said of John, " He was incredibly strong-willed - It's very hard to withdraw without anything you know - cold turkey. It's a myth that we went to the hospital to withdraw. We were so totally scared, we thought ' It's illegal, we can't openly go to a hospital: they might arrest us. So we never even dreamed of going to hospital. We just cold turkeyed."

As painful as the experience must have been, it resulted in a hugely cathartic expression of emotion for John. " I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff, " he claimed. " People think that plastic Ono is very personal , but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I search for other ways - just writing down words that have to rhyme."

After the Beatles had officially disbanded John embarked on his solo career proper. In 1972 he moved to New York with Yoko ( now his wife ). His drug conviction from four years previously was dragged up as a reason for denial of a visa, but the couple maintained that it was for political statements they had made condemning the Vietnam war and their continued outspoken pleas for peace. To this day there are still confidential FBI files regarding the Lennons. 

Here Is Christmas

Shortly before Christmas of 1971, the lennons decide to make a festive single with the Plastic Ono Band - a name given to which ever musicians on any of their recordings. The title of the new offering was simply Happy Xmas ( War Is Over ) . Speaking recently Yoko laughed; " John said " We're gonna write so that it's bigger than White Christmas, and I was laughing, like 'Yeah Yeah'. And of course it's not bigger than White Christmas in terms of sales, but it's bigger in a sense that this generation relates more to Happy Xmas, I think."

It was put onto tape at New York's Record Plant, a studio facility on West 44th Street and it features no less than five acoustic guitars - session players drafted in by producer Phil Spector - and John himself playing the major/suspended fourth refrain and thus providing the basis for the huge sound Spector and Lennon were after. New York's Harlem Community Choir was drafted in to provide the beefy chorus vocals that conclude the track - there were 30 kids present under 12 ( some as young as four ) and four teenagers.

In 1972 the lineup for the touring Plastic Ono Band was still incomplete. John's reluctance to step into a lead guitarist role ( although he was more than capable ) showed. This slot remained unfilled, Lennon told the Melody Maker in November of 1971, " We'll probably just get some kid who comes in and knocks us all out. I don't want to play lead - I'm just an amateur."

All We Are Saying

Perhaps the most recognisable and most freely associated Lennon song is not one originally written on guitar at all. Imagine is a simple piano melody with some of the most straight forward, thought provoking and heart-rendering lyrics ever committed to paper. Yoko shares here memories; John wrote very quickly. Words flowed from his pen like sparkling spring water. Imagine crystallised John's dream. It crystallised his idealism. It was something he really wanted to say to the world. " Ironically John never made a secret of his perceived limited keyboard knowledge: " I play the piano even worse than I play guitar, so that is a limited palette. I surprise myself, I'm not sure where I am half the time. But with the guitar, I know such a lot about the guitar that I can be buskin', or if I want to write a rocker, I can. I have to play guitar because I can't play piano well enough to inspire me to rock."

Imagine was a plea for peace, a plea for hope, a plea for the future. One that was very uncertain. Following this intensely creative period and a fun rock 'n' roll album celebrating his influences, John was to take an extended hiatus from the music industry to concentrate time on his family - specifically his new son, Sean Ono Lennon ( he also had a son Julian with his first wife ). John confessed that for the first time in his life he didn't give his music a second thought.

" My guitar was hung up behind the bed. And I don't think I took it down in five years... Walking away is much harder than carrying on. I hadn't in the time between 1962 to 1973. On demand, on schedule. It was a case of physician heal thyself. It was more important to face ourselves, face that reality, than to just continue a life of rock 'n' roll showbiz ..." However after sufficient time had lapsed, a holiday jaunt to Bermuda was to provide a catalyst for John to return to the studio which resulted in Double Fantasy. It was a critically-acclaimed album and one that has since sold millions.

Shortly before his tragic, needless and violent death on the whim of a madman, the ex-Beatle said in a radio interview, " My life resolves around my son Sean. Now I have more reason to stay healthy and bright. I consider that my work won't be done until I'm dead and buried, and I hope that's not for a long, long time."

Beautiful words and excellent review worthy of a legend .....

Biography by  Sian Llewellyn  of  Total Guitar Magazine