Word: lennons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Imagine: John Lennon...
SOMEWHERE along the line, the makers of Imagine: John Lennon must have asked themselves the following: how do you make a documentary about someone so well known that he was, in his own words, "bigger than Jesus Christ...
This skewed perspective undoubtedly highlights Lennon at his absolute worst. Adrift, he was a very bad piece of work: a drunken, heroin-addicted woman basher and room wrecker who was catatonically depressed and dependent on his manipulative wife. At the same time, Goldman's emphasis dovetails nicely with the revised version of his own life that Lennon peddled during his last years. He disparaged the Beatles and his role in their success. He told one interviewer: "We sold out, you know. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain." Goldman obediently parrots this view...
...good reason, since the idea is crazy. Even Goldman recognizes that the discipline accepted by the Beatles proved liberating. With the album Rubber Soul, he writes, "Lennon was employing the new medium of pop song like a serious artist." In fact, when Lennon could harness his wit and rage within commercial demands, he simply blew away restraints and claimed new territory for the popular imagination. What, then, compelled him to destroy the most successful performing group on earth? Why did he consign his fate to a woman who would later ask friends, "How can that oaf be so successful when...
Author Albert Goldman strips bare the best and brightest of the Beatles in his controversial biography The Lives of John Lennon...