Word: lennons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...little reminder was in order, a small history lesson, and there was no one better to lead the class than Bruce Springsteen. Lennon had lately become warmly admiring of Springsteen, especially his hit single Hungry Heart. Springsteen could probably have let Lennon's death pass unremarked, and few in the audience at his Philadelphia concert last Tuesday would have been troubled. But instead of ripping right into the first song, Springsteen simply said, "If it wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us would be some place much different tonight. It's a hard world that...
...board so hard he broke a key. By the second verse, the song turned into a challenge the audience was happy to accept: "I wanna know love is wild, I wanna know love is real," Springsteen yelled and they yelled back. By the end, it sounded like redemption John Lennon knew that sound too. He could use it like a chord change because he had been chasing it most of his life...
...John Lennon grew up on Penny Lane, and after a time he moved to a house outside Liverpool, hard by a boys' reformatory. There was another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals would go to a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. The house was called Strawberry Fields. His boyhood was neither as roughly working-class as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite as benign as the magical association of those place names might suggest. But John's adolescence in the suburbs, the garden outside the back door and the warm ministrations...
...could not support her child. John was 4½ when he was farmed out to the suburbs All the sorrow, rage and confusion of this early boyhood were taken up again and again in songs like Julia and Mother. These early years were not an unhealed wound for Lennon, but more nearly a root, a deep psychic wellspring from which he could draw reserves of hard truth...
Reserves of another sort gave him trouble even early on. "In one way, I was always hip," Lennon remarked recently in Playboy, during an interview that could stand as lively proof that some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life. "I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way." Lennon's songs made peace with those hallucinations and expanded them -whether with psychedelics, psyschiatry or a sort...