Word: lennons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lennon was no stranger to threats on his life. As early as 1964, at the first Beatles concert in France, Lennon got a note backstage that read, "I am going to shoot you at 9 tonight." He had only lately become accustomed to the freewheeling anarchy of New York street life: "I can go out this door now and go into a restaurant . . . Do you want to know how great that is?" he told the BBC. But friends remember him as being guarded both in public and around the few people he and Ono met during the long years...
...Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of operational fatalism, a sense that doing your best, whether on record or in concert, required laying yourself open, making yourself vulnerable. It was not only the pressures and excesses of the rock-'n'-roll life that moved the Who's Pete Townshend to remark, "Rock is going to kill me somehow." And it was not just the death of Elvis Presley that Lennon had in mind when he said to friends in 1978, "If you stay in this business long enough...
...Rock, Lennon knew as well as anyone, is the applied art of big risk and big feelings. The songs he and Paul McCartney wrote for the Beatles, separately and together, brought more people up against the joy and boldness of rock music than anything else ever has. It wasn't just that Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein were taking the Beatles as seriously-and a good deal more affectionately-than Stockhausen. The worldwide appeal of the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their restless idealism that stayed a step...
...songs Lennon wrote later on his own-Imagine and Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Instant Karma and Give Peace a Chance and the gentle and unapologetic Watching the Wheels from the new album, or the gorgeous seasonal anthem, Happy Xmas (War Is Over), which he recorded with Ono in 1972-kept the standard high and his conscience fine-tuned. The political songs were all personal, the intimate songs all singular in their fierce insistence on making public all issues of the heart, on working some common moral out of private pain. Rock music is still benefitting from lessons that...
Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon remained chiefly the property-one might even be tempted to say prisoner-of his own generation. Some -those who regarded the Beatles as a benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some overmoneyed songwriter with a penchant for political pronouncements and personal excess-wondered what all the fuss was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the middle of the day. "A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner would not get this kind of treatment," said a teacher in Oxford...