Word: lennons
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...Lennon, on the other hand, was too smart, self-deprecating and evasive to be an easy target for ridicule. Well into his book, Goldman drops a small complaint about the difficulties he had in getting at the truth of his subject: "Interview a score of people who interacted strongly with Lennon and you will get a score of Lennons, each one a man highly congenial to your source." This problem with evidence suggests why Goldman wrote The Lives, rather than The Life, in his title. The complications do not end here. Those eyewitnesses to facets of Lennon's life...
...still does, of course; nothing can change the harsh reality of Lennon's death. But Albert Goldman's controversial new biography offers unsettling evidence of how thoroughly John and Yoko distorted the messy details of their lives for public consumption. Apparently the mythmaking machinery was working overtime during the fall of 1980. For one thing, the much heralded marriage was on the rocks and headed for worse. Yoko told a confidant of her plans to divorce her husband after the work on Double Fantasy was completed: "I need to free myself of the Lennon name." Her tender contributions to that...
Goldman deserves considerable credit for making such sordid, depressing material compulsively readable. The Lives of John Lennon is a far more balanced and objective biography than his Elvis (1981). Goldman, a pop-culture maven and former professor of English at Columbia University, had no sympathy for Presley or for the gospel, country and rockabilly traditions that fused in his music. Much of Elvis crouches at the level of a self-conscious hipster poking fun at a greaseball bumpkin...
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...