London Evening Standard, "More Popular Than Jesus" 3/4/1966

Reporter Maureen Cleave, a good friend of John Lennon's, wrote a personality article about him that would be published in the March 4th 1966 edition of the London Evening Standard. Cleave's piece was intended to present a portrait of the behind-the-scenes Lennon, and was entitled 'How Does A Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This.' The article contained a number of Lennon musings, remarks and random thoughts from a recent conversation she had with him at his home in Weybridge, including John's personal view of the current state of religion: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

A separate article with different content, including portions of the Jesus quote out of context from the original article, was published in the American teen fanzine 'Datebook' just before the Beatles' 1966 American tour.

Word-of-mouth rumors in America about John Lennon's Jesus quote spread quickly among anti-Beatle factions, even further out of context, as the ridiculous egocentric headline: 'John says Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' The outrage and reaction mostly seemed to be coming from the 'bible belt' in America.

John would later remark during a press conference in Chicago on August 12th during the Beatles' 1966 North American tour, "We could've just sort of hidden in England and said, 'We're not going, we're not going!' You know, that occured to me when I heard it all. I couldn't remember saying it. I couldn't remember the article. I was panicking, saying, 'I'm not going at all,' you know. But if they sort of straighten it out, it will be worth it, and good."

Lennon continued, "When it came out in England it was a bit of a blab-mouthed saying anyway... A few people wrote into the papers, and a few wrote back saying, 'So what, he said that. Who is he anyway,' or they said, 'So, he can have his own opinion.' And then it just vanished. It was very small. But... you know, when it gets over here and then it's put into a kid's magazine, and just parts of it or whatever was put in, it just loses its meaning or its context immediately... and everybody starts making their own versions of it." John would be asked many times during the 1966 tour to clarify what he had intended to say. Lennon explained in Chicago: "My views are only from what I've read or observed of christianity and what it was, and what it has been, or what it could be. It just seems to me to be shrinking. I'm not knocking it or saying it's bad. I'm just saying it seems to be shrinking and losing contact."

In some cities, reporters would ask Lennon to explain the Jesus comment repeatedly -- even multple times within a single press conference -- baiting him to become upset or to say something even further inflammatory. Knowing their game, John kept his cool.

The public outcry against Lennon had been coming from a rather small minority of the population, but once the national media fanned the flames as much as they were able, reports of negative public reaction made it appear more widespread than it really was. For the minority of Americans who had been moved from religious outrage to action, the fallout did involve Beatle record burnings arranged by christian radio stations, Ku Klux Klan protests, and anonymous death threats. It also gave the older generation a sense of vindication that the Beatles were somehow bad role models for the youth of America.

With some hindsight perspective, John clarified the remark perhaps best during his December 1966 Look magazine interview: "I said we were more popular than Jesus, which is a fact. I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They're all saying the same thing, and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said -- the basic things he laid down about love and goodness -- and not what people say he said."

John's then-wife Cynthia would state years later in her 1978 book, A Twist Of Lennon: "His views were totally misconstrued. John was very bewildered and frightened by the reaction that his words created in the States. Beatle albums were burnt in a mass orgy of self-righteous indignation. Letters arrived at the house full of threats, hate and venom."

The original London Evening Standard article is presented below in its entirety, featuring the quote in its original context.

The photographer for the article was Graeme Robertson.

                                          - Jay Spangler, www.beatlesinterviews.org

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Article Copyright © 1966 London Evening Standard

HOW DOES A BEATLE LIVE?
JOHN LENNON LIVES LIKE THIS
by Maureen Cleave

On a hill in Surrey... a young man famous, loaded and waiting for something

It was this time three years ago that The Beatles first grew famous. Ever since then, observers have anxiously tried to gauge whether their fame was on the wax or on the wane; they foretold the fall of the old Beatles, they searched diligently for the new Beatles (which was as pointless as looking for the new Big Ben).

At last they have given up; The Beatles' fame is beyond question. It has nothing to do with whether they are rude or polite, married or unmarried, 25 or 45; whether they appear on Top of the Pops or do not appear on Top of the Pops. They are well above any position even a Rolling Stone might jostle for. They are famous in the way the Queen is famous. When John Lennon's Rolls-Royce, with its black wheels and its black windows, goes past, people say: 'It's the Queen,' or 'It's The Beatles.' With her they share the security of a stable life at the top. They all tick over in the public esteem-she in Buckingham Palace, they in the Weybridge-Esher area. Only Paul remains in London.

The Weybridge community consists of the three married Beatles; they live there among the wooded hills and the stockbrokers. They have not worked since Christmas and their existence is secluded and curiously timeless. "What day is it?" John Lennon asks with interest when you ring up with news from outside. The fans are still at the gates but The Beatles see only each other. They are better friends than ever before.

Ringo and his wife, Maureen, may drop in on John and Cyn; John may drop in on Ringo; George and Pattie may drop in on John and Cyn and they might all go round to Ringo's, by car of course. Outdoors is for holidays.

They watch films, they play rowdy games of Buccaneer; they watch television till it goes off, often playing records at the same time. They while away the small hours of the morning making mad tapes. Bedtimes and mealtimes have no meaning as such. "We've never had time before to do anything but just be Beatles," John Lennon said.

He is much the same as he was before. He still peers down his nose, arrogant as an eagle, although contact lenses have righted the short sight that originally caused the expression. He looks more like Henry VIII than ever now that his face has filled out-he is just as imperious, just as unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, charming and quick-witted. He is still easy-going, still tough as hell. "You never asked after Fred Lennon," he said, disappointed. (Fred is his father; he emerged after they got famous.) "He was here a few weeks ago. It was only the second time in my life I'd seen him -- I showed him the door." He went on cheerfully: "I wasn't having him in the house."

His enthusiasm is undiminished and he insists on its being shared. George has put him on to this Indian music. "You're not listening, are you?" he shouts after 20 minutes of the record. "It's amazing this -- so cool. Don't the Indians appear cool to you? Are you listening? This music is thousands of years old; it makes me laugh, the British going over there and telling them what to do. Quite amazing." And he switched on the television set.

Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it's closed round whatever he believes at the time. "Christianity will go," he said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." He is reading extensively about religion.

He shops in lightning swoops on Asprey's these days and there is some fine wine in his cellar, but he is still quite unselfconscious. He is far too lazy to keep up appearances, even if he had worked out what the appearances should be-which he has not.

He is now 25. He lives in a large, heavily panelled, heavily carpeted, mock Tudor house set on a hill with his wife Cynthia and his son Julian. There is a cat called after his aunt Mimi, and a purple dining room. Julian is three; he may be sent to the Lycde in London. "Seems the only place for him in his position," said his father, surveying him dispassionately. "I feel sorry for him, though. I couldn't stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren't they?"

We did a speedy tour of the house, Julian panting along behind, clutching a large porcelain Siamese cat. John swept past the objects in which he had lost interest: "That's Sidney" (a suit of armour); "That's a hobby I had for a week" (a room full of model racing cars); "Cyn won't let me get rid of that" (a fruit machine). In the sitting room are eight little green boxes with winking red lights; he bought them as Christmas presents but never got round to giving them away. They wink for a year; one imagines him sitting there till next Christmas, surrounded by the little winking boxes.

He paused over objects he still fancies; a huge altar crucifix of a Roman Catholic nature with IHS on it; a pair of crutches, a present from George; an enormous Bible he bought in Chester; his gorilla suit.

"I thought I might need a gorilla suit," he said; he seemed sad about it. "I've only worn it twice. I thought I might pop it on in the summer and drive round in the Ferrari. We were all going to get them and drive round in them but I was the only one who did. I've been thinking about it and if I didn't wear the head it would make an amazing fur coat-with legs, you see. I would like a fur coat but I've never run into any."

One feels that his possessions -- to which he adds daily-have got the upper hand; all the tape recorders, the five television sets, the cars, the telephones of which he knows not a single number. The moment he approaches a switch it fuses; six of the winking boxes, guaranteed to last till next Christmas, have gone funny already. His cars-the Rolls, the Mini-Cooper (black wheels, black windows), the Ferrari (being painted black) -- puzzle him. 

Then there's the swimming pool, the trees sloping away beneath it. "Nothing like what I ordered," he said resignedly. He wanted the bottom to be a mirror. "It's an amazing household," he said. "None of my gadgets really work except the gorilla suit -- that's the only suit that fits me."

He is very keen on books, will always ask what is good to read. He buys quantities of books and these are kept tidily in a special room. He has Swift, Tennyson, Huxley, Orwell, costly leather-bound editions of Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde. Then there's Little Women, all the William books from his childhood; and some unexpected volumes such as Forty-One Years In India, by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, and Curiosities of Natural History, by Francis T. Buckland. This last-with its chapter headings 'Ear-less Cats', 'Wooden-Legged People,' 'The Immortal Harvey's Mother' is right up his street.

He approaches reading with a lively interest untempered by too much formal education. "I've read millions of books," he said, "that's why I seem to know things." He is obsessed by Celts. "I have decided I am a Celt," he said. "I am on Boadicea's side -- all those bloody blue-eyed blondes chopping people up. I have an awful feeling wishing I was there -- not there with scabs and sores but there through reading about it. The books don't give you more than a paragraph about how they lived; I have to imagine that."

He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. "Physically lazy," he said. "I don't mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more." Occasionally he is driven to London in the Rolls by an ex-Welsh guardsman called Anthony; Anthony has a moustache that intrigues him.

The day I visited him he had been invited to lunch in London, about which he was rather excited. "Do you know how long lunch lasts?" he asked. "I've never been to lunch before. I went to a Lyons the other day and had egg and chips and a cup of tea. The waiters kept looking and saying: 'No, it isn't him, it can't be him'."

He settled himself into the car and demonstrated the television, the folding bed, the refrigerator, the writing desk, the telephone. He has spent many fruitless hours on that telephone. "I only once got through to a person," he said, "and they were out."

Anthony had spent the weekend in Wales. John asked if they'd kept a welcome for him in the hillside and Anthony said they had. They discussed the possibility of an extension for the telephone. We had to call at the doctor's because John had a bit of sea urchin in his toe. "Don't want to be like Dorothy Dandridge," he said, "dying of a splinter 50 years later." He added reassuringly that he had washed the foot in question.

We bowled along in a costly fashion through the countryside. "Famous and loaded" is how he describes himself now. "They keep telling me I'm all right for money but then I think I may have spent it all by the time I'm 40 so I keep going. That's why I started selling my cars; then I changed my mind and got them all back and a new one too.

"I want the money just to be rich. The only other way of getting it is to be born rich. If you have money, that's power without having to be powerful. I often think that it's all a big conspiracy, that the winners are the Government and people like us who've got the money. That joke about keeping the workers ignorant is still true; that's what they said about the Tories and the landowners and that; then Labour were meant to educate the workers but they don't seem to be doing that any more."

He has a morbid horror of stupid people: "Famous and loaded as I am, I still have to meet soft people. It often comes into my mind that I'm not really rich. There are really rich people but I don't know where they are."

He finds being famous quite easy, confirming one's suspicion that The Beatles had been leading up to this all their lives. "Everybody thinks they would have been famous if only they'd had the Latin and that. So when it happens it comes naturally. You remember your old grannie saying soft things like: 'You'll make it with that voice.'" Not, he added, that he had any old grannies.

He got to the doctor 2 3/4 hours early and to lunch on time but in the wrong place. He bought a giant compendium of games from Asprey's but having opened it he could not, of course, shut it again. He wondered what else he should buy. He went to Brian Epstein's office. "Any presents?" he asked eagerly; he observed that there was nothing like getting things free. He tried on the attractive Miss Hanson's spectacles.

The rumour came through that a Beatle had been sighted walking down Oxford Street! He brightened. "One of the others must be out," he said, as though speaking of an escaped bear. "We only let them out one at a time," said the attractive Miss Hanson firmly.

He said that to live and have a laugh were the things to do; but was that enough for the restless spirit?

"Weybridge," he said, "won't do at all. I'm just stopping at it, like a bus stop. Bankers and stockbrokers live there; they can add figures and Weybridge is what they live in and they think it's the end, they really do. I think of it every day -- me in my Hansel and Gretel house. I'll take my time; I'll get my real house when I know what I want."

"You see, there's something else I'm going to do, something I must do -- only I don't know what it is. That's why I go round painting and taping and drawing and writing and that, because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn't it for me."

Anthony got him and the compendium into the car and drove him home with the television flickering in the soothing darkness while the Londoners outside rushed home from work.

'Imagine' by John Lennon

Many members of the World Socialist Movement have considered John Lennon's song Imagine an anthem of universal hope. In few other songs, and perhaps in no song that reached as wide an audience as that one, is the socialist vision so accurately and movingly conveyed. It was originally featured on the 1971 album "Imagine," and made the top of the charts in England no less than 3 times (its first release as a single, 1975; in 1981 following Lennon's death in 1980 (when it shot up to number 1 for several weeks); and again during the Christmas season in 1999, after it had been voted the nation's favorite song lyric and second favorite all-time song in a large best-music-of-the-millennium poll.

Imagine is a humanistic song par excellence, denying humans the place they often accord themselves in the spiritual universe, and instead relegating them to their material and exquisitely beautiful home of Earth. This Lennon does to urge his fellow men and women to unite in creating a world fit to live upon, one without countries, war, religion, or private property. Sharing this world together as a true "brotherhood of man," some in the World Socialist Movement have wondered if he wrote this song after reading a copy of the Socialist Standard, which is not impossible considering his extensive reading of radical journals following the demise of the Beatles, although it is not known if he actually read the Standard, a journal that has also been advocating a nationless, classless, moneyless society of common ownership since 1904.

The Beatles, a band he not only founded (along with Paul McCartney) but also named, was a group whose fame and meaning he often felt uncomfortable about. It was after all Lennon who also brought the Beatles to a close by telling the other members he was planning to leave, prior to the release of his "Instant Karma" single.

The story of John Lennon is one much closer in spirit to what would be termed punk rock than to traditional pop. First of all, the way John Lennon and thousands of other youth embraced skiffle in England, is reminiscent of the way punk bands exploded in the 1970s often similarly without knowing how to play an instrument! Secondly, John Lennon's famous antics on the stage while the Beatles played in Germany included mocking the Nazis' salute and wearing a toilet seat around his neck. Such attempts to shock are often associated with the later punk era. Indeed, one of John Lennon's youthful pranks had been to urinate from the rooftop of a Liverpool church upon nuns passing below. Thirdly, the early Beatles' scruffy Teddy Boy leather and T-shirt look was also much closer to the attire of the rebellious and radical punk musicians of the 1970s than their later cleaner moptop image dressed in capitalist business attire.

John Lennon's anger and sense of the absurd was of course expressed in his acerbic lyrics. Interestingly, his later political self only appears as a logical extension of his former pre-Beatles and early Beatles self if we do not consider his brief 9 years as a famous Beatle. It is true that traces of his rebelliousness were often found in his Beatles interviews, and his statement that the Beatles had become more famous than Christ was a rare albeit unwitting use of his fame to upset the status quo that would probably not be rivaled until the Sex Pistols starting swearing on British national television a dozen years later.

One could argue, then, rather successfully, that John Lennon's Beatles spell, while it of course contributed enormously in melody and marketing to pop music in the 20th Century, was a sort of "selling out" and a turning away from his enormously creative potential and in particular from his genuine, political and critical nature. Beatles fans might take exception to that statement. But imagine if a contemporary grunge band like Nirvana of the 1990s for example had abandoned their aggressive look and musical style in favor of suits and short hair and singing pretty love songs guaranteed to win them a larger if not international audience, as well as to earn them favor with the royal family, in short, a similar "cuddly" look as the Beatles opted for in 1962?

The first time you hear John Lennon on a Beatles album ("Please Please Me," their first) in 1963 is interestingly titled "Misery," and begins "The world is treating me bad." Indeed, Lennon often threw these little lyrical bombs from his true self into otherwise pop-perfect gems that echoed the musical sensibilities of American pop (Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Motown). Perhaps Lennon enjoyed using his songs, as he had the world around him, as an opportunity to put a foot in, or, as a title of a book he was to write a few years later suggests, a spanner in the works (in a pun that ended up actually being "Spaniard In The Works").

Those lyrical contributions contrasted sharply with the oftentimes drippier McCartney lyrics, in which love songs (as the Beatles mostly sung) were more banal expositions of the heart. While all Beatles songs were attributed to the Lennon-McCartney partnership, such a thesis is supported by how after the Beatles split, the Lennon songs immediately (beginning that very year of 1970) began exploring profoundly political, psychological and existential themes, while McCartney's solo work has mainly continued to delve into the nostalgic and romantic, and is for the most part either far less interesting to analyze and far too boring to listen to, with the possible exceptions of such few lone political statements as "Give Ireland Back To The Irish." On the LP "Please Please Me," "Misery" contrasted with "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" on the very same album. Even on the more traditional love song, "Ask Me Why," Lennon sings: "If I cry, it's not because I'm sad, but you're the only love I've ever had. I can't believe it's happened to me, I can't conceive of any more misery." Thus even on that song in which the object of his affection has been won over, Lennon sings from his dark side as the Everyman who is amazed that he found love, or is himself loved, while an uncertain cloud of doubt and pain hangs over the lover.

The common perception that Lennon sang the more biting lyrics is generally borne out by analyzing them, and since it is apparently true that McCartney and Lennon each tended to sing the songs they contributed to the most as writers, one can only assume that Lennon's struggling spirit was largely responsible for investing that struggle and discomfort more profusely into his own lyrical creations, and hence into the Beatles repertoire itself.

The songs Lennon crafted for "With The Beatles" (1963) were all love songs, and this was generally true on all the early LPs. In the 1964 album "Hard Days Night," (hands down the classic early Beatles album) John states in the title song that he has been "working like a dog," an all too brief reference in a Beatles song to our working lives, although in this song the woman's love makes him "feel okay." In the song "Help!" from the 1965 album of the same name, John appears to be describing his own pain in the Beatles, with his independence lost and his insecurity mounting, and his need for someone to soothe him and point him in a different direction (interestingly, as Yoko Ono was apparently to have precisely that positive effect he was seeking in a relationship).

"Nowhere Man" on "Rubber Soul" (1965) is similarly a song about alienation, although it does not place it in the world of work or power, yet admonishes those who allow themselves to be so invisible for losing themselves thus and for their passivity, and urges them (and indeed all of us, "isn't he a lot like you and me?") to take more control of the world around them. In "I'm Only Sleeping" from "Revolver" (1966), Lennon again discusses our rushed lives and his unashamed laziness (and socialists do promote the "right to be lazy," in contradistinction with the capitalist "right to work"). On the albums "Sgt. Pepper" and "Magical Mystery Tour" (both 1967), John Lennon's lyrics began to turn increasingly surreal ("I Am The Walrus"), as they are influenced by drugs, Eastern culture, and an obvious personal liberation reflected in the liberation of his artistic expression. "Revolution" on the "White Album" (1968) is the first overtly political Lennon song, often misunderstood as being either apolitical or conservative, but rather a critique of the especially Maoist and other fringe leftist groups of his time who advocated a revolution that only "talks about destruction." Successful revolution, after all, is not only about destroying an old order, but also about building a new one.

Already, Yoko Ono's influence is felt in his music and in his actions. While Yoko Ono is often portrayed as a negative influence upon his life, a study of that period would seem to suggest the opposite, that indeed she provided the intellectual, political and aesthetic influence and permission he needed to flower to the fullness of his creative potential. After he met her, his songs began to really take on the inner world of his painful feelings that he endured as a child who lost his mother, and as a genius perhaps hampered by the Beatles, and the outer world we must all endure. Indeed, even while the Beatles were still together, he had released with Yoko Ono three experimental albums (the two "Unfinished Music" albums, and the "Wedding Album," all from 1968 and 1969).

As soon as the Beatles were history, John Lennon began to make history with his painfully honest and political songs. The 1970 "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" album was a case in point. Besides the two songs exploring the loss of his mother, and one of the two most beautiful melodies to be found on any Beatles or non-Beatles record, "Love" (the other was "Oh My Love" on "Imagine"), this album began to explore humanistic and political themes big time. Lennon's understanding that he dwells in a godless universe is revealed in different places. For example, in "I Found Out," he stated: "There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky," and in the song "God" he goes one further: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," a Feuerbachian and Marxian rooting of God in human psychology and material culture. The song "Working Class Hero" is a classic exposition of the humiliation of being a worker in such settings as home, school, and work. John Lennon, though himself a millionaire many times over, has nonetheless here identified with the plight of working masses and himself arrived at full class consciousness when he sings that: "There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill."

It was the "Imagine" album from 1971 that contained the title song, selected by Citizens of the World as its official anthem. Other political songs of note were "I Don't Want To Be A Soldier" ("I don't wanna die"), and "Give Me Some Truth" ("I've had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians, all I want is the truth now").

John Lennon's most overtly political album was side one of the 1972 "Some Time In New York City" (side two was extracts from a concert with Frank Zappa). On this album, John penned the famous feminist statement "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World" ("We make her bear and raise our children, and then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen. We tell her home is the only place she should be, then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend"). Lennon asks us to "think about it, do something about it." The next song "Sisters O Sisters" by Yoko Ono is another feminist song calling on her human sisters to build a new world because "we lost our green land, we lost our clean air." Song three, "Attica State," is an anti-prison, pro-freedom song urging us to "free the prisoners, jail the judges, free all prisoners everywhere, all they want is truth and justice, all they need is love and care." "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck Of The Irish" deride British rule ("You should have the luck of the Irish, and you'd wish you was English instead!"). Finally, John and Yoko both contributed songs about prisoners John Sinclair (sentenced to 10 years for selling marijuana to an undercover police officer) and Angela Davis, black activist. This was not a musically strong album for the man who had once penned the melody of "Strawberry Fields Forever," but it allowed Lennon to devote an album to the news of the day.

Speculations have abounded as to why John Lennon was assassinated. Klint Finley (as reported on the website www.technocult.net in February 2002) quoted Lennon's son Sean as stating: "Anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests, is insane. Or very naive. Or hasn't thought about it clearly. It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad killed. Definitely." Several conspiracy as well as "lone nut" theories are advanced. The conspiracy theories advance the hypotheses that John Lennon was viewed as a national security threat on several occasions, for Nixon and later for the new president Reagan. Several documented FBI instances of surveillance of John Lennon and trumped up arrests in the 1970s are used to back up the theory. It is of course true that John Lennon was a major national figure who was involved publically in diverse radical political causes, including supporting the IRA, a Trotskyist group, and the causes of various prisoners, at different times. There is also considerable support for the "lone nut" theory as Mark Chapman had been receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia for his entire life since childhood, as well as had entertained numerous delusions about John Lennon and Todd Rundgren as well.

So what if Mark Chapman had not actually been a "Manchurian Candidate" for a secret group of governmental officials? The greater likelihood is that John Lennon and the other Beatles came on the heels of the post-war and Cold War spectacle begun by Kennedy of Camelot, in which Americans stood unified behind a President mystically and mythically conceived as from the ranks, facing the glorious future he promised rife with social programs. The Beatles arrived as the nation was mourning the loss of more than a man but of his and now their dreams, and indeed one might say helped to soothe their loss, divert from them as only the power of the Spectacle can.

Following Kennedy's assassination, it was John Lennon in particular who stood as the most visible and most vocal opponent of this unified land. He had been the archangel of the new society and now had become the archenemy, whose records were being burned by Christians for his statement about Christ and later who supported the various forces of opposition and apparent destruction. For a young man (Chapman) already suffering from paranoid delusions, John Lennon may have presented himself as the obvious symbol of the historical split within his world, and of course it may be that all paranoid delusions represent projections of the split within the sufferer's mind, projections of anger about vulnerability that is externalized upon evil others, and so kept from personal accountability.

There is truth in all paranoid delusions. For example, John Lennon was in fact both the prime creator of pop music and its greatest critic. He elevated it to dimensions that even dwarfed Elvis and helped to tear it apart. He became a public figure with whom millions identified, yet he also alienated millions. He turned the rock star into a figure that expressed the words and feelings of a generation and so became at once its figurehead and target, its liberator and its curse. Once he had entered into the homes of a hundred million young people, as the very symbol of the spectacle of the new media, he also dragged in with him in the parents' heretofore safe houses the generation gap, the antiwar movement, and the "communist menace." John Lennon embodied more than anybody the very dialectic of the 1960s—the tension between liberalism and freedom to exploit on the one hand, and anti-capitalism and freedom from exploitation on the other, between America's pleasure principle (exemplified by the Beatles) and its reality principle (the world of false information, impossible wealth, and even more impossible power), between music as entertainment and music as the chorus for the revolution.

It is surely no coincidence that at the advent of the Reagan era, that was perhaps more than any other to silence its massacres abroad and its perceived aesthetic and political excesses at home, liberties were to be taken with the hand that had helped to send its house of cards tumbling down. It often takes the mad to see the madness around them with acute hypervigilance. Yes, Mark Chapman was most probably mad, but his assassination of John Lennon expressed unwittingly a social wish for the assassination of others like Lennon (some successful, others only in fantasy). It is therefore easy to fall prey to a (often false) conspiracy theory these days, as the ruling class conspires daily to protect its domain, and the working class does not yet conspire in numbers greater than a few thousands here and there to undermine it. John Lennon was the perfect target, in many ways, even if his murder was not a concerted effort by the powers to be to be rid of him.

What he left behind was the utopian imagination we all share that still exists in a million brains refusing to be silenced.

"Imagine," the song, was unquestionably Lennon's finest moment. Its lyrical and conceptual clarity shone sunlight of vision upon our dark and violent world. It urged us to imagine a world without property, without religion, without nations, living in peace. It postulated an economic order in which both greed and hunger would be impossible. Socialists also share this vision. They support the cause that approaches humanity towards the goal of a classless economic order in which wage labor, money and buying and selling have been replaced by free people working together to meet their needs without the constraints imposed by the market system, in short a world of peace, equality, abundance and ecological sustainability. You may think that we are dreamers, but we are not the only ones. I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will live as one.

'Lost' Tapes by Lennon In Yearlong Radio Series

''The Lost Lennon Tapes,'' a yearlong weekly radio series, begins this week on stations associated with the Westwood One Radio Network. Culled from more than 300 hours of John Lennon's taped archives, the series includes interviews, unreleased recordings (including an acoustic-guitar version of ''Strawberry Fields''), songs in various stages of development, jam sessions and other material - some of it dating back to the Quarrymen, Lennon's band before the Beatles - that was made available by Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow.

The series came about when Elliott Mintz, a media consultant and a longtime friend of Lennon and Ms. Ono, told the chairman of Westwood One, Norm Pattiz, about the existence of extensive Lennon tape archives. ''I listened to some of the material and it was just priceless,'' Mr. Pattiz said. ''Apparently John taped everything.'' Mr. Pattiz said the series would trace some Lennon songs from their first rough recordings through demo tapes to completion.

The series, which is being sent to radio stations by satellite for broadcast at their convenience during the week, is being carried in New York by WNEW-FM (102.7). The opening three-hour program will be broadcast Sunday at 8 P.M., and it will continue on Mondays at 11 P.M., starting Feb. 1. ''The Lost Lennon Tapes'' will also be broadcast by WYSP-FM in Philadelphia.

F.B.I. Files on Lennon Reveal Little Beyond Some Weird Details

After a 14-year legal battle by a California history professor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a new cache of material from a 300-page dossier on the late rock star John Lennon, and has agreed to pay $204,000 to cover legal fees incurred in his efforts to open the file.

For all the years of challenge, however, the file contains little, if any, new information about Lennon, although it does present some bizarre details, like a description of an antiwar activist trying to train a parrot to speak profanities.

The professor, Jon Wiener, who teaches history at the University of California at Irvine and is the author of the 1984 ''Come Together: John Lennon in His Time,'' (University of Illinois Press) said that the new information was important, however, because it shows that the F.B.I. concealed that it knew all along that the ex-Beatle's antiwar activities were nonviolent and that it had no reason to investigate Lennon to begin with.

He also said he would continue to sue the bureau for the release of the last 10 pages of its Lennon file, which it has refused to reveal, citing confidentiality provisions of the Freedom of Information law. The bureau would not describe the contents further.

The settlement came as Mr. Wiener and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which will receive the $204,000 payment, were taking depositions in preparation for a trial to gain access to the documents.

The new material, which has been kept secret by the F.B.I. for 25, were developed by agents tracking the activities of antiwar activists in the early 1970's.

The F.B.I. had already released about 300 pages of material from its surveillance, which spanned 1971-1972, to Mr. Wiener, who originally sought the Lennon files for his book. But much of it was blacked out by felt tip marker. Some of the new material is the same pages with the deletions restored.

In defending the investigation of Lennon, Joe Krovisky, a spokesman for the United States Department of Justice, said that ''the investigation was begun by the F.B.I. after it had received information from a source that Lennon was going to contribute $75,000 to a group that was going to disrupt the Republican National Convention.'' He referred to the 1972 convention at which President Richard M. Nixon was renominated. ''The F.B.I. was obligated to check it out,'' Mr. Krovisky said.

However, in the newly released material, an F.B.I. informer is recorded as reporting that Lennon had told antiwar activists that he would come to the Presidential conventions only ''if they are peaceful.'' Despite this, the F.B.I. was justified in continuing its investigation, Mr. Krovisky said, because ''Lennon still might have come to the convention and disrupted it.''

Lennon was among many prominent figures whom the bureau, under the late J. Edgar Hoover, had under surveillance. Critics have attacked Hoover for going far beyond what was reasonable for law enforcement purposes.

F.B.I. agents began watching Lennon in 1971. They continued to follow him during the time the Immigration and Naturalization Service was trying to deport him on the grounds that he had pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis in Britain in 1968. It is not known how many agents were watching Lennon. The surveillance ended in November 1972.

The effort to withhold much of the dossier continued after President Clinton directed Federal agencies to comply with ''the letter and spirit'' of the Freedom of Information Act and to make classified files more accessible.. But Mr. Wiener called the refusal to release the final 10 pages ''another abuse of power and of the Freedom of Information Act.'' Mr. Krovisky noted that most of the Lennon material had now been released.

Mr. Wiener's case has wound its way through the Federal court system, at one point reaching the United States Supreme Court, when the F.B.I. appealed a lower court ruling that its reasons for withholding the documents were insufficient. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case and sent it back to the district court for trial.

''All Lennon was saying was 'Give peace a chance,' '' Mr. Wiener, 53, said in a telephone conversation from Los Angeles. ''The F.B.I. is supposed to catch criminals, not stop people from criticizing the President. This is an example of F.B.I. harassment, the purpose of which was to silence Lennon as a voice of the peace movement.''

Mr. Krovisky declined to comment on the disputed documents, citing F.B.I. policy not to discuss litigation. But in earlier court papers, the bureau quoted the national security provision of the Freedom of Information Act as a reason for withholding the files.

Like the information released earlier, the new information shows almost nothing new about Lennon, although there are more details from confidential informants. The newly released documents contain page after page of apparently trivial information about members of antiwar groups. In one document written by an agent on March 5, 1972,, an informer reports that a parrot belonging to a woman called Linda ''interjects 'Right On!' whenever the conversation gets rousing.'' The document reported that a man named Tom was trying to train it to utter an obscenity when he was involved in arguments.

''But the bird now says it to him whenever he sees him,'' the agent reported. ''The cage is surrounded by small objects that Tom has thrown in response.''

The small details continue. On Jan. 6, 1972, another report was received from the field that one antiwar activist ''is using his parents' car again.'' In another, received on Jan. 5, 1972, an agent writes that an antiwar activist ''was in the office today.'' In a report received on March 8, 1972, an informant wrote that Tom Hayden, today a California state senator, met with Rennie Davis, a leader of the antiwar movement and along with Mr. Hayden a member of the Chicago Seven, and ''discussed the possibility of forming a group calling itself the 'antiwar union.' '' ''A peace concert has also been planned for the Boston area,'' another item, received Jan. 10, 1971, reads.

Mr. Wiener's efforts to see the Lennon file began in 1981, three months after Lennon was fatally shot outside his apartment building in Manhattan. ''Lennon had moved to New York City in August 1971,'' Mr. Wiener recalled, ''and he had jumped right into the middle of the antiwar movement. He became friends with Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis and Abbie Hoffman and was thinking about doing a concert tour which would, in the words of Jerry Rubin, culminate in a 'political Woodstock.' '' It had not been announced that Lennon was going to appear in the concert, though he had discussed the possibility with friends. It is not known how news of the possibility of his appearance reached the F.B.I., but at some point in late 1971, after getting a tip about Lennon's activities, Hoover directed bureau offices to begin investigating him.

In December 1972, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina sent a confidential memorandum to John N. Mitchell, then Attorney General, suggesting that Lennon be deported as a ''strategic countermeasure,'' Mr. Wiener said, quoting from the Senator's memo. The countermeasure, he said, would be one way to insure that Lennon would not show up at the convention.

But the Republican Convention came and went without Lennon attending, and the F.B.I. finally gave up on its investigation. ''In view of subject's inactivity in revolutionary activities and his seemingly rejection by New York radicals, his case is being closed,'' one document said.

Mr. Wiener explained, ''Lennon had withdrawn from antiwar activities on the advice of his immigration lawyers to improve his chances of not being deported.'' In 1975, the United States Court of Appeals overturned the Immigration and Naturalization Service's order to deport Lennon.

Critic's Notebook: Looking for the Real John Lennon; 20 Years Later, Both the Man and the Myth Remain Vulnerable

As they have done with ritual devotion every Dec. 8 for 20 years, admirers of John Lennon will find ways to pass by the Dakota tomorrow and perhaps linger for a moment. Lennon lived in that stately building at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West (his widow, Yoko Ono, still does), and it was in its entranceway that he was shot to death on Dec. 8, 1980, as he returned from a recording session at nearly 11 p.m.

Within an hour of the shooting, radio and television had spread the word that Lennon had been murdered, and hundreds of his dazed fans gathered at the building to try to come to terms with what had happened. By 1 a.m., about 1,000 people had arrived.

For the rest of that week -- the shooting was on a Monday -- West 72nd Street outside the Dakota was clogged with mourners who knew Lennon only through his work but were driven to stand in the cold, singing Lennon and Beatles songs to the accompaniment of portable radios and tape players. It wasn't until Ms. Ono called for a silent vigil in Central Park (and around the world), the following Sunday that the crowd finally dispersed.

In the 20 years since his death, Lennon has become one of popular culture's battlegrounds, like Elvis Presley before him or, for that matter, like anyone of sufficient historical interest to attract not only serious biographers, but hagiographers and revisionists as well. It almost seems as though Lennon anticipated this. During his life -- that is, during the tightly packed 18 years of his life when he was famous -- Lennon created and cultivated a public persona that was so well defined and copiously documented that it resists attempts to make him into either a saint or, as the revisionists have it, a dysfunctional layabout.

He began work on this persona in the early Beatles years, when he established a niche within the group for literate lyrics and cutting humor that was evident both at news conferences and in his books, ''In His Own Write'' in 1964 and ''A Spaniard in the Works'' in 1965 (and the posthumous ''Skywriting by Word of Mouth,'' 1986). Later, his literary flair and sense of the absurd animated songs like ''Strawberry Fields Forever'' and ''I Am the Walrus,'' in which arcane wordplay was matched by musical experimentation.

His writing colleagues, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, each had distinctive compositional personalities, but only Lennon could have written songs that were off the edge in exactly that way.

But there were other undercurrents in Lennon's middle-period Beatles songs. ''In My Life,'' one of the best tracks on the ''Rubber Soul'' album, was overtly autobiographical, and ''The Word,'' on the same disc, introduced a utopian philosophy that would find clearer expression two years later in ''All You Need Is Love'' and a few years after that in ''Imagine.'' That twin focus -- autobiography and utopianism -- characterized virtually all of his post-Beatles work as well, and it helped define who he was, or at least who he wanted us to believe he was.

Just about the last thing he wanted was for anyone to make him out as a saint. That much is clear from the lengthy confessional interviews he gave between 1969 and 1980. Two of the most comprehensive have just been reissued in book form as ''Lennon Remembers'' (Verso), a 1970 interview with Jann S. Wenner, for Rolling Stone, and ''All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono'' (St. Martin's Press), a 1980 interview with David Sheff for Playboy.

In these conversations and others, he is hardly evasive about his personal difficulties: between typically wide-ranging discussions of his projects and views, political and otherwise, he acknowledges his failings as a father and husband, his temper and a tendency toward violence, his periods of drug addiction and even his doubts about the value of his music.

His autobiographical songs were not particularly self-aggrandizing either. The entire 1970 ''Plastic Ono Band'' album, recorded after a few weeks of Dr. Arthur Janov's ''primal scream'' therapy, is alternately insecure and assertive.

It begins with a plaintive, angry meditation on parental abandonment (''Mother''), touches directly or obliquely on other personal demons (including heroin addiction, something he had already addressed more directly in the chilling ''Cold Turkey'') and concludes (but for the codalike ''My Mummy's Dead'') with ''God,'' a repudiation of a long litany of deities and heroes ending with the Beatles. As harsh, direct and disturbing as the album is, it is in many ways Lennon's most consistently gripping solo recording.

He lightened up thereafter, but his insecurities remained under the microscope in songs like ''How?,'' ''Jealous Guy,'' ''Scared,'' ''I'm Losing You'' and ''I Don't Want to Face It.'' That isn't to say that he couldn't be aggressive. In the annals of musical poison-pen letters, his excoriation of his former songwriting partner as a lightweight musically and otherwise in ''How Do You Sleep?,'' his former manager, Allen Klein, in ''Steel and Glass,'' and the political establishment in ''Gimme Some Truth'' share the top rung with Bob Dylan's ''Positively Fourth Street.''

POP REVIEW; Imagining John Lennon, In a Time Of Anguish

When the TNT cable channel planned ''Come Together,'' its tribute to John Lennon, the show was going to be a benefit for gun-control groups, a concert ''in support of a nonviolent world.'' After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, it inevitably changed. The rescheduled concert, which was broadcast live on Tuesday night from Radio City Music Hall on the WB network and on TNT, became a benefit for relief efforts through the Web site www.helping.org.

Lennon's yearning to give peace a chance, and his conviction that ''love is the answer,'' made an uncomfortable fit with the prospect of imminent war. Instead, the tribute found a new focus: mourning both a murdered musician and the thousands of victims in New York and Washington.

Its avowed purpose became, in the words of the show's host, Kevin Spacey, ''to not only keep John's songs alive but to help rebuild New York.'' The most touching moment was broadcast from Central Park, where Cyndi Lauper sang ''Strawberry Fields'' next to the memorial to Lennon, with circles of candles flickering on the mosaic that reads, ''Imagine.''

The set for the show was based on the white room where Lennon made the video for ''Imagine'' and included a white grand piano like the one he used. At the music hall, concertgoers saw Lennon's home movies and heard his music during the broadcast's commercials.

''Imagine'' itself, belted by the gospel singer Yolanda Adams with the onetime Beatles sideman Billy Preston on organ, sounded newly prescient and poignant in its longing for an end to countries, religions and possessions, with its utopia as distant as ever. It was just one moment in which an old song adapted to a new historical moment -- a testament both to the wise generality of Lennon's writing and to fans' willingness to place themselves within a song.

Actors including Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Leelee Sobieski, Steve Buscemi and Benjamin Bratt condemned the attacks and praised heroic rescue workers and the city itself. Punctuated by videotaped interviews with Lennon, they cast his songs as dreams of a one-world community and transmutations of pain into beauty. Behind the performers, video screens showed New York scenes, hard-working firefighters and American flags.

Many of Lennon's songs are filled with a sense of private loss that has now taken on a public resonance. When Dave Matthews gently sang ''In My Life,'' its ''places I'll remember . . . Some have gone'' seemed utterly specific. The hallucinatory itinerary of ''Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,'' sung by Marc Anthony, became a New York travelogue, with all its whimsicality vanished. When Nelly Furtado and David Stewart performed ''Instant Karma,'' its peak came with Ms. Furtado trumpeting ''surely not to live in pain and fear.'' And Natalie Merchant sang ''Nowhere Man'' without a hint of its original disdain, turning it into a folk-rock lullaby for someone bewildered and displaced.

The program's original character, as an all-star musical tribute, emerged now and then. Mr. Spacey had a moment of celebrity karaoke, singing ''Mind Games'' as a finely detailed Lennon impression. Stone Temple Pilots did their own Lennon imitation as they replicated the Beatles' fuzz-toned ''Revolution.'' Sean Lennon, Lennon's son with Yoko Ono (the show's executive producer), harmonized with Rufus Wainwright on Lennon's ''Across the Universe'' and ''This Boy,'' and sang ''Julia'' alone, his voice a lighter echo of his father's.

Lou Reed made ''Jealous Guy'' completely his own, a volatile rocker that turned each verse into a cycle of tongue-tied bewilderment, fury and partial apology, warning, ''I'm a jealous guy -- watch out!'' Alanis Morrissette gave ''Dear Prudence'' a touch of Eastern drone and mysticism. Shelby Lynne, who lost her own parents to violence, sang Lennon's primal ''Mother,'' though the large band led by Dave Stewart made it sound strangely triumphant rather than lonely.

Craig David, an English pop-soul singer, dared to add some words to Lennon's own in ''Come Together,'' with a quick-tongued rap that acknowledged, ''It's real hard to try and say goodbye when it feels like yesterday'' and ''the heroes are the real superstars.'' The reggae singer Shaggy introduced ''Give Peace a Chance'' with another rap calling for ''no more terror, no more wars,'' and added, ''It's peace we need.'' But ''Give Peace a Chance'' soon segued to another, more pugnacious Lennon song: ''Power to the People'' -- a sentiment from the 1960's that awaits its 21st-century meanings.

Photo: The gospel artist Yolanda Adams singing ''Imagine'' at Radio City. The former Beatles sideman Billy Preston played organ (front, on the right). (G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times)(pg. E8); Lou Reed performing ''Jealous Guy'' at a John Lennon tribute at Radio City. (G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times)(pg. E1)

John Lennon Scholarships

The John Lennon Scholarships are an annual competition open to student songwriters and composers of contemporary musical genres including alternative, pop, rock, indie, electronica, R&B, and experimental. Over the past eighteen years, more than $360,000 in scholarships has been awarded to talented young musicians from colleges and universities throughout the United States, making this award one of the nation’s most esteemed accolades for emerging songwriters.

Established in 1997 by Yoko Ono in conjunction with the BMI Foundation, this scholarship program honors the memory of one of the preeminent songwriters of the 20th century: John Lennon. Lennon’s enormous creative legacy includes such songs as, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Imagine,” “I Am the Walrus,” “All You Need Is Love,” and “Come Together,” and continues to inspire and uplift new generations of music lovers around the world.

Through the generosity of Ono and Gibson Musical Instruments, three scholarships totaling $20,000 are presented annually for the best original songs submitted to the competition. Applicants must be U.S. college students between the ages of 17 and 24. Works are judged by a prestigious panel of music publishers, songwriters, and executives that in past years has included Tony-winning theater composers Maury Yeston and Frank Wildhorn, prominent jazz specialist Suzan Jenkins, accomplished songwriters Teron Beal, Jeff Cohen, Benny Blanco, and Charles Fox, and Grammy-winning record producers Russ Titelman and the late Arif Mardin. Broadcast Music Inc.’s Assistant VP of Writer-Publisher Relations, Samantha Cox, oversees the competition. Cox has worked to build the careers of numerous major recordings artists, including Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and 3 Doors Down, and lends her rich, varied experience for supporting new talent to her role as the program’s Director. 

Many of our John Lennon Scholarships winners have gone on to create successful careers in recorded music, theater, and concert performance. Prior winners include: Bora Yoon, composer/performer and TED fellow; Lynda DeFuria, singer/songwriter and Off-Broadway actress; Svoy, recording artist; and Andrew Horowitz, performer and composer/producer for Grammy-winning artist John Legend.

John Lennon Biography

John Lennon didn’t invent rock and roll, nor did he embody it as toweringly as figures like Elvis Presley and Little Richard, but he did more than anyone else to shake it up, move it forward and instill it with a conscience. As the most daring and outspoken of the four Beatles, he helped shape the agenda of the Sixties - socially and politically, no less than musically. As a solo artist, he made music that alternately disturbed and soothed, provoked and sought community. As a human being, he served as an exemplar of honesty in his art and life. As Jann Wenner wrote in the foreword to a collection of writings entitled The Ballad of John and Yoko, “Of the many things that will be long remembered about John Lennon - his genius as a musician and singer, his wit and literary swiftness, his social intuition and leadership - among the most haunting was the stark, unembarrassed commitment of his life, his work and his undernourished frame to truth, to peace and to humanity.”

Lennon was born in 1940 during the Nazi bombing of Britain and given the middle name Winston, after prime minister Churchill (he would later change his middle name to Ono). At age five, Lennon was sent to live with his “Aunt Mimi” after his parents separated. In 1956, Aunt Mimi bought Lennon a guitar. His incessant playing prompted her to remark, “The guitar’s all very well as a hobby, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.” That same year, Lennon formed his first group, the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles.

Having experienced the horror of a world at war as a child and then living through the Vietnam era as a young man, Lennon came to embrace and embody pacifism. His was the voice and vision that powered such Beatles classics as “All You Need Is Love” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Yet Lennon also had a dark side that found expression in pained outcries dating as far back as “Help,” and his was the most naturally adventuresome musical spirit in the band, as evidenced by such outre tracks as “I Am the Walrus” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” The uncensored, self-lacerating aspect of the Lennon persona reached a fevered pitch with the drug-withdrawal blues of “Cold Turkey,” a 1969 single released under the name Plastic Ono Band.

Although Lennon was a complicated man, he chose after the Beatles to simplify his art in order to figure out his life, erasing the boundaries between the two. As he explained it, he started trying “to shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur...Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it, and express yourself as simply [and] straightforwardly as possible.” His most fully realized statement as a solo artist was 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. It followed several collaborative sound collages recorded toward the end of the Beatles era with Yoko Ono, his wife and collaborator. The raw, confessional nature of Plastic Ono Band reflected the primal-scream therapy that Lennon and Ono had been undergoing with psychologist Arthur Janov. He dealt with such fundamental issues as “God” and “Mother” and the class system (“Working Class Hero”) on an album as full of naked candor as any in rock has ever been.

Many of Lennon’s post-Beatles compositions – “Imagine,” “Mind Games” and “Instant Karma” – have rightfully become anthems, flaunting tough-minded realism, cosmic epiphany, hard-won idealism and visionary utopianism in equal measure. For all of the unvarnished genius of Lennon’s recordings, however, much of what lingers in the public memory goes beyond musical legacy. Rather, it has to do with leading by example. The relationship between John and Yoko endured challenges to became one of the most touching and celebrated of 20th-century romances. They were gallantly foolish in undertaking performance art pieces - bed-ins, happenings, full-page ads declaring “War Is Over!” - that spread their message of peace.

During the early Seventies, Lennon fought the U.S. government to avoid deportation – a campaign of harassment by Nixon-era conservatives that officially ended when Lennon was issued a green card in 1976 – and came to love his adopted city of New York. In 1974, Lennon had his first Number One single with the release of "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" (Walls and Bridges, 1974), which featured Elton John on backing vocals, piano and organ. On November 28, 1974, Elton John cajoled Lennon into joining him onstage at Madison Square Garden, where they performed "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There." It would be Lennon's last public performance.

Beginning with the birth of his second son, Sean Ono Lennon, in 1975, John Lennon dropped out of sight for five years. During this spell, he chose to lay low and raise Sean as a proud househusband. Simply by stepping back and “watching the wheels,” John Lennon made a statement about priorities that said more than words and music. His eventual return to the recording scene in 1980 was one of the more eagerly anticipated musical events of the year. The album Double Fantasy, jointly credited to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and named for a flower he’d seen at a botanical garden, was released on November 17, 1980. On December 8, a brilliant life came to an untimely end when Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment. He was returning from a recording session for an album that was posthumously released as Milk and Honey. Three weeks after his death, with the entire rock world still in disbelief and mourning, “(Just Like) Starting Over” (from Double Fantasy) hit #1.