'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.