Pages tagged “john lennon”

All he was saying was "give peace a chance."

Christie's plans to auction off a hand-written sheet of lyrics to John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance" this July during its rock and pop memorabilia sale. Lennon gave friend and fan Gail Renard the piece of paper during his eight-day "bed-in" in with Yoko Ono in Montreal, the one that culminated with the recording of the popular song. It later went on to become a worldwide hit, and a phrase that's part of the popular lexicon, pacifist or otherwise. The event occurred toward the end of Lennon's stint as a Beatle; the band would soon dissolve.

"I think the interest is there because this is certainly one of the most recognizable and influential of John Lennon's solo compositions," Helen Hall, head of the popular culture department at Christie's South Kensington, told the Associated Press. "It's important not just as one of Lennon's most famous peace anthems, it's also the fact that it was written at such a historical event."

The lyrics will be available for public viewing July 5 in London. Renard also plans to auction photographs of herself with Lennon and Ono.

Related links:
Christies.com
YouTube: "Give Peace A Chance"
Beatles.com

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The Vulnerable Beatle
Lennon’s narrative-like catalog tailor-made for digital delivery

Live Peace in Toronto, 1969 - Three stars
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - Five stars
Imagine - Five stars
Sometime in New York City - Three stars
Mind Games - Four Stars
Walls and Bridges - Three stars
Rock ‘N’ Roll - Two stars
Double Fantasy - Three stars
Milk and Honey - Three stars
Lennon Anthology - Four stars

One of the more telling songs in John Lennon’s solo catalog is the tender “Look at Me.” Not the well-scrubbed version on his first album, but the unvarnished take on 1998’s Anthology, his posthumous 94-track box set of demos, outtakes and other unreleased gems. “Look at me,” he sings in a vulnerable rasp over the buzz and twang of acoustic guitar, “who am I supposed to be?” At one point, he even begs, “Please look at me.” And finally, Lennon – the soul of the Beatles, the musical hear of the ‘60s peace movement, the voice of a generation – asks the most basic human question: “Who am I?” He answers resignedly, “Nobody knows but me.”

The song perfectly telescopes the Lennon dilemma, but fans can get a pretty good idea of who he was – and what contradictions he lived – from his full body of music, now available digitally for the first time on Apple Inc.’s iTunes. The computer company’s acquisition of the Lennon catalog suggests The Beatles’ works may be coming soon. Apple had not been able to acquire the Fab Four’s music before this year, due to a trademark battle over the name (The Beatles’ record label was called Apple Corps.). But in February, the dispute was settled, and The Beatles’ solo projects have found their way onto iTunes.

Of the four, Lennon’s music makes the most sense in digital form, not because it’s singles-oriented, but because it transcends even the album format. His songs, and his lyrics – from “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” on his first solo album to “God bless our love,” on his last one – form one long narrative. The story of his solo career begins with a show recorded just after the Beatles completed Abbey Road. Though Lennon had cut three extremely avant garde albums with Ono the previous year, Live Peace in Toronto, 1969 was his scruffy, rock ‘n’ roll hall pass out of the increasingly strained Beatles classroom. It’s hardly a live album of the caliber of The Who’s Live at Leeds, but Lennon’s makeshift band, including Eric Clapton cranking out the blues and Ono wailing in the background, romps through rock standards like “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and biting Lennon originals such as “Cold Turkey.”

If Toronto is the introduction to Lennon’s musical memoirs, Plastic Ono Band is the brilliant and harrowing first chapter, in which he deals head-on with everything from his childhood emotional traumas (“Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead”) to the toll his abnormal fame as a Beatle has taken on his identity (“Look at Me”) to the social injustice of Britain’s class system (“Working Class Hero”). “Isolation” offers a glimpse of his megalomania and anger toward his fans, and in “God,” he re-examines his entire belief system. Bleak and often difficult to listen to, Lennon’s first studio release is among the all-time greatest albums of the rock era, and worth downloading in its entirety. So is its follow-up, Imagine, on which Lennon runs the gamut of emotions, from rage (“How Do You Sleep?,” a vicious attack on Paul McCartney) to sweet, giddy love (“Oh Yoko!”).

The narrative loses focus on Sometime in New York City, a set of protest songs that hasn’t aged well, though the album has been unfairly chastised. Feminist anthem “Woman is the Nigger of the World” is one of Lennon’s finest songs, and there are several other bright spots, including some of Ono’s compositions. Despite her being consistently maligned for her Asian sense of melody (Western naysayers and obsessive Beatles fans call it “out of tune”). Ono’s “Born in a Prison” is powerful. For Mind Games, Lennon returned to the stylistic trimmings of Imagine. Featuring pretty ballads (“Out of the Blue”), hard rockers (“Meat City”) and scratchy country blues (“Tight As”), Mind Games is excellent but doesn’t break new ground. Walls and Bridges is less successful primarily because he recorded it during his infamous “Lost Weekend.” The album has too many silly songs – such as the duet with Elton John (and Lennon’s first #1 solo hit) “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” – and not enough tracks like the genius “#9 Dream.” Oldies cover album Rock ‘N’ Roll is a bust, with badly arranged interpretations of the kinds of songs he and The Beatles nailed in the early ‘60s.

After five years in retirement, Lennon returned in 1980 with Double Fantasy, which, while good, doesn’t stand up as well as it did when the world was moruning his assassination. “Dear Yoko” is a rewrite of “Oh Yoko!” Other stronger tracks, such as “I’m Losing You,” seem recycled, too. In fact, many of Ono’s songs on the album are superior. With the arrival of punk and New Wave, the times had caught up with her vision, and tracks like “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” are sharper and more relevant than the old-fashioned pop Lennon had fallen back on. Milk and Honey is similar, but Lennon’s material – such as the beautifully ragged (and horribly ironic) “Grow Old With Me” – sound fresher. Several collections are also available on iTunes, but the one worth picking from is the gargantuan Anthology – its alternate takes tell the John Lennon story in ways his official albums don’t.

Read Mark Kemp's take on twenty must-download tracks in Lennon's newly-digitized catalog here.

It's a daunting task to dig through a catalog as deep as John Lennon's, but with all of his albums finally available for digital download via iTunes, there's now more reason than ever. Paste's senior contributing editor Mark Kemp has sorted through some of Lennon's finest work, cataloging playlist-ready popular favorites and deep tracks alike.

1. “Look at Me,” from Anthology
In one of his most vulnerable songs, Lennon asks his listeners to look at who he is beyond the Beatles, beyond fame, beyond the mythology that had grown up around him during his tenure with the biggest pop band in the world.

2. “Mother,” from Plastic Ono Band
After the Beatles’ acrimonious break-up, Lennon turned inward, looking to his childhood for reasons for his insecurity. This song came out of his scream-therapy sessions and is one of the rawest, most primal songs in the rock canon. “Mother, you had me but I never had you,” he sings, and then in the next verse, “Father, you left me but I never left you.” The song was recently covered, brilliantly and fittingly, by Shelby Lynne, whose father murdered her mother when Lynne was a child and then turned the gun on himself.

3. "God," from Plastic Ono Band
Throughout his youth and as a Beatle, Lennon looked to gurus, different religions and his own musical idols, like Elvis and Dylan, for answers to life’s big questions. In this song, he decides the only concept he can truly believe in is his own existence.

4. "Working Class Hero," from Plastic Ono Band
Another dark one from his solo studio debut, this acoustic-guitar ballad chastises Britain’s class system for making the working-class citizen believe he can never raise himself above his place in society.

5. "Imagine," from Imagine
On his second album, Lennon returns to the dreamer of his past, and in this beautiful piano-based ballad he dreams of a world with no boundaries, no theology, no rules, no limits.

6. "Gimme Some Truth", from Imagine
Always one to expose hypocrisy, Lennon demands the Truth in this song. The problem is that Lennon himself – a confessed violent soul, a drug addict, a megalomaniac, a cheater – was as hypocritical as anyone he targeted, and he knew it.

7. "How Do You Sleep," from Imagine
In this song he proves his hypocrisy. It’s perhaps the most brutal, least compassionate song ever directed at any one person. In this one, he attacks Paul McCartney, basically calling him a no-talent poser. On his early solo album Ram, McCartney had directed a number of barbs at Lennon.

8. "Cold Turkey," from Lennon Legend
If the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” romanticizes the drug, this one puts dope in its proper context – as a conduit to utter pain. In the horrible screams toward the end of “Cold Turkey,” you can practically hear Lennon kicking the drug.

9. "Woman is the Nigger of the World," from Sometime in New York City
One of Lennon’s most powerful political songs, this one accurately describes women as the most oppressed minority in the world: “We make her paint her face and dance / If she wont be a slave, we say that she don’t love us. / If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man. / While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us…”

10. "Mind Games," from Mind Games
Inspired by the book of the same name by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in which the authors suggest that humans have the potential to succeed, spiritually and otherwise, by playing mind games with themselves.

11. "You Are Here," from Mind Games
Fueled by pedal steel guitar and a Caribbean rhythm, Lennon sings to his lover Yoko Ono, “Wherever you are, you are here.” He wrote this gorgeous song after his infamous lost weekend away from Ono.

12. "One Day (at a Time)," from Mind Games
Another song directed to Ono, the title has become something of a cliché since 12-step groups became all the rage in the 1980s. But listening to this ballad without judgment makes the wisdom of the “one day at a time” philosophy resonate beyond the field of addiction treatment. “One day at a time is all we do,” Lennon sings over a dreamy, almost surreal melody, “One day at a time is good for us, too.”

13. "#9 Dream," from Walls and Bridges
With its George Harrison-like slide guitar, changes in tempo, and obsession with dreams and the number 9, this one sounds more like a Beatles song than anything in Lennon’s solo catalog. The repeated nonsense words “Ah, bowakawa, poussé, poussé” reportedly came to Lennon in a dream.

14. "Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)," from Anthology
The raw take of this cynical slow-burner is much more effective than the overly-echoed, horn-heavy version from Walls and Bridges. In this one, Lennon questions his own capacity for honesty in lines like, “And still you ask me do I love you, what it is, what it is / All I can tell you is it's all show biz.” At the end of this take, Lennon sounds deeply depressed when he mutters to the engineer, “All right, let’s go have a listen – and a break from it.”

15. "I’m Losing You," from Double Fantasy
For the most part, the songs on his comeback album represented a renewal for Lennon, but this smoking, noisy blues rocker finds him and Yoko still coming to terms with the betrayal and hurt of their rocky years away from each other. “What the hell am I supposed to do – just put a Band-aid on it, and stop the bleeding now?,” Lennon asks, and then later: “Do you still have to carry that cross? Drop it!”

16. "Help Me to Help Myself," from Double Fantasy
This is another one from his comeback that suggests Lennon still was dealing with his demons long after it was being reported he was living a life of domestic bliss. Even the Double Fantasy version is raw and pure, just Lennon and his piano and lines like, “Well I tried so hard to stay alive, but the angel of destruction keeps on hounding me all around.” Then he begs to the God whose existence he’d once denied, “Lord, help me. Lord, help me now. Help me to help myself.”

17. "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him," from Milk and Honey
This is Lennon’s version of a song Yoko had done on Double Fantasy. In this version, released posthumously, Lennon sings the exact same lyrics Yoko had written to reassure him: “Every man has a woman who loves him / In rain or shine or life and death / If he finds her in this lifetime.”

18. Sean’s “Little Help…,” from Anthology
No rip-and-burn of Lennon songs should be without the voice of his and Yoko’s son, Sean. Not the grown-up Sean who worked with the Beastie Boys, but the young Sean who partly inspired Lennon’s comeback. In this minute-long segment, Sean incorrectly sings the lyrics of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.” And father, gently and lovingly, corrects him.

19. "Beautiful Boy," from Anthology
The previous spoken segment segues perfectly into one of the sweetest songs Lennon ever wrote, a lovely, Asian-themed melodic ode to the son he would never see grow up. The lyrics, “Close your eyes, have no fear, the monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here” ring horribly sad in light of the fact that a monster with a gun would soon appear outside the Dakota and take Lennon away from his son.

20. "Grow Old With Me," from Milk and Honey
Another sad song, in retrospect. In this one, he wishes for Yoko and himself a long and more stable relationship into their twilight years. And again, he asks God to bless their love and employs other religious language, such as “world without end, world without end.”

Read Mark Kemp's review of the entire recently-digitzed Lennon oeuvre from Paste #37 here.

Time for someone to take the well-known John and Yoko “Think Different” ad and photoshop a pair of iPods in place of the flowers. While the Beatles catalogue and Apple Inc still don’t live in peace, sixteen of Lennon’s EMI solo albums are now available in the iTunes music store. It’s the third batch of Beatle-member music made downloadable through the medium, following Paul McCartney’s in May and Ringo Starr’s in June. According to the BBC, George Harrison’s widow “recently said an agreement to put the band’s recordings online (is) ‘imminent.’”

For a 30-day period, “exclusive video content” is included with the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Sometime in New York City, Walls and Bridges, Milk and Honey and collections Anthology and Working Class Hero. Dang, sounds like enough music and film clips to make your own mini rock-doc.

“John would have loved the fact that his music will now be available in a format suited to a new generation of listeners,” Yoko Ono has stated.

Related links
JohnLennon.com
Apple.com
Paste: Imagining Peace in Darfur

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Click here to return to the issue 33 cover story home page.

In March 31, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared at a Vienna press conference in a bag large enough to hold the two of them closely together, hidden from the glare of the camera flashes. Inside the bag, they claimed to be eating chocolate cake. Perplexed, the press asked questions and John and Yoko explained that the bag represented total communication. “When you’re in a bag, you can’t be judged by the color of your skin, the length of your hair, your age or any other attributes.” After the press carefully considered their concept, John and Yoko were amused that the first question was, “Well then, what are you wearing?”

Exactly 38 years later, on March 31, 2007, horsemen masked by turbans and bandanas surrounded both Tiero and Marena—good-sized farming villages located just across the Chadanian border from Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. Although their faces were well hidden, rank was proudly displayed on the military uniforms they were wearing.

The villagers immediately recognized the horsemen as Janjaweed—an Arab militia backed by the Sudanese government. Villagers attempted to put up a fight, but over the course of three hours, they were burned, murdered and brutalized, leaving an estimated 300 to 400 people dead. An exact count has not yet been made because bodies continue to turn up in the bush.

The atrocity in Tiero and Marena is but one in a chain of state-supported massacres that led both Colin Powell and President Bush to conclude in 2004 that what is happening in Darfur is nothing short of genocide. But aside from generous aid packages from the U.S., very little has been done to stop the violence. As a consequence, more than 300,000 African Sudanese farmers have been murdered for the very sort of thing John and Yoko tried to hide in a bag—their skin color and tribal affiliations.

The unofficial goal of the Janjaweed has been to clear large swaths of the resource-scarce country for Arab farmers—displacing more than 2.5 million Darfuris to overflowing, disease-ridden camps throughout Chad in the process. The attacks on Tiero and Marena represent a growing problem as death, violence and brutality spill across the borders of Sudan into Chad and the Central African Republic, displacing an additional 140,000 refugees.

You Can’t Get Peace in a King-Sized Duvet
John Lennon realized that his high-minded art projects and chants of “Give Peace a Chance” were simplistic. And, to him, that was exactly the point. “We’re trying to sell peace, like a product,” he said on The David Frost Show. “We’re trying to sell peace the way people sell soap or soft drinks.”

John and Yoko’s “ad campaign for peace” took on Dadaist proportions as the couple bought billboards in major city squares and took out newspaper advertisements declaring, “War is Over (If You Want It).” They sent acorns to world leaders with the hope that they would be planted for peace. Most famously, they spent their honeymoon at the Amsterdam Hilton, hosting a bedside press conference with the slogans “bed peace” and “hair peace” posted above their heads. “My photo is going to be in the paper anyway. It might as well be in the paper with the word ‘peace’ above my head,” John reasoned.

“At the time, they were ridiculed,” says Helen Garrett, director of marketing for Amnesty International. “But here it is, 30-some years later and people are still talking about what they did. John took these large concepts and made them simple enough for people to understand. He put them into slogans that could then be used to inspire and mobilize.”

And he also turned many of these slogans into songs. Earlier this year, Ono waived licensing restrictions on Lennon’s entire solo catalog so U2 could record “Instant Karma,” The Black Eyed Peas could record “Power to the People,” Green Day could record “Working Class Hero” and the results could be packaged and sold—like soap—to raise money for Darfur and to promote peace there.

“With his music, Lennon says things about the relationship of life, love, fatherhood and fame,” says Jeff Ayeroff, executive producer of the resulting album, Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur. “And he means them. He doesn’t hide behind them. He doesn’t find irony and sarcasm. He believes in what he is saying.”

Ayeroff was the producer of The Beatles 1 album and the brains behind MTV’s Rock the Vote. He had the connections to pull everyone from Jackson Browne to The flaming Lips on board. “We ended up with 60 tracks, which I cut down to 23 for the album,” he says. “As a result, there are going to be a lot of Internet-only and special-edition tracks—like Willie Nelson’s version of ‘Imagine,’ available only at Borders bookstores, or Duran Duran’s take on ‘Instant Karma,’ available only in Europe.”

Nutopian International Anthem
The first UN Refugee Agency workers to make it to Tiero following the massacre found an apocalyptic scene far removed from the utopian dreamscape described in John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It’s a scene far too horrific to recount here, but in this bloodclot of reality we find the true power of a song that asks us to resist our impulse for violence and turn a cheek toward peace.

“‘Imagine’ has probably done better than any other song in making people aware that things don’t have to be the way they are,” says Jakob Dylan, who contributed “Gimmie Some Truth” to the Instant Karma project with his friend Dhanni Harrison. “It works in the subconscious. You could say that, lyrically, it’s naive, but if it is, then bring on more naiveté. Because these are the kind of lessons that even children don’t have to be taught.”

Throughout his career, John Lennon dared us to make a choice against violence. It’s the same choice the Instant Karma campaign is making right now. “We’re not asking people to send large sums of money or to travel to Sudan to work on our humanitarian team,” Garrett says. “We’re asking people to keep communicating. If our elected officials know that this is an issue their constituency cares about, they will be pressured to do more.”

For more info, visit InstantKarma.

A captain’s logbook from a sailing trip John Lennon took in 1980 might have some people wondering what the former Beatle was doing in the middle of the Atlantic sailing in a 43-foot schooner with four strangers and a mysterious figure known only as “Captain Hank.” The answer? Shaking off a five-year bout of writer’s block.

The book—which surfaced at a recent auction held by London rock-memorabilia house Cooper Owen—is signed by several sailors and guests of the vessel Megan Jaye and includes notes and doodles made by Lennon during the stormy 600-mile voyage from Rhode Island to Bermuda in June 1980. “Dear Megan,” reads one inscription, “There is no place like nowhere. And thanks Hank. Love, John.” Along with his notes, Lennon drew a picture of himself with a beard, sailing the Megan Jaye through the Bermuda Triangle. The book also contains other entries and anecdotes that touch upon the importance of this Bermuda trip, which is credited with lifting the Beatle out of depression and inspiring him to begin writing his last album, Double Fantasy. Lennon, rock historians say, considered the Bermuda trip one of the most important events of his life.

“He had not been inspired like that since 1961 when he was starting off with The Beatles,” says Tom Fontaine, owner of the Megan Jaye logbook, who also worked on the recent film The U.S. vs. John Lennon (see Paste #24). “The experience gave him the confidence in himself to go back and write his final works. It’s an important piece and I want it to go to the right person.”

While the logbook was withdrawn from the Cooper Owen auction because it failed to meet the reserve, people will get a chance to view it (and even buy it) Dec. 9 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas at a charity auction for the TJ Martel Foundation. (Some experts estimate it will be auctioned for as much as $43,000. Fontaine estimates it at $35,000. It was last sold for more than $8,000).

‘SEA LEGS’
According to the Cooper Owen auction catalog, the sail from Newport, R.I., to Hamilton, Bermuda, was an epic voyage for Lennon. On day three, the Megan Jaye ran into rough weather and, one by one, the crew fell ill from pitching seas. Lennon, after 15 minutes at the wheel in his foul-weather gear, began to get his sea legs. He said the feeling was just like going on stage. “At first you panic and then you’re ready to throw up your guts,” Lennon recalled in a Playboy interview after his trip. “But once you got out there and start doing all the stuff, you forget your fears and you got high on your performance.

“So there I was at the wheel with the wind and sea lashing out at me. At first I was terrified, but Captain Hank was at my side so I felt relatively safe because I knew he wouldn’t let me do anything stupid. After a while Captain Hank wasn’t feeling too well so he went to the cabin below.

“Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky.” Lennon also compared the experience to when The Beatles were at their peak, saying he felt “centered” and “in tune with the cosmos.”

Tyler Coneys was a member of the crew, which included his cousins Kevin and Ellen and Captain Hank. Earlier that spring, Lennon, 39 at the time, had purchased a 14-foot sailboat from Coneys Marine in Huntington, N.Y. (“It was a ‘wet-ass’ boat,” says Coneys. “Not the kind you buy when you just start sailing at 40.”)

Coneys says the Atlantic crossing was Lennon’s longtime dream. “When guys turn 40 some buy a sports car or a motorcycle. Well, Lennon wanted this experience. They say life begins at 40. And this is what he wanted.”

If Coneys had any doubt of Lennon’s grit and toughness, it was washed away during the gale. “It was a huge storm and everyone thought we might die,” says Coneys. “We were in the middle of it and the waves looked like the size of buildings. He could have been watching TV but instead he decided to be there by choice. Right there in it. It was the perfect situation, I guess. All your life you dream about an adventure. You can’t make something like that happen.”

On the boat, Coneys said Lennon had no superstar pretense and fulfilled his ship duties like the rest of the crew. “He was really just one of the guys,” Coneys says. “But he came through. It was right in the heart of the worst part of the storm and he stepped up.”

NEW WIND FOR THE SAILS
With the cathartic six-day journey behind him, Lennon arrived on the island June 11 relaxed, re-energized and inspired. He stayed for two months—writing, recording and staying up all night working on his new songs, and visiting clubs and shops in downtown Hamilton. On a trip to the Botanical Gardens with his son, Sean, they spotted a freesia hybrid flower called Double Fantasy and thus the album title was born. Another time, having drinks with two local journalists, Lennon came up with the lyrics for “Watching the Wheels.” On the club’s walls flashed projections of turning wheels while one of the journalists lamented to Lennon that he should be writing great songs—not shut in a New York apartment, no longer part of the “big time.” During his stay, he also wrote “I’m Losing You,” “Beautiful Boy” and an early version of “Woman.” During that last summer vacation of his life, Lennon was also inspired to write “Borrowed Time” after listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ album Burnin’. In one of his less-poetic moments, he later described this productive time as “a diarrhea of creativity.”

By all accounts it seemed the sail to Bermuda and his following stay allowed Lennon a rare, much-needed degree of anonymity—and the breezy freedom to create unfettered. It was easy living, that relaxed Caribbean-Anglo vibe, and he was making plans to return the next summer. However, nobody can be quite certain if that would have been by boat or plane. And still, all we know about Captain Hank is what Lennon told us. “He looked like the man on the Zig-Zag rolling papers, with a beard and a scarf on his head and a sextant.”

In celebration of what would be John Lennon's 66th birthday on October 9th, 2006, the Worn Free t-shirt design company has announced the release of a number of new designs inspired by tees once worn by Lennon himself.

Beatles fans, Plastic Ono Band devotees, and general pop culture junkies alike can now sport replicas of some of Lennon's most iconic shirts, like "You Are Here" and "Working Class Hero," which pushed the same political and social messages as many of his classic songs.

Worn Free also offers shirts popularized by other vintage rockers like Joey Ramone and Gram Parsons. "John Lennon was the inspiration for this entire project," designer Steve Coe explained in a statement. "He inspired me, and millions of other people with his creative expressions – be it a song, a protest, a love-in or even a three-word phrase on a t-shirt."

Check out the new Lennon collection and all the other tees at http://www.wornfree.com.

Book collects Lennon musings from wide range of admirers

Memories of John Lennon celebrates one of rock’s most prismatic figures. The trickster, rebel and peacemaker are only a few of the kaleidoscopic images that emerge from reflections by 73 men and women affected by Lennon—close friends and passing acquaintances, as well as some who only knew him through his music.

A labor of love edited by Yoko Ono, Memories has all the strengths and weaknesses of a family scrapbook, displaying a sweet, regretful nostalgia with only occasional flashes of the turmoil that gives any real family its spark. As in a family scrapbook, loss haunts the pages. Lennon’s life is not laid out for retracing over a rigid timeline. The alphabetical arrangement of contributors turns the book into an encyclopedia of dreams. A poem by Alicia Keys is followed by an essay from Astrid Kirchherr, whose early photographs helped turn The Beatles into The Beatles.

Some, like Dennis Hopper and Norman Mailer, contribute exactly one weary sentence apiece. Bono offers a picture he doodled at age 12.

Memories is not a book to pick up and read from beginning to end. Browsing its short pieces encourages meditation and self-reflection, but only rarely surprises.

On Nov. 2 Capitol Records will release two John Lennon albums: the new John Lennon Acoustic and a remixed and remastered version of Lennon's classic Rock 'n' Roll with bonus tracks. Both releases were supervised by Yoko Ono.

Acoustic brings together some of Lennon’s most popular acoustic tracks on one album for the very first time. Seven of the album's seventeen tracks are available for official release for the first time.

Acoustic Track List

1. Love
2. Working Class Hero
3. Well Well Well
4. Look at Me
5. God
6. My Mummy's Dead
7. Cold Turkey
8. I'm a Man
9. Luck of the Irish (Live)
10. John Sinclair (Live)
11. Woman is the Nigger of the World
12. What You Got
13. Watching the Wheels
14. Dear Yoko
15. Real Love
16. Imagine (Live)
17. It's Real

Rock 'n' Roll is the fourth of Lennon's solo albums to be remixed and remastered. Originally released in 1975, the album appears now with four bonus tracks: "To Know Her is to Love Her" and "Angel Baby" (both remastered), "Since My Baby Left Me," a never-before issued version of the track included on Menlove Avenue, and a reprise of "Just Because" with an alternate ending and a very special Christmas message to Paul, George, Ringo, Yoko and the British people.

In addition to the bonus tracks, a new selection of black and white Lennon photographs will be included in the booklet.

Much of Lennon’s post-Beatles work was drenched in autobiographical reflection. This DVD companion to a greatest-hits collection is no exception. It’s largely comprised of home movies, personal photos and video valentines featuring Lennon and spouse Yoko Ono—a sort of narration-less documentary where song lyrics do the talking and images provide additional insight. Legend’s a bittersweet look at the latter half of Lennon’s career—the obvious heaviness of his relationship with Ono, his love for his son, and a bright future cut short. Such sentimental sorrow is countered by the raucous live footage of “Cold Turkey,” the studio rock out of “Instant Karma!” and the rockabilly rave-up of “Slippin’ & Slidin’.” And while Lennon’s activist angst is well on display in clips of “Power to the People,” “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” and “Give Peace a Chance,” his playful side is there, too, with footage of unbridled goofiness and lovey-dovey cuddling with Ono. His simplistically amusing art bounds through “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and a bonus animation section. Legend seems to best sum up the man as we’ve come to know him. The music and its accompanying visuals show an altogether brilliant, bitter, whimsical, thought-provoking 20th-century treasure. It’s a fitting tribute even the often skeptical Lennon might approve of.