Imagine

Ultimately, "Imagine" is a call for mutual responsibility — "A brotherhood of man" — and a condemnation of the hells we continually bring on ourselves. Don Henley of the Eagles admits that "hearing 'Imagine' now is a bittersweet experience. On one hand, it's a calming influence. On the other, it's connected to the violence. There will always be conflict in the world until we stop buying into these myths of God and property. But we're always capable of doing better." Guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, a big fan of Lennon's radical premise in "Imagine," takes a more extreme view: "If people really believed the sentiments John Lennon expressed in that song, we would have had revolution in this country a long time ago."

Lennon himself described "Imagine" as "virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement. . . . But because it is sugar-coated, it is accepted." Released as a single in the U.S. in the fall of '71, "Imagine" went to Number Three on Billboard's Top 100 chart. "Now I understand what you have to do," Lennon noted. "Put your political message across with a little honey."

"He played it to a few people after he wrote it," Ono recalls, "and they all said, 'Oh, that's good.' But you got the feeling that they really liked it because it sounded so sweet — that if they tuned into the lyrics more, they might not have thought it was so pretty.

"But John was not being preachy — he was asking people to imagine these things, rather than 'do it,' " she insists, sitting in her living room at the Dakota in New York on a recent autumn morning. From her windows, through the turning foliage of Central Park, one can see Strawberry Fields, the Lennon memorial at Seventy-second Street, a circle of benches around a black-and-white mosaic inscribed with the single word that best captured Lennon's energy and idealism: IMAGINE. Since its unveiling in 1984, the space has been a favorite hallowed meeting place in times of trouble for New Yorkers and visitors alike. But one of the most striking sights on the morning of September 11th was the parade of refugees from downtown soberly marching up Central Park West, pausing at Strawberry Fields for tears and self-examination in Lennon's spiritual company. Today, down in Times Square, two lines from "Imagine" literally hang in the air as an invitation to renewal, on a huge billboard paid for by Ono: IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE/LIVING LIFE IN PEACE.

"Imagining, visualizing — this is a powerful way of creating the future," Ono continues. "It's very gentle but also extremely basic. There is an incredible power to that. And instead of saying, 'We'll definitely get there,' he put an element of hope in the song. If we knew we were definitely getting there, he wouldn't have had to write the song."

Lennon delivered it with eerily prescient timing. Imagine, with the title song placed at the start of Side One, was issued in America by Apple Records on September 9th, 1971 — thirty years, almost to the day, before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

"The world and everything in it, including music and poetry, has been divided into 'B.S.' and 'A.S.' " — before and after September 11th, according to the venerable San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "We are living in a world of much harsher reality than Lennon ever experienced. Yet is not today precisely the time when we need, more than ever, to hear John's idealistic vision, sung out again loud and clear?"

"It's extraordinary that Lennon was able, out of a clear blue sky, to construct this elegant appeal for a saner universe," says songwriter Jimmy Webb. "I could see something like this being inspired by a horrific event like the World Trade Center attack. But he was just sitting around one day and came up with this idea for a song calling for a better world. It's clairvoyant.

"God doesn't want us to do this stuff to each other," he adds soberly. "The most important thing Lennon said in that song was this: Anything that divides us, that causes us to be violent toward one another, doesn't come from God."

Lennon knew how good "imagine" was. In one of his last interviews, when asked if he thought his solo work would have the lasting imprint of a Beatles song like "Strawberry Fields Forever," he shot back with absolute confidence: " 'Imagine,' 'Love' and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up to any song that was written when I was a Beatle."

In fact, the origins of "Imagine" go back to the very dawn of Beatlemania, to Ono's life before Lennon and her conceptual art of the early 1960s. In her book Grapefruit, first published in Tokyo in 1964, Ono wrote a series of enigmatic instructions for paintings and musical compositions, works that literally began with acts of imagination: "Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky" ("Drinking Piece for Orchestra"); "Imagine your body spreading rapidly all over the world like thin tissue" ("Rubber Piece").

When Lennon and Ono became a couple in 1968 — two years after they first met at a London exhibition of her work — they immediately began collaborating on art projects and peace efforts that challenged the limit of dreams, like the set of billboards that appeared in a dozen cities during Christmas 1969 with the message WAR IS OVER and, in smaller type underneath, IF YOU WANT IT. "We were two artists living together," Ono explains. "We influenced each other. He wrote the song, but 'Imagine' was a manifesto for both of us."