Lennon Lives Forever

In the mid-1950s, Lennon and much of English youth were in the grip of a passion for skiffle — a rhythmic mix of the British music-hall tradition and American folk music, popularized in Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" — when a harder beat emerged from America, led by artists like bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, R&B singers Ray Charles and James Brown, and fierce new stylists such as Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Lennon loved this music immediately — he sought it out nightly on Radio Luxembourg, an early form of British pirate radio. But the class-conscious Mimi saw rock & roll as entertainment for commoners, and she wouldn't let Lennon learn to play it in her house. When John purchased a guitar anyway, Julia allowed him to have it sent to her home, where she taught him some chord patterns and rhythms, and gave him room to practice with friends.

Julia was killed in 1958 — hit by a car driven by a drunken off-duty policeman — and Lennon was left with the sense of an unfinished relationship that forever haunted his memories and longings. "I lost her twice," Lennon told David Sheff in a lengthy 1980 Playboy interview. "Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again . . . when she actually, physically died . . . The underlying chip on my shoulder that I had as a youth got really big then. Being a teenager and a rock & roller and an art student and my mother being killed just when I was re-establishing a relationship with her . . . it was very traumatic for me."

The adventure of the Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs. He formed the group to make his way through the world un-alone, in a partnership that might lessen his sense of anxiety and separation. Later, he would end the group for the same reasons.

As a teenager, at Quarry Bank High School and later at Liverpool College of Art, Lennon was seen as unusually bright, imaginative, creative — and as a constant troublemaker. He wrote clever prose and drew skillful caricatures, but he had no patience for conventions of form and showed little respect to school authority for its own sake. Though Lennon struck some as a nasty character, he was also in serious pursuit of the securities and union that could be afforded by love and family. He found a romantic form of that quest in Cynthia Powell — who married him in 1962 and bore him a son, Julian, the following year — but Lennon's true effort at building a family came in the communion he formed with the Beatles. Indeed, the Beatles proved the great love story of the 1960s — love was their main theme, first as a romantic ideal, then later as a social and political end — but love wouldn't save their family.

The group debuted in 1962 with "Love Me Do" (a song by Paul McCartney) and first hit Number One on the British charts in 1963 with "Please Please Me" (a song by Lennon that was also a clever plea about oral sex). Within a year, the Beatles were the biggest event in British culture since the Second World War. A year later, after the group's breakthrough in America on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles were simply the biggest thing in the world, short of nuclear fear. They represented a sea change -- in music, in culture, in democracy itself. They weren't always comfortable with having that effect. "People said the Beatles were the movement," Lennon later said, "but we were only part of the movement. We were influenced as much as we influenced." True, but the Beatles were a key part of that movement. They represented youthful hope, and they represented the new social power that rock & roll might achieve — a power not only to upset but to transform. The world was changing — or at least it felt that way — and the Beatles served as emblems of that change.

As wonderful as all that may have seemed to the Beatles' audience, the group's internal reality was rather different. Lennon called life with the Beatles "a trap." In part, he meant the confinements and pressures that came with their fame and the fears — such as the dread they felt traveling America in 1966, under constant death threats in the wake of Lennon's controversial statement that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." Certainly, Lennon reveled in the money and fame, the hedonistic opportunities that spilled forth every place the Beatles turned, but he hated the touring. He resented making nice for private audiences with local privileged officials, and he felt the concerts offered no chance for musical growth. He also lamented that all these obligations kept him from time with his son Julian, though, according to Cynthia in her recent book, John, her former husband's emotional investment in his son was often strained even in the best of circumstances. The truth is, Lennon had inherited more of his mother's spirit than he understood. He lived intensely in the moment — he threw himself into attachments with real ardor — but when those moments and the infatuation had passed, he liked to move on. Quickly.