October 9, 2020

John Lennon turns 80.

31 comments:

oldirishpig said...

Nothing for Julian?

minnesota farm guy said...

Maudlin.

mccullough said...

Obladi oblada life goes on

Iman said...

Good take! I still tear up a bit on occasion when I hear Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy”...

Bay Area Guy said...

You ever read up on Mark David Chapman? (Lennon's murderer, but for some reason, not hated, and mostly forgotten).

He had a strange journey.

From another UK article:

How strange, for example, that Chapman should visit Beirut at a time when the Lebanese capital was a hive of CIA activity — and was said to be home to one of the agency’s top-secret assassination training camps. Another camp
was supposedly in Hawaii, where Chapman lived for a number of years.

And who funded the penniless young man’s round-the-world trip in 1975, which took in Japan, the UK, India, Nepal, Korea, Vietnam and China?


Yeah, I know it's a conspiracy theory, but I like conspiracy theories!

MadisonMan said...

Joe Biden is almost 80 as well.

JAORE said...

I find it odd to read someone dead "turns" a certain age. How about, had he lived, Lennon would be 80 today?

He didn't turn. Didn't even spin in his grave.

donald said...

His Rock N Roll album of covers was the best thing he ever did. It really and truly is magnificent.

FWBuff said...

March 2, 2030 will truly be an 80th birthday worth remembering. RIP Karen Carpenter.

DanTheMan said...

Jaore, Rameses II will turn 3,233 this year. :)

Bay Area Guy said...

For the record, I love Instant Karma , but hate Imagine .

Anonymous said...

I find it gross for people to publicly celebrate to strangers the birthday of a dead person; It reeks of attention seeking.

Ralph L said...

John looks mightily effeminate in Paul's pic.

Ralph L said...

Beethoven rolls on to 250 this December 16. Can the Beatles outlive living memory of them?

Wince said...

You really could put on a good show with Paul, Ringo, Sean and Dhani.

Temujin said...

Boy- I gotta tell you, after the last couple of decades, I miss the days of the Beatles.

JAORE said...

Jaore, Rameses II will turn 3,233 this year. :)

Too many candles to contemplate.

tcrosse said...

The Telegraph has quite a long piece John Lennon at 80! Imagining the Beatle Today. It recaps Lennon's life and after-life decade by decade. It ends:

"He was full of contradictions. The humanitarian who, in the Imagine documentary, while recording a song aimed at long-term best friend Paul McCartney, is seen asking “How do you sleep, you c***?” The lifelong teenager desperate for attention who was visibly scornful of his screaming fans. The self-described “nice clean-cut suburban boy”, who bought a mansion but wrote Working Class Hero and imagined having nothing. Capable of more than almost anyone else who has ever picked up a guitar, but as messed up as the rest of us. A flawed genius, a human being.

Perhaps George Harrison had it right in 1974: “John Lennon is a saint and he’s heavy-duty, and he’s great and I love him.

“But at the same time, he’s such a bastard – but that’s the great thing about him, you see?”"

PB said...

Robert Carlyle portrayed an aged Lennon in the movie Yesterday. Great image.

Marcus Bressler said...

Would Lennon, if he had lived, joined Wife Beaters Anonymous?

J. Farmer said...

Was never a big John Lennon fan. George Harrison is my favorite Beatle. I think Lennon gets a lot of unfair attack that has more to do with his fans' attitude towards him than himself.

Near the end of 1980, my father went to Maine to ring a ferry from New York Harbor to Florida. My uncle tagged along to assist, and about a week later my mother flew to New York to meet them and ride the rest of the way back. They were finishing up dinner at a restaurant near Columbus Circle, and a small argument ensued. My mother wanted to see The Dakota building thanks to it being featured in Rosemary's Baby. My father protested because it was already evening and in the opposite direction down Central Park West they needed to go. To break the impasse, my uncle said he wanted to see it, too.

While they were walking, my uncle joked to my mother, "Maybe you can tell Lennon what you think of his record." Double Fantasy had come out a few weeks earlier, and my mother hated it. After viewing the building from Central Park West and down 72nd Street, they took a cab to the marina where the boat was docked. When they finally got underway, the three of them were listening to the Patriots/Dolphins game on the radio. As they were passing Liberty Island in the Upper New York Bay, Howard Cosell famously made the announcement that Lennon had shot and killed outside his apartment.

Iman said...

Wince @2:45pm...

Yes, indeed!

Iman said...

Still remember watching MNF with a good friend and Gifford (I think) breaking in to make the announcement of the shooting...

rcocean said...

Isn't this rather pathetic? Lennon died 40 years ago, and wrote all his good songs 50+ years ago. Why has culture been frozen and so backward looking? Nobody in 1990 was mooning about the death of Irving Berlin. There's something definitely wrong with Music and all the arts, when we become obsessed with singers and song writers who died 40 years ago. Did the boomers just choke off all the talent in the last 40 years?

I know for a fact that no one in 1990 was going on about Big Band Music or 1940's pop songs and Jazz. I didn't even know Doris Day had been a great singer till I took a classic film course in college. But today, everyone's still jabbering about Hitler and Munich (82 years ago!), Elvis, the Beatles, and Rolling Stones. Its all very weird.

rcocean said...

Personally, I always enjoyed McCarthy's songs more. Lennon had that weird Left-wing, pretentious intellectual thing going. That he ended as a druggie house-husband married to oddball Japanese woman doesn't surprise me.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

be neat to find this and watch

J. Farmer said...

@rcocean:

Its all very weird.

It doesn't seem that weird to me. Irvin Berlin was a composer, not a performer. The Beatles are popular because their music is popular. The aesthetic qualities of music don't have an expiration date. People are still interested in music that was composed centuries ago.

Rock was a pretty big stylistic change from the big band ere, and we're still in the rock era (to a degree). So while my parents (boomers) had big differences in taste of music with their parents, they did not have such big differences in taste of music with their children. There was some, of course, but nowhere near to the same degree.

One of the main reasons the swing era died out was because the band leaders who produced it became increasingly disinterested in providing the music for dance halls. They wanted their audience sitting in a chair looking and listening to them, not dancing. Rock and roll filled this vacuum.

There seems to be a cycle in musical genres that always move them from simpler to more complex and then back to simpler. The simplicity attracts more practitioners, and as the practitioners gain proficiency, they want to experiment.

Joe Smith said...

He's not 80. He won't be 80.

He's fucking dead...

stlcdr said...

Huh. Had to go to the all knowing Wikipedia to verify that John Lennon is, in fact, still dead and didn’t turn 80.

Christopher said...

Rock was a pretty big stylistic change from the big band era and we're still in the rock era (to a degree).

I'm in my 60's and can walk into many open mics where 20-somethings are singing Beatles songs.

In the 1960s when those songs were written, hearing Irving Berlin or Glen Miller at a coffeehouse was... less common.

RobinGoodfellow said...

“ Blogger Iman said...
Good take! I still tear up a bit on occasion when I hear Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’...”

I tear up when I hear anything by Yoko Ono, but I suspect it is for different reasons.