Remembering John Lennon

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This evening, 8 December, marks perhaps the singlemost tragically senseless day in the history of rock. It was on this date 26 years ago that John Lennon was gunned down by Mark David Chapman.

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It was also on this date that popular culture was robbed of one of its most precious assets. Lennon wasn't just an ex-Beatle--he inspired many of us to accept a sense of responsibility in our creative endeavors. He was, and remains, an inspiration to those of us who hold to the naive proposition that music (or film or writing or art) can, in fact, change the world.

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The Nixon-era Feds apparently believed him, too. After "Give Peace A Chance" became an anti-war anthem for Vietnam protestors, the Nixon Administration built an FBI file around his activities. When Lennon announced plans in 1972 for a world tour to encourage voter registration and protest the war, the Federal government pounced with a deportation order.

All of this is chronicled in the film The U.S. vs. John Lennon. And to make a brutally long story mercifully short, Lennon eventually won the case.

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Adversity often fuels a creative spark, and it was during this time that Lennon was at his most adventurous. He wasn't concerned about making a hit record so much as he was concerned about using his superstar status to affect social and political change. It just so happened, though, that he made some infectious, rockin' tunes in the process.

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The U.S vs. John Lennon: Music From the Motion Picture showcases some of Lennon's best work from this period. An interviewer once asked him if he considered himself a genius. Lennon's reply was, "If there's any such thing as a genius, then yeah." It was that ability to be both self-effacing and sarcastic in a single phrase that made him one of the true rock greats. More than that, he was a spokesman for a generation. He was, in so many ways, our voice. What we were thinking, he said. And he said it in a way that was often angry, always tinged with humor, and never weighted with pretension.

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A song like "Gimme Some Truth," with lyrics like "I've had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians" rings as true today as it did in 1972, regardless of one's political leanings. "Give Peace A Chance" has outlived any controversy initially surrounding it to become a universal mantra in our unsettled global state. "Working Class Hero," banned at the time because of its use of the F-word, takes on a new significance in this age of economic uncertainty.

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Even at his angriest, Lennon maintained his sense of humor. "I believe time wounds all heels," he said when asked if he was concerned about his deportation hearings. He believed the way to wage a revolution was to use humor as a weapon. He was a brilliant, if often overlooked, satirist.

The classic "Ballad of John and Yoko" offers incontrovertible proof of that. With its bemused look at the press hoopla surrounding the couple's "bed-in" for world peace, it also showed he knew how to work a room.

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But Lennon was more than an angry clown. He was capable of touching the core of the human condition with a profundity rarely seen in pop music. "Imagine" resonates with a common chord we all feel, that elusive dream of a world without conflict. (Ironically, it was the song that allegedly set Chapman on his course to kill Lennon.) "Love" illustrates Lennon's attempts to define the indefinable. To him, love was the one universal that held the cosmos together. He expands on this theme with the unlikely holiday greeting card, "Merry Xmas (War Is Over)."

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The U.S. vs. John Lennon soundtrack highlights some of Lennon's best work. It offers us a reminder that he was a man beset by inner demons, but he never let them get the best of him.

Rather, he shared them with us, and invited us to listen as he shook them from his soul. And as we listened, we came to realize we shared those demons. And realizing that, we were inspired to make our creative urges mean something more than a three chord progression. The three chords were fine. He showed us how to fill them.

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"Okay, flower power didn't work. So what? We start again," he said. And that, my friends, was the beginning of a movement. Lennon knew change was in the air. He was at the forefront of it.

He wasn't content to be a Beatle. He wanted to change the world.

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Chapman had other ideas. He couldn't stand being a nobody anymore, or so he said when asked why he killed Lennon. I really don't care why he killed John Lennon, any more than I care why Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy. Tiny brains are incapable of evolving. It's that simple. Since they can't evolve, their only recourse is to destroy.

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Listening to John Lennon tonight, I realize tiny minds rot in their own bile. The rest of us--well, we remember forever, and move on. That's how Lennon would have wanted it.