Shine On, John, Like the Moon and the Stars and the Sun

"We'll get it right next time," you said.

Let's hope so. You left us with a lot to consider, not the least of which are the politics of gun control, the unworkable infighting of democratic republics, the abysmal failures of prison/mental institutionalization, the perpetual foreign entanglements and wars, and learning to love each other long enough to survive, in spite of it all. All of that with your sublime music, and all before you shuffled so soon off this mortal coil. 

Instant Dharma

Dharma (där'-ma, dûr'-) n.
1. (In Indian religion) the eternal and inherent nature of reality, regarded in Hinduism as a cosmic law underlying right behavior and social order. (Oxford Dictionary)

On December 8, 1980, as I walked into the Jilly's East tavern located half a block down the hill from where I lived on 24th Avenue E. in Seattle, the television above the bar showed Howard Cosell breaking into the Monday Night Football broadcast to announce that John Lennon had been killed outside the Dakota Hotel, in his adopted home of New York City. 

It turned out this was the second time the incorrigible Cosell had interrupted ABC's broadcast with the terrible news (minutes earlier, his was the first national media report). Which explained why none of the normally raucous football fans gathered around the TV above the bar were talking about the Miami Dolphins-New England Patriots game in progress.

Even patrons who detested Howard Cosell (part of a large viewership segment who disliked his unorthodoxy and haughty frankness) were listening raptly. Cosell was a Beatles fan speaking to Beatles fans. He was speaking to all of them. Punching through journalism's Isinglass ceiling to interject the news to the television audience in his typically hectoring manner, saying "this is just a football game," he was speaking to all of us.



On that particularly dreary December night in 1980, he didn't seem the least bit concerned with the game on the field. He and his associate in the broadcast booth, NFL icon Frank Gifford (who had here introduced Lennon to yet another fan and future U.S. President), had lost a friend. Cosell was a John Lennon fan speaking to John Lennon fans. 

The same abrasive, cigar-chewing New Yorker (and NYU law school graduate) had once interviewed Muhammad Ali and championed his conscientious objection to military service. Never shy about expressing himself, he was openly aggrieved now and in a state of shock. Once again he was taking umbrage, taking it personally. Among other things, he had been an early advocate for Lennon's ultimately successful struggle to acquire a green card, despite enormous politically-motivated legal opposition. 




[Note to reader--references in this article to the linked interviews and music recordings will make more sense if you can take the time to listen to them.]  

Sailing Into the Mystic

A revelatory discovery can occur when you're alone in a room with a book, or with a recording of someone singing as beautifully as John Lennon could. The Author of the Universe can be revealed to be not a single lonely, islolated, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-pervading deity, but instead a singing, guitar-picking, piano-chording working-class songwriter from Liverpool, England... as well as his friends Paul, George and Ringo. And thee.

Or in the case of Mark David Chapman, as he bounded rabidly through the gates of Hell, authorship can be dictated by a hallucinated apparition in the guise of an unsuspecting American author, a typewriter-pounding novelist who, if he'd ever toyed with coming out of seclusion to do an interview with the New Yorker before 1980, immediately abandoned all hope as he re-entered his own private Idaho/New Hampshire.

Because it's personal. It remains personal, even when you fancy yourself to be Shiva the Destroyer and decide to shatter all the clockworks during the blackest hour after midnight in the garden of good and evil. 

Chapman was denied parole for the tenth time last August. He can recant all he wants, continue to consume all the nerve-rending psychiatric drugs he's fed by his uniformed and lab-coated keepers, but when he's eligible again in August of 2020, it will just result in parole denial #11. 

It's about deeply personal choices and living with the consequences. 

Looking Through A Glass Onion

My own timeline is demarcated by hearing particular Beatles recordings for the first time. One occasion was a day that a girl I didn't know brought a copy of Meet the Beatles to my Jim Hill Junior High School science class, invited by a gracious teacher whose name I also don't remember, to play "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on a portable hi-fi for the class to hear. Another was when my pal Russ Hansen lowered the stereo needle and I heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Or the night I stepped into the lounge area inside Brantley Hall, the University of Montana dormitory where my future bride Kathy lived, and heard John Lennon singing "Dear Prudence" to Mia Farrow's sister. 

This past November 22nd marked the 50th anniversary of that Montana milestone. For the last few weeks my music-listening rotation has almost exclusively consisted of discs #1 and #2 (and a bit of the Esher demos on disc #3) of the reissued The Beatles, a.k.a. the White Album, on which Prudence was famously invited to "come out to play." The nostalgia pangs have been fierce, thanks in great measure to personal vicissitudes and the re-issue's producer, Giles Martin, who was recently named the Universal Music Group (UMG) Head of Audio & Sound, based at Abbey Road Studios. Giles was, of course, raised by another big Beatles fan, his father and the Beatles' producer from day one, George Martin.

For anyone who has heard the astonishing new 50th anniversary CD reissue, the following comments will amount to preaching to the choir. The 2009 remaster (linked below, now available on YouTube for reasons known only to mad solicitors and Englishmen... for how much longer?) is by no means relegated to the ash heap of history--with a flick of a browser click you can listen to these seminal recordings in stereo on your laptop. But if you have not heard the new 50th anniversary edition, well, you ain't heard nothin' yet. If such things matter to you, immediately send a telegram, text message, FedEx overnight letter or well-fed carrier pigeon to the North Pole and ask Santa for a copy. Or if you would like to celebrate John Lennon's October 9th birthday, get it now. 



Imagine listening what you just heard from the 2009 CD re-issue, but with such sound fidelity that you can hear the doubled harmonies of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison as three distinct, uniquely musical voices. Or Ringo's endless snap and sizzle on the snares and cymbals. Imagine hearing both baritone and alto saxophones in separate and integrated performances in the "Savoy Truffle" horn arrangement. Imagine hearing Eric Clapton wring tears from his strings on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" as John plays a bass guitar line so dense that it sounds like he's beating a rug with a lead pipe. 

Forget all the cliché reissues that have become such a joke in recent years. That's not what Giles Martin and his bosses Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono were doing with Sgt. Pepper and now the White Album. This isn't a record label desperately cashing in by issuing scraps. These are immaculately remixed and remastered works of art. 

I'm going to take a deep breath and avoid invoking comparisons to the Sistine Chapel... I hope. I've been listening to iterations of these recordings for decades now, but every time I listen to the new reissue I hear something new. Arguments and discussions about warm analog on vinyl vs. cold and lifeless digital on compact disc? Been there, argued both sides long and well. Forget it. These new Giles Martin-produced reissues are the proverbial shit. Or if you prefer more genteel language, the bomb. Or a more sacred appellation, the Holy freaking Grail. Find a good playback system, a pair of good speakers or headphones, and play it loud and proud. 

Then go back to the top of the slide, stop and turn, and go for another ride.

All You Need is Love

One more thing about the White Album (which, for the benefit of all you audiophiles, critics, graphic artists, fact-checkers and other readers of tea leaves, is correctly titled The BEATLES, per both sleeves' original and reissued embossings):

For the last fifty years we have been hearing tall journalistic tales of the acrimony that supposedly dominated the Beatles' musical and personal relationships during these waning days of their association. Sniping, whining, trash-talking, threats, and worst of all, mutual desire to virtually break up the band and record separately from each other. Like a latter-day Inspector Alan Grant from Josephine Tey's novel Daughter of Time (a title taken from Sir Francis Bacon's wise comment that "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority"), I had scrutinized photos of the Liverpool Lads during these recording sessions and could never see a bit of evidence to support any of the stories. 



Turns out, I wasn't mad. In fact, these guys loved each other. I know, I know... some will ask about Lennon's song "God" in which he says "I don't believe in Beatles," or later, his song "How Do You Sleep?" that was directed at the other half of the most successful songwriting team of the 20th Century. What about it? Anyone who has ever been through a divorce, or endured a real heartbreak with someone close, knows the answer. To paraphrase the H.W. Longfellow poem, in a relationship this close (c'mon, for over two years, these ambitious friends literally huddled and slept together for warmth, traveling back and forth to Hamburg in the back of a van with their equipment): when it was bad it was horrid. But when it was good, it was very, very good.  

And when John, Paul, George and Ringo (whose pithy analysis was "I love the White Album!") recorded these tunes, it was very, very good. They were having tons of fun. Many of the recordings were done not off in separate facilities, but live in the studio. Much to George Martin's chagrin, his protégés eschewed the refinement and complicated technical trickery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, and went back to basics. From simple and sweet to raw, loudly distorted, rip-it-up rock 'n' roll. In Giles Martin's assiduous detective work while archiving and carefully listening to the hundreds of hours of unedited tape recordings replete with ongoing studio instruction and collaborative discussions between tunes, he was able to shed the light of truth on the petty fictions and half-truths perpetuated all these years by controversy-hungry music journalists. He confirmed what millions of Beatles fans had suspected all along while listening to this music: the boys were having the time of their lives. 

John Lennon and his mates left us with an incredible musical legacy that not only has outlived him and his friend George Harrison, it's one that will outlive us all. But where does that leave us, me and thee, now that our friends are long gone? Who's to say? "What on Earth are you trying to do?" he asks as he sings in "Instant Karma." And then answers, "It's up to you, yeah you." 



Instant karma 

Again the question is, "What on Earth are you trying to do?" and the answer is still "It's up to you, yeah you."

I like that advice. For right now, I'd like to not mourn the death of my friend John Winston Ono Lennon, but instead, celebrate his life in a manner he himself would have appreciated. I think I owe him that. He gave me so much. And he left me no doubt that we are only beginning to solve some of the biggest mysteries of this life. 

Thank you, John. Your life does indeed shine on, like the moon, and the stars and the sun. And if you really did immediately get out of one car and into another... then give or take a few days, Happy Birthday, mate.