January 31st, 2008John Lennon's Winning Beat
Jan. 29, 2008 (Investor’s Business Daily delivered by Newstex) —
John Lennon did more than compose when he wrote songs such as “Help” with the Beatles and “Mother” as a solo artist.
In “Help,” Lennon revealed his insecurities about unwanted weight gain and depression amid the crush of the Beatles’ popularity; “Mother” was about his fractured family life, says Larry Kane, author of “Lennon Revealed,” a biography. “These were not just rock songs,” he told IBD. “John told me that everything he wrote was basically letting his life bleed out into the public.”
Lennon’s work with the Beatles on albums such as “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and as a solo artist on the record “Imagine” introduced a level of counterculture that had been lacking in pop music, says Steven Rosenblatt, an attorney and Beatle memorabilia collector.
“The Beatles changed the way people thought, they were rebellious, they were inquiring and innovative and Lennon was at the cutting edge,” he told IBD.
Lennon wrote “Sexy Sadie” to criticize Maharishi Mahesh Yogi after visiting the guru in India.
Other songs, including “Give Peace a Chance,” promoted social consciousness.
Lennon’s willingness to sing his mind made him an enduring historical figure, says Tom Erlewine, senior pop music editor for All Media Guide, an entertainment information database acquired in December by Macrovision (NASDAQ:MVSN).
“People see him as being very honest in his music,” he told IBD. “He searched for answers through his music and art, and that makes him very relatable.”
Lennon And McCartney
What made the Beatles as huge as they were was Lennon’s collaboration with Paul McCartney, according to Peter Brown, who co-wrote Lennon biography “The Love You Make” with Steven Gaines.
“Paul’s mellow, pretty melodies in turn complemented John’s strident rock riffs,” wrote Brown, former director of Apple Corp., the Beatles’ financial parent company. “Their voices complemented each other perfectly, with Paul’s sweet, round tones softening the edges of John’s strained nasality.”
The combination worked.
The Beatles still rank as the No. 1 selling recording group in the U.S. Their album sales topped 170 million in America through 2007, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Lennon’s solo LP sales reached 13.5 million.
Lennon was born Oct. 9, 1940, in Liverpool, England. His mother, Julia, was a housewife, comedian and singer. Lennon barely knew his father, Freddie, a seaman.
When he was 18, Lennon met Paul McCartney, his future Beatle collaborator, at a gig. Also in 1958, Lennon watched helplessly as his mother died in a traffic accident.
By 1960, John had formed the Silver Beetles. The name changed soon after.
The group played everywhere from church functions to strip clubs in Liverpool before leaving for Hamburg, Germany.
Playing 12 hours a night in German nightclubs helped the band become professional, Lennon said in Hunter Davies’ book “The Beatles.”
“It was Hamburg that had done it,” Lennon said. “That’s where we really developed. We had to try anything that came into our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best.”
In 1961, the Beatles built a large following at Liverpool’s Cavern Club.
A year later, the group, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr teaming with Lennon, got its first recording contract with Parlophone, a unit of EMI.
Many bands and singers at the time relied on professional songwriters. But Lennon and McCartney knew they had to follow a new crop of artists such as Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochrane, who were writing their own songs, says Terry Burrows in his book “John Lennon.”
“This inspired a highly competitive period that saw John and Paul each writing new songs as if their lives depended on it,” he wrote.
The Lennon-McCartney duo released their first single, “Love Me Do,” in October 1962. The next single, “Please Please Me,” topped sales charts in the United Kingdom in early 1963. The group’s first album of the same title also topped the charts in England and sold over 500,000 copies by year’s end.
By the end of 1963, the group’s fourth single, “She Loves You,” became its biggest up to that point, with sales of 1 million in England.
Lennon’s suggestion to replace the typical “me and you” subject with something about a third person broadened the song’s appeal, wrote Burrows. “As Paul recalled: ‘We hit on the idea of doing a reported conversation — She told me what to say, she said she loves you — giving it a dimension that was different from what we had done before.’”
The Beatles also became a top draw in America. Their show at Shea Stadium on Aug. 15, 1965, packed in 55,000 hysterical fans and grossed $304,000, a record at the time.
Early in their career, Lennon and the Beatles learned the value of positive press.
“Trying to get publicity was just a game,” Lennon told Davies. “We used to traipse around the offices of the local papers and the musical papers asking them to write about us because that’s what you had to do.”
Later, reporters often pursued Lennon because of his sharp wit.
In 1966, the Beatles stopped playing live. They recorded seven more albums by the time the group disbanded in 1970.
In the recording studio, Lennon became adept at incorporating news and personal bits into his songs.
The inspiration for “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” came from a drawing by Lennon’s son, Julian. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” came from a circus poster Lennon saw, wrote Geoff Emerick, an engineer who worked on several Beatle albums, in “Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles,” a book co-authored by Howard Massey.
“He’d often work little phrases or snatches of conversation about something he had been recently reading or talking about into the music he was recording,” he wrote.
Lennon competed for record space with McCartney. When Paul wrote “Penny Lane,” John countered with “Strawberry Fields.”
The pair collaborated on other songs such as “With a Little Help From My Friends” in the studio, with Lennon on guitar and McCartney on piano.
When Lennon got stuck on finding a middle section for “A Day in the Life,” McCartney penned “Woke up, got out of bed …”
Fine Lines
As a songwriter, Lennon played the role of a careful editor. He bristled when his first wife, Cynthia, suggested using the word “just” in the song, “I Feel Fine,” wrote Davies.
“You never use the word just,” Lennon said. “It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.”
In the 1970s, Lennon recorded several hit songs, including “Imagine” and “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
Following a five-year break from music to help raise his son, Sean, Lennon released the “Double Fantasy” album with his second wife, Yoko Ono in November 1980.
A month later, on Dec. 8, Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment building in New York City by a deranged fan. He was 40 years old.
Newstex ID: IBD-0001-22588719
Originally published in the January 29, 2008 version of Investor’s Business Daily.
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