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December 11, 2000
THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO AND ME
I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard that John Lennon had been shot.
| John Lennon's death touched me in ways the others of my lifetime had not. |
I dried my hands, dishes still unwashed in the sink, and turned on the TV. Sure enough, Cosell, a tough-guy sports announcer, was ignoring the football game (I certainly can't remember who was playing) with sad updates, his voice full of the disbelief we all felt. Lennon had been shot by an autograph seeker outside of his apartment building in New York City, Cosell said. He had been taken to the hospital, and the fan who had allegedly shot him had been arrested. Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, had been at the site of the shooting but was unharmed.
It seems to me that for all the great historic moments that have seared themselves into the combined memory of my generation, the over-hyped but undeniably influential baby boomers, we have had an unusual amount of tragedy to mark our lives. Two Kennedys and Martin Luther King both assassinated. Three astronauts in Apollo I who died in a launch pad fire in 1967. Celebrities such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin from the various excesses of their celebrityhood.
But John Lennon's death touched me in ways the others of my lifetime had not.
I grew up with Lennon's music, both as a Beatle and as an uncompromising (and sometimes confoundingly wrongheaded) solo artist. I knew his voice as well as if he were a family member. I knew his sense of humor, cynicism and cutting sarcasm from years of trying to be like him. I knew his music inside and out. And, from the simplistic perspective of a fan, I thought I knew John as a person, and thought of him as a friend.
I followed the days following his assassination with a numb sort of media fascination. Mark David Chapman was a fan - just like me - who somehow became a killer who transposed all his life's failings on his hero. He was obsessed with the former Beatle and even had a Japanese girlfriend to mirror Yoko Ono.
Yoko Ono was in my thoughts a lot in those days. Even then, a decade after Paul McCartney filed he papers to dissolve the group, Ono was the woman who was commonly thought of as the one who broke up the Beatles.
She was the first famous Japanese woman I had heard of. Even my mother knew of the family Ono came from, and was somewhat impressed that Lennon was with her (or maybe she was puzzled that someone from Ono's background would consort with a Beatle). I found her fascinating, though mysterious, from the first introductions I had to her: Her photo in the poster for the "White Album," the 1969 hit song "The Ballad of John and Yoko." Her silent, spooky presence in the "Let It Be" film, where her reputation as the Beatles-buster began. What I found out about her, I learned from magazines and books.
She was an artist from a aristocratic family, who met Lennon when he stumbled upon a gallery showing of her work and liked her spirit. She was wholly uninterested in the fact that he was a Beatle, which he loved. He left his first wife for Ono, and the couple turned their private lives into a very public spectacle, performance art on a grand scale. The two even posed nude on the original cover of their "Wedding Album" recording, in which they chanted each other's name over and over.
As a conceptual artist, she's interesting. As a musician, she's an acquired taste. Although her singing on the Lennon/Ono "Double Fantasy" album (which had just come out when Lennon was killed) and one subsequent 1980s solo album is prettied up, my clearest memory of her is the one side of artsy-fartsy screeching she caterwauled on the 1970 "Live Peace in Toronto" album. But then, she never pretended to be a rock star, just an artist. And, in the '80s in the wake of Lennon's death, she became an artful businesswoman, raising cattle and buying song publishing rights. She grew into a somewhat reclusive, mysterious celebrity in her own right.
In the mid-1980s my best friend Leland and I visited the Dakota, the gothic-looking apartment building alongside Central Park West where Lennon had been shot. We morbidly looked for some stains on the sidewalk from the killing, even seven years later. Leland and I also paid tribute to Lennon a few years later by visiting Strawberry Fields, the area of Central Park dedicated by Ono to her husband's memory. John Lennon's draw is still very strong for me.
In the late 1980s, I was fortunate enough to meet Ono in person. She came to a Denver gallery for a special exhibit - not of her own work, but of Lennon's artwork. She owns the rights to images created by Lennon, and she was converting his old scribbles and cartoons into a marketing bonanza, adding color to them and putting them on everything from fine art prints to t-shirts and coffee mugs.
Like many people in the music press, I admit to being somewhat disgusted by this blatant commercialization of my hero's aesthetics. But when I met her in a brief press reception where a group of reporters got to ask her questions and also mingled with her for a few minutes, I lost my cynicism towards her. She has an incredible presence, an aura about her that exudes calm and peacefulness. Maybe I was simply starstruck by being so close to her, but I couldn't dislike her. I walked away a fan, even though I still found her mysterious. (I didn't buy a mug, though).
It's hard to believe that 20 years have passed since Lennon's death. His old group, the Beatles, are as ubiquitous today as they were then - a hit coffee table book, "Anthology," and a compilation of the group's number-one hits appropriately tiled "1," are both in the bestseller charts. A TV movie about the Beatles is getting all the hype.
And Yoko Ono, who witnessed one of the historic moments of my life, is in many ways as mysterious to me now as she was back then.