While the most popular image of John Lennon remains the
peace-sign waving peacenik who sang “Imagine all the people living life in
peace,” it has recently become more fashionable to call him out as a bully,
misogynist, and rich hypocrite who sang “Imagine no possessions” and refused to
take a firm stance on positive revolution. What a lot of us commentators sometimes forget (and I’m as
guilty of this as anyone else) is that John Lennon wasn’t an image, he was a
man, and a very complex one at that. Yes, at times he was a bully, a misogynist
who sang “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man,” and
a soft-on-revolution splash of cold water who tried to assure us “it’s gonna be
alright” (it wasn’t), but as writer James A. Mitchell reminds us, John Lennon
wasn’t always all those things. In the early seventies he worked hard on making
amends for the rough man he’d been. After walking the middle of the road
through much of The Beatles’ career, he decided to use his booming voice for
more ideologically positive purposes, championing feminist principals as early
as 1970’s “Well, Well, Well”; taking up with such high-profile activists as
Jerry Rubin, Tariq Ali, and Bobby Seale; and moving from his plush Tittenhurst
Park estate to a grubby apartment in Greenwich Village.
These are the years Lennon worked with revolutionary rockers
Elephant’s Memory and appeared on “The Mike Douglas Show” with special guests Rubin
(whose no-punches-pulled rhetoric irked Douglas) and Black Panther Seale (whose
non-violent community spirit surprised and delighted him) and “The Dick Cavett
Show” where he discussed how the White House was trying to run him out of the
country and why it was so important that he be allowed to stay. These are the
years Lennon railed against the unfair imprisonment of John Sinclair (“they
gave him ten [years] for two [joints])” and recorded the highly controversial Sometime in New York City on which he
laid out his various causes and gave Yoko Ono equal time in the musical
spotlight.
Were Lennon’s politics and music sometimes muddled during
this period? That’s up to the reader, because James A. Mitchell is not really
interested in analyzing the former Beatle or swaying us one way or the other in
The Walrus & The Elephants: John
Lennon’s Years of Revolution. He merely lays out this period biographically
with ample support from a variety of interviewees who knew and worked with
Lennon during it. Going this route allows us to draw our own conclusions. As
far as I’m concerned, I came away from this inspiring book truly happy to be a John
Lennon fan. While it’s easy to run the guy down for his bad attitude in the
sixties and the materialism that seemed at odds with his no-possessions message
of the seventies, you have to give the man credit for trying really hard to
overcome such things, making impressive progress, and using his fame and
influence to speak out about important issues in a way some called naïve and
simplistic but actually made them accessible to everyone. And while some have criticized
the guy for his refusal to give in to the more militant aspects of revolution,
I say, “fuck that.” There should be more champions of non-violent change. For
those who feel that Lennon turned his back on causes as quickly as he picked them
up, Mitchell explains his familial reasons for doing so. For anyone whose faith in that image of peace and love is
getting shaky, Mitchell’s book will restore it, reintroducing you to the man
behind the slogans and peace signs. I loved The
Walrus & The Elephants for that reason.
