In the documentary Imagine (1988) there is a scene filmed in 1971 in the mansion that John Lennon had at Ascot. There, the musician goes out to speak with a homeless man who had been living hidden in the immensity of the farm's garden. The intruder, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had traveled from San Francisco to England to let his idol know that he felt his songs were written for him. Before the dialogue between them can be heard, Yoko Ono's voiceover clarifies that the ex-beatle used to feel sorry for these delusional fans "because he felt responsible for these people as they were the result of his songs." Nine years later, someone else would erase it from the face of the Earth shortly before midnight on December 8, 1980. In the face of justice, Mark David Chapman would clarify that it was just that: the result of Lennon's songs.
Born into a dysfunctional home and raised by his uncles, John Lennon found in music the element to seal several of the holes he felt he had in his personal life. Cynthia, his first wife, used to say that his appearance during adolescence - a teddy boy in a jopo, leather jacket and thick-rimmed glasses - was nothing more than the facade for the outside of a sad and fragile young man on the inside. That defense mechanism was the one that ended up defining his profile within the dynamics of The Beatles: he was neither the right one, nor the funny one, nor the quiet one. Lennon was the ironic, the scathing. According to the musician himself, when the Fab Four were still on their way to fame, he was in charge of haranguing them on what was a trip to the top of the "toppermost of the poppermost" (the highest of the most pop / popular) . And they succeeded.
But one day Lennon got tired of being popular. The decisions that surrounded the dynamics of The Beatles in its last three years of existence ended up forging its new person, away from the flashes and the jet set, and closer to the artistic avant-garde and political militancy, especially pacifist. His happenings with Yoko Ono in the "bed ins" for peace and the lyrics of "Imagine" earned him (and still are, for many unsuspecting people), the erroneous nickname of hippie, but Lennon had little to do with a culture to the one he considered naive. His political north seemed to be in bohemian New York, and he emigrated to that city in the early 70s.
Installed in his new land, John Lennon was questioned by his detractors, who did not conceive the idea that the musician sympathized with the intellectuals of Greenwich Village but lived in a lavish old apartment in the Dakota building, opposite Central Park. Her response was Some Time in New York City , a double album with lyrics about women's rights, the race issue in America, and Britain's dominant role towards Northern Ireland. Unintentionally, the album concluded with four songs recorded (and improvised) live with Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention. The disc was beaten by the press, to the point that in the NME Lennon was branded a "pathetic old revolutionary," but he still had his live performance at a double function at Madison Square Garden in 1972, the last shows of his entire career.
"I have no romanticism with any part of my past," Lennon said in an interview with Playboy in September 1980. Although it is allusive to The Beatles in particular, the phrase well serves to graph the life that the author of "Imagine" led in his last seven years. He recorded albums that he never performed live, took a "lost weekend" (which lasted a year and a half) from his relationship with Yoko Ono, and had drinks with his lover, May Pang, and Harry Nilsson. After having to record a rock and roll cover album due to a contractual lawsuit, Lennon took advantage of the birth of Sean, his second son, to retire from music for five years.
In the mid-1980s, Lennon and a group of friends boarded a boat to travel from Rhode Island to the island of Bermuda, where they would spend a few days on vacation. A mid-voyage storm caused almost everyone on the boat to suffer from dizziness and fatigue, forcing the musician to take the helm for several hours to travel the more than 700 miles of the journey. Some time later, he would say that this experience made him feel so sure of himself that he returned to compose fluently after five years. His creative flow was such that he recorded an album between August and October, and released it the following month. On the afternoon of December 8, John Lennon left his home, signed a copy of Double Fantasy for him to a follower who was waiting for him at the door and he went to a session at Record Plant studios. The former beatle returned home shortly before 11 at night, his fan was still there, but he no longer had a record in his hand.
