Perhaps the two most important people in his life were Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. With Paul he had a partnership unequalled in the musical world. They didn't always agree, but when they did work together, magic happened. The Beatles' best songs have always been true Lennon-McCartney collaberations. He shared with Yoko, his wife, a love more deep and intimate than anything he had ever experienced. All other things were put on hold for her, even being a Beatle.
John experienced great tragedy in his life. At the height of Beatlemania, even though he was married with a son, and one of the most famous people in the world, he seemed to spend a lot of time being unhappy. No one questioned the reason he wrote the song "Help!" But for every occasion, he had a pun or a witty joke. He has been described as a "brilliant madman."
One October night, amidst the explosions and chaos of an air raid, John Winston Lennon came into the world. He was born on October 9, 1940 at the Oxford Street maternity home in Liverpool, to Julia and Freddy Lennon.
Liverpool was a target for German planes because of its shipyards and docks. While bombs exploded outside, Julia named the baby John, and gave him the second name of Winston, after Britain's prime minister.
Freddy Lennon was a sailor who left Julia when John was a little boy, never to return. Julia's four sisters all helped raise John, especially Mimi, who brought John to live with her when Julia met another man.
Mimi sent John to Dovedale Primary School when he was four. He learned to read quickly, but his writing was unusual, because he like to make puns and change words into others like them. It was also discovered that he had chronically poor eyesight.
John made many friends at Dovedale. John, as well as Pete Shotton, Nigel Whalley, and Ivan Vaughan were always together. John was always the leader and initiator of the group.
At twelve, John and Pete started Quarry Bank Grammar School, while Nigel and Ivan each went to separate schools. John and Pete did not do so well at Quarry Bank; they got into trouble constantly. John could have passed his subjects without too much trouble, but he was lazy and didn't much care.
Starting around 1956, rebellious young men in England started to dress in clothes and wear hairstyles that were unheard of at that time. These were known as "Teddy Boys." John and his friends were considered the worst Teddy Boys by the headmaster at Quarry Bank.
It was also in 1956 that John Lennon heard the song "Heartbreak Hotel," by a young man named Elvis Presley. He loved it. From then on, he devoured every rock and roll song he heard. Since the BBC did not play rock and roll, he had to listen to Radio Luxembourg after 8 p.m. He listened under the covers, late at night, so Mimi wouldn't know.
Then the skiffle craze hit Britain. It was easy to form a skiffle group. All you really needed was a guitar. So John pestered Mimi and Julia endlessly for a guitar. For some reason, it was Mimi who finally relented and bought him a guitar for seventeen pounds. Julia, who could play the banjo, taught him some banjo chords.
John started Art College in 1957. He didn't fit in very well there, because there were no other Teddy Boys.
The original group from Dovedale formed a skiffle group called the Quarry Men. In 1957, Paul McCartney joined the band, and in 1958, George Harrison, though he was younger than the others, wormed his way in.
On July 15, 1958, Julia Lennon was hit by a car and killed. John was devastated, though he refused to show it. Though he hadn't lived with Julia, he'd visited her often and sometimes stayed at her house for days on end. She had seemed more like a sister to him than a mother.
Not long after that, John met Cynthia Powell, a shy young woman who was fascinated with him. They began going steady in the autumn of 1958.
In 1959, John met Stu Sutcliffe, a fellow Art College student, and they became close friends. Stu even wanted to join the group, but he didn't know how to play an instrument. He was a talented artist, however, and when he made 65 pounds selling a painting, he used it to buy a bass guitar. He joined the group with absolutely no idea how to play it.
After two trips to Hamburg, Germany, playing in clubs, the group now known as the Beatles returned minus Stu, who had decided to settle in Germany with his fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr. He died soon after of a brain hemorrhage.
The Beatles were devastated, especially John, though he again refused to show his grief openly.
But good things were happening. The Beatles were discovered by Brain Epstein, who agreed to managed them in November 1961. Brian got them a recording session at Parlophone Records on July 6, 1962.
Meanwhile, John learned that his longtime girlfriend, Cynthia, was pregnant. They got married in August of 1962.
In April of 1963, John's first son, Julian Lennon, was born. By this time, the Beatles had become so popular with the release of their number one single, "Please Please Me," that John could not get to the hospital until a week later, and then in a disguise. The baby was named Julian in honor of Julia, John's late mother.
John was delighted with the baby, but turned out to be a less than attentive father. Due to the Beatles' phenomenal success, and their rigorous touring and recording schedule, John almost never saw Cynthia and Julian.
In April 1964, a non musical project came out: In His Own Write, John's first book. It was a collection of John's doodles, poems, and little stories, filled with puns. All the "nonsense" he had filled his notebooks with as a schoolboy had found a home. It was followed later with a second volume, A Spaniard in the Works.
In February 1966, John made a comment to a reporter after being asked his views on organized religion: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink...We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first--rock and roll or Christianity." The remark went unnoticed in Britain, but not in the United States five months later when it was reprinted, right before the Beatles' fourth American tour. America was outraged. Bonfires were held to burn Beatles' albums and accessories, but none of it seemed to halt their popularity very much.
In November of 1966, John met Yoko Ono, a Japanese-American artist, when he visited her art display. Shortly after that, Yoko asked John to finance another of her displays. John agreed, but did not want to be credited. Later, they grew closer and closer, and eventually began living together. The closer John and Yoko got, the further apart John and Cynthia grew.
In August 1967, Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose. He had been disturbed for a long time. By then, he was openly homosexual, as well as being weighed down by the monstrous stress of managing the Beatles. Though suicide was ruled out, it will never really be known if he truly wanted to die that day.
Meanwhile, John's relationship with Yoko deepened. He had a meeting with Cynthia, telling her that he intended to divorce her because she had supposedly been adulterous. This was forgotten when it was discovered that Yoko was pregnant. Cynthia in turn sued John for adultery.
Later, Paul payed her a visit. He had written a song for Julian named "Hey Jude." Jokingly, he asked her to marry him.
Yoko accompanied John to recording sessions, and seated herself next to him while the Beatles worked. In their entire ten year stint together, nothing like this had ever happened.
On October 18, John and Yoko were busted for possessing cannabis. John pleaded guilty in court, and was fined 150 pounds.
It was also around this time that John and Yoko released Unfinished Music No. 1 -- Two Virgins. And on November 22, 1968, The Beatles, better known as the White Album, was released. On the same day, Yoko lost her baby. John stayed faithfully by her side.
John and Yoko were married on March 20, 1969, at the British Consul on the Rock of Gibralter. They staged several "happenings" together, and the marriage was one of them. Another was their honeymoon, in which they spent seven days in bed at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, to promote the cause of peace.
A third happening was a bag-in, to promote "bagism." John and Yoko sat on a table inside a large bag. In bagism, the speaker does not prejudice the listener by his appearance.
On May 26, 1969, John and Yoko had another "bed-in." This one was in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, and lasted ten days.
In June, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Also, another album, Unfinished Music No 2. -- Life with the Lions was released. Then, in July, John suspended his vigorous Peace Campaign and returned to recording sessions with the Beatles, to record the Beatles' last album, Abbey Road.
In September, John started a new group, composed of him, Yoko, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White. And so the Beatles ceased to exist.
On May 20, 1970, the film Let it Be was released, representing one of the Beatles' last projects. They were never seen together again.
John launched a successful solo career, with Yoko always by his side. He took a prolonged break from record-making with the birth of his second son, Sean, on October 9, 1975. He was a father to Sean in a way that he had never been to Julian. He had just returned to recording when he was shot dead by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, outside the Dakota apartment building in New York where he lived, on December 8, 1980.
A memorial to John stands in Central Park. It is called Strawberry Fields.
Source: Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation, by Philip Norman
Here is a list of John's albums:
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