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There’s this little spot in Pune I used to hit up all the time back in college, called The Hidden Place. This quirky painting called the ‘Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame’ was the restaurant’s centerpiece. It had none other than John Lennon himself, casually strumming his guitar in front of a hookah, like he’s mid-chat with Paul McCartney, probably debating and disagreeing in that iconic Lennon way. If you’re just a casual rock fan — maybe still figuring out the mysteries of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or realizing there’s more to life than just Hotel California’s legendary guitar solo — this painting probably seems cool, no big deal. But the fan who knows the story behind John’s music, his inspirations and his behaviour every time he kept the guitar and plectrum down is likely to feel uncomfortable, knowing that the stories don’t really portray the singer as a nice guy. And that’s a vibe you can’t really shake.
The Beatles are ubiquitous, almost omnipresent when it comes to music, 55 years after they broke up. Abbey Road is a masterpiece, Revolver is the album version of ‘Layla’ by Derek and the Dominoes in the sense of utter perfection, and the ‘White Album’, or ‘The Beatles’, is beautiful like Madhubala is breathtaking in Mughal-E-Azam (both are pieces of art). But the dream had to end sometime — after 12 studio albums, hundreds of smoked joints, millions of records sold, and many hearts broken, the band called it a day. It was the breakup of the century, and no one could believe why a group so prolific and successful would ever decide to stop making music.
There were several reasons for the breakup. The perfection of their art brought in fans who didn’t just revere them but worshipped them. Their music became a movement, and very soon the four musicians found themselves running behind the crowd they were once leading. They couldn’t keep up, and their manager Brian Epstein’s death added further weight to their already strained bonds. Everyone dealt with things their own way — while Harrison kept writing extremely rooted lyrics without receiving the chance to showcase any of them, Lennon took succour in heroin; substance abuse took over his life and his career.
In the book ‘The Lives of John Lennon’, written by Albert Goldman, the author suggests that Lennon never truly came out of his tumultuous relationship with drugs. He was a heavy heroin user, which both his wives, Cynthia Powell and Yoko Ono, have talked about. The book highlights how his addiction could be credited to his natural laziness and dependence upon strong women. His eccentric mind and drugged-out cerebral cortex made for a dangerous combination, and while this state might have helped John pen some extremely powerful lines, it also pushed him to be a violent and irrational man.
John’s pen became caustic towards his ex-bandmates. His song ‘How Do You Sleep?’ was an attack on Paul McCartney, because John thought that Paul had taken shots at him on his album ‘Ram’. It started with a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, where Lennon carelessly talked about the dissolution of The Beatles and one of his songs, ‘I don’t believe in the Beatles’. He talked about how he had risen above several myths in his life, and that is what the Beatles were: “A myth.” He said in the interview, “I don’t believe in it. The dream is over. I’m not just talking about the Beatles; I’m talking about the generation thing. It’s over, and we have to – I have to personally – get down to so-called reality.”
John’s marriage to Cynthia Powell and Yoko Ono
He carried the same attitude to his partners. John always claimed that his relationship with his first wife, Cynthia, was over before he got involved with Yoko. In an open letter written to Cynthia dated November 15, 1976, John wrote, “As you and I well know, our marriage was long over before the advent of LSD or Yoko Ono… and that’s reality!” Imagine coming back to your home, which you share with your husband, to find him and his muse in matching bathrobes, staring into each other’s souls (The ‘Imagine’ is not incidental). Even though they got divorced later that year, Cynthia admitted in her 2005 memoir, ‘John’, that, “having tried to live an ordinary life for so many years since John and I parted, I have come to realise that I will always be known as John’s first wife.”
The promiscuity didn’t start with Yoko; John had been acting like a drunk sailor who has seen shore and a tavern for the first time in years, long before they even got married. Cynthia would often travel with the band during the initial days, and at the age of 22, she got pregnant, leading John to propose and marry her. However, the birth of their child, Julian, didn’t necessarily fix things between them, mostly because Cynthia had no idea there was something to fix except for John’s intrinsic habits surrounding jealousy and violence, and these were habits she had learnt to live with. Their manager Brian told Cyntia that she needed to stay back with Julian, as they had to maintain the illusion that he was still available. In the same memoir Cynthia wrote, “There was John, rapidly becoming famous and wealthy. And there was I, in a grim little five-pounds-a-week bedsit, with his son.”
The storm kept on brewing, and as a last-ditch effort, Cynthia hoped that the band’s trip to India would help calm things down. Everyone knows how that turned out, and Cynthia walked out of John’s life soon after.
From there began John’s torrid relationship with Yoko, lined with activism and an alleged malignity that might not have shot The Beatles, but it loaded the gun and pointed it towards the band. The first ironic thing about this union is John and Yoko’s ‘Bed-In For Peace’ movement. During the peak of the Vietnam War in 1969, the two artists decided to host two separate protests at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The two cashed in on the publicity that their marriage received and booked a suite for a week straight so that the media and fans could visit them, and they could relay the message of love and peace. The reason why this made no sense coming from Lennon is because he was himself a violent man. According to a damning letter written by John’s housekeeper in 1968, John would hit his son Julian for small mistakes and minor transgressions.
Many would argue that while John left his first wife to be with another woman, but it was all a part of a plan to find the perfect partner. Yoko was that person, until she wasn’t, and after getting married, holding protests together, and fighting against her deportation, John began an affair with his assistant May Pang.
The origins of this affair are even wilder. According to the documentary The Lost Weekend: The Love Story (named after the infamous period in his life), which highlights Pang’s time with John, it was Ono who initially asked her to go out with her boss. She said, “Yoko walked into my office and said, ‘John and I are not getting along. I want you to go out with him. I responded, ‘Well, are you kidding? I can’t do that; he’s my employer, he’s my boss. He’s your husband.” But in that same documentary, Pang admits that Ono never thought the affair would get so serious or that it would take so little work to get John to be unfaithful.
Ultimately, Yoko “asked” for John back, and the two came together once again and even topped their reunion off with a vow-renewal ceremony. They remained married until he was assassinated in front of their New York house in 1980.
John himself had a tough childhood, and dealing with his mother’s death and father’s abandonment made him vulnerable to all that took control of his mind and body. But none of it explains his out-of-pocket relationship with the people around him. He was rude, indecent and downright disrespectful to his own bandmates and wrote songs to insult Harrison and Paul. He was unfair to the people who kept him afloat, while his habits dragged him down into an abyss created by his own hatred. One needs to exercise caution while using the term ‘legend’ for him, because the musical ‘genius’ was also a broken, violent, envious, and questionable human being, who needs to be remembered with an asterisk floating over his name.
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