Early life
John Winston Lennon was born on the evening of 9 October 1940 during the height of Germany's Blitz on Britain. He inherited his mother's reddish-blonde hair and his father's slightly squinted eyes and prominent nose. Both of his parents had musical background and experience, though neither pursued it seriously. John Lennon's childhood years were tinged with tragedy. He lived with his parents in Liverpool until his father Fred Lennon, a merchant seaman, walked out on the family. His mother, Julia, then decided that she was unable to care for John as well as she should and so gave him to her sister, Mimi, who resided nearby at 251 Menlove Avenue. Roles were reversed as the socially class-concious, strict but loving Aunt Mimi became mother to John, while his true mother Julia acted more like a free-willed aunt who visited regularly and spoiled the lad.
Around adolescence, Lennon developed severe myopia, or shortsightedness, and was obliged to wear thick, horn-rimmed glasses in order to see clearly. But only grudgingly did he allow himself to be photographed bespectacled, even though one of his idols, Buddy Holly, wore glasses. During his early Beatle career, Lennon wore contacts or prescription sunglasses, but later finally accepted his fate and donned his trademark, round 'granny-glasses' in late 1966. Many people wear such glasses today, even if they do not actually need them to see. Although John lived apart from his mother he still kept in contact with her through regular visits, and during this time Julia was responsible for introducing her son to a lifelong interest in music by teaching him how to play the banjo. Soon after his 16th birthday, his mother was killed after she was struck by a car which was being driven by a drunken off-duty police officer. This event influenced many of his later songs, and was also one of the factors that cemented his friendship with Paul McCartney, who lost his mother to breast cancer at the age of 14. Later, in 1968, Lennon wrote a song entitled Julia in honour of his mother.
His Aunt Mimi was able to get him accepted into the Liverpool College of Art by showing them some of his drawings, and it was there that he met his future wife, Cynthia Powell. However, John steadily grew to hate the conformity of art school and, like many young men of his age, became increasingly interested in Rock 'n' Roll music and American singers like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Eventually, in the late 1950s, Lennon formed his own skiffle group called The Quarry Men, which later became The Silver Beetles (a tribute to Buddy Holly's Crickets) and soon afterwards was shortened to The Beatles.He married Cynthia in 1962 after she became pregnant with his child, Julian.
Beatles career
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
As a member of The Beatles, Lennon had a profound influence on rock and roll and in expanding the genre's boundaries during the 1960s. He is widely considered, along with fellow-writing partner Paul McCartney, as one of the most influential singer-songwriter-musicians of the 20th century. Of the two, Lennon is generally viewed as the better lyricist, while McCartney is seen as the more accomplished composer. Though overly simplistic, this view does have some truth as much of the songs credited to Lennon-McCartney, but actually inspired by Lennon himself are more developed, introspective pieces often in the first-person and dealing with more personal issues. Lennon's lyrics are also often the more lyrical, due to his love of word-play, double-meaning and strange words. His most surreal pieces of songwriting, Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus are fine example of his unique style. Lennon's partnership in songwriting with McCartney many times involved him in complementing and counterbalancing McCartney's upbeat, positive outlook with the other side of the coin, as one of their songs, Getting Better demonstrates:
McCartney: I have to admit it's gettin' better, it's gettin' better all the time.
Lennon: It couldn't get much worse!
John Lennon often spoke his mind freely. On March 4, 1966, in an interview for the London Evening Standard with Maureen Cleave, he made the following statement:'Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.'
While the statement is certianly an odd one to make about one of the world's major religions, many view it as taken out of context. It should be noted that, like the other major religions, Christianity has been around for milennia and has shown no hint of decline. Regardless, when read in the proper context of the article, Lennon sounds actually saddened that a rock group such as The Beatles became more important to many people than spirituality. Though the article was unnoticed in the UK, there was a severe backlash by conservative religious groups in the U.S. Radio stations banned the group's recordings, and their albums and other products were burned and destroyed. Spain and the Vatican denounced Lennon's words, and South Africa banned Beatles music from the radio. Lennon seems to have been quite distressed by this row and later admitted that he didn't like having introduced more hate into the world. On August 11, 1966, he held a press conference in Chicago in order to address the growing furor. He told reporters 'I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have gotten away with it. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I wasn't knocking it or putting it down. I was just saying it as a fact and it's true more for England than here. I'm not saying that we're better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it's all this.'
The Vatican accepted his apology. He was often misquoted as saying 'bigger than Jesus', which led many to believe that he meant that the Beatles were better than Jesus. Whether he thought that (at the time anyway) is not clear, but he certainly did not say that.
On November 9, 1966, after their final tour ended and right after he had wrapped up filming a minor role in the film How I Won the War, Lennon visited an art exhibit of Yoko Ono's at the Indica art gallery in London. The Beatle was impressed by Ono's art, most notably a piece consisting of a small word which could only be read with a magnifying glass from a ladder. The word was 'yes'. 'It was positive!' he enthusiastically told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970. Ono and Lennon, both married, immediately made an impression on each other. They occasionally made contact with each other during the period of Sergeant Pepper and the 'Summer of Love.'
Finally in the spring of 1968, after returning disenchanted from a transcendental meditation retreat in India, Lennon began his love affair with Ono, and revealed the fact to his increasingly estranged wife Cynthia. Cynthia Lennon filed for divorce later that year, while Lennon and Ono from then on were inseperable in public and private, as well as during Beatles recording sessions. This new development led to obvious friction with the other members of the group, and heightened the tension during the 1968 White Album sessions.Undue blame has been heavily placed on Ono as the sole cause of the group's fracture, as they were already diverging shortly after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967. Lennon's immediate reaction to Epstein's death had been, 'The Beatles are finished.' What he saw as misguided leadership from McCartney after this seems to have had a lot to do with the fracture between them.
At the end of 1968, Lennon and Ono performed as Dirty Mac on the The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. During his last two years as member of The Beatles, Lennon remained as vocal as ever, spending much of his time with Yoko on public displays speaking out against the Vietnam War, and for peace. He sent back the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) he got from the Queen of England, reportedly 'with love', to protest British support of the Vietnam War and their involvement in African affairs. On March 20, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married in Gibraltar, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam in a 'bed-in' for peace. John and Yoko followed up their honeymoon with another 'bed-in' for peace this time held in Montreal. During the second 'bed-in' the couple recorded 'Give Peace a Chance'. They were mainly patronized as a couple of eccentrics by the media, but still were important figures in the anti-war movement. Shortly after, John changed his middle name from Winston to Ono to show his 'oneness' with Yoko. Lennon wrote 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' about his marriage and the press's take on it all.
After both being injured in the summer of 1969 in a car accident in Scotland, Lennon arranged for Yoko to be constantly with him in the studio as he recorded his last album with The Beatles, Abbey Road. A full-sized bed was rolled into the studio so that Lennon would not be separated from Ono. Abbey Road was the last polished, united effort by the group, and after its release in the autumn of 1969, it seemed the four members had made a peaceful parting of ways. But the release of the rough, and over-orchestrated 'Let It Be' album in May, 1970 had acrimonious results. Bridges were burnt as an enraged McCartney announced he was quitting the group stating that his approval was not obtained when Phil Spector, at the insistence of Lennon and George Harrison, added overlush orchestration to several of McCartney's pieces. He was even quoted as saying that he was 'sickened' by the 'mutilation' of his music. Though the split would only become legally final some time later, Lennon and McCartney's partnership had come to a bitter end.