John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

Paul McCartney had known John well by sight for some time before their carefully arranged official introduction. To Paul, judging solely by appearances, “John was the local Ted. You saw him rather than met him…This Ted would get on the bus and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me.”

Like John, he wore a black uniform blazer with a Latin motto, in this case Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati (“We are born not for ourselves only, but for all the world”);

“He’s a real wacker, isn’t he?” she commented witheringly after he’d gone. “You always seem to like the low-class types, don’t you, John?”

On a copy of the tour itinerary next to Manila he scrawled, “Nearly fucking killed by the Government…and it’s just another Beatle day…. George said ‘They should drop an H-Bomb on Manila’ and we all silently agreed.”

“Make a key. Find a lock that fits. If you find it, burn the house that is attached to it.”

Despite his continued abstinence from Billboard magazine, John still kept abreast of what was happening in pop music. He admired the professionalism of the Bee Gees, would-be Beatles in the Sixties now riding the disco wave with their sound track to Saturday Night Fever. Among the newer British bands, he liked the Electric Light Orchestra, even if their symphonic-electronic style felt like “son of I Am the Walrus.” He watched the continued transatlantic success of Bowie and Elton John without rancor, was amused by the way the Stones somehow still kept on rolling, surprised and scornful when Bob Dylan became a born-again Christian, and amazed that an apparently heterosexual band could have the nerve to call itself Queen. His main source of information was Bob Gruen, who photographed almost every major rock act that came through town and often urged him to come out and see some hot new attraction like Blondie or the New York Dolls. But putting Sean to bed always took precedence. “At one point I said, ‘Am I bothering you by telling you about all this?’” Gruen remembers. “John said, ‘No, I like to know what’s going on. And some night, you never know, I may want to change my mind.’”

The Beatles, Sean says, were an essential springboard for John, however irksome his life with them became. “I don’t think my dad would have been commercial at all without Paul and the management and George Martin. I mean in the sense of making himself palatable to the masses, I don’t think that was his area of expertise. I think he was very edgy and interesting, and ‘edgy’ and ‘interesting’ don’t always cut it for the populace. I think the sugar around the Beatles with my dad as this core of intensity made them the ultimate package.