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Remember 1980 When The ‘60s Died?
a year ago
You always wonder how you will react to these things, but I can’t say I was all that surprised when NBC broke into “The Tonight Show” to say that John Lennon was dead. I always thought that he would be the first of the Beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees-first into left-wing adventurism or by just shutting up for five years when he decided he really didn’t have anything much to say; but I had always figured it would be by his own hand. That he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probable psychotic only underscores the banality surrounding his death.
Look: I don’t think I’m insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It’s just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock n’ roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams and aspirations.
I don’t know which is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they’re kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the Beatlemania show are being sold a bill of goods.
I can’t mourn John Lennon. I didn’t know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that’s all he was- a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his “assassin” (and please, let’s have no more talk of this being a “political” killing, and don’t call him a “rock n’ roll martyr”). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude”? What do you think the real- cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic- John Lennon would have to say about that?
John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories- to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place- insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.
So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon’s lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment- not for John Lennon the man- that you are mourning, if you are morning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.
Remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said “Don’t follow leaders?” Well, he was right. But the very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. And they’re still doing it today. The Beatles did lead but they led with a wink. They may have been more popular than Jesus, but I don’t think they wanted to be the world’s religion. That would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. John Lennon didn’t want that, or he wouldn’t have retired for the last half of the seventies. What happened Monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so in the first place.
In some of the last interviews before he died, he said, “What I realized during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I had made a physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me.” And, “We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed.” And, “Produce your own dream. It’s quite possible to do anything... the unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions.”
Good-bye, baby, and amen.
Thinking The Unthinkable About John Lennon, an obituary written by Lester Bangs and published in the Los Angeles Times, the 11th of December, 1980
Look: I don’t think I’m insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It’s just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock n’ roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams and aspirations.
I don’t know which is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they’re kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the Beatlemania show are being sold a bill of goods.
I can’t mourn John Lennon. I didn’t know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that’s all he was- a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his “assassin” (and please, let’s have no more talk of this being a “political” killing, and don’t call him a “rock n’ roll martyr”). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude”? What do you think the real- cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic- John Lennon would have to say about that?
John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories- to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place- insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.
So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutted lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon’s lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment- not for John Lennon the man- that you are mourning, if you are morning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.
Remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said “Don’t follow leaders?” Well, he was right. But the very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. And they’re still doing it today. The Beatles did lead but they led with a wink. They may have been more popular than Jesus, but I don’t think they wanted to be the world’s religion. That would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. John Lennon didn’t want that, or he wouldn’t have retired for the last half of the seventies. What happened Monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so in the first place.
In some of the last interviews before he died, he said, “What I realized during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I had made a physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me.” And, “We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed.” And, “Produce your own dream. It’s quite possible to do anything... the unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions.”
Good-bye, baby, and amen.
Thinking The Unthinkable About John Lennon, an obituary written by Lester Bangs and published in the Los Angeles Times, the 11th of December, 1980
Vix
Vix
Buddha wasn't founding a religion he was trying to find ways to improve everyone's lives.
Philosophers likewise, waxing on about our collective lots in life, hopefully improving such.
But people tend to put a messenger on a pedestal. Elevated to a minor godhood that no flawed human can possibly live up to that. The longer they stay in the light the more their flaws become obvious, their luster fades, cracks appear.
And when your philosopher falls from grace people are angry that they didn't live up to their standards. Then another poet or songster picks up the standard only for everything to begin again. Rise, god-like, fall.
This is why you shouldn't throw your belief into a person's message. They ultimately aren't saying anything new and they live breathe and die like us all.
Every generation gets their icons and people are still left wanting when the messenger proves his falibility. Embrace the spirit of their message, but act on your own.
But they don't honestly want a podium, they just want a voice, or if they've that to simply profess their message. Choosing kindness, choosing life, period, is a choice, and choice is what we have alone as our birthright. But it can be taken; wheedled away, a person or their oration threatened into silence; and silence has a sound, after all, but it's what you take from it and not the physical vibrations transmitted to nervous-chiasmic carrier to the reactive meat inside your skull-vault that you hear or can't.
A direct-drive turntable and having at least one older brother more than 20 years your senior, whom I never parted with in loving friendship, passing on hundreds of vinyl spinners at 45 and 33-1/2rpm to me when he downsized last summer, to go with the Technics SL-D2 he left in my stereo-brachiate hands when he moved out in the late 1980's (now matched to an Ortofon Red modular stylus, bought from that Auld Record Store in 2017), wasn't a small help. He owned more records than I have compact discs, and now I care for and listen to them, including what I can grok is every major Beatles' release that shimmied into local music stores here in our mutual Canadian hometown.
Solid-state, good chummer.