John Lennon: Still The Stuff We Itch For

By Leo Sadorf

Brer Pig didn’t post anything for Lennon’s birthday. Instead, he handed the job to me.  I turn to Jinx and the damn cat goes off chasing one of those invisible somethings that only cats see.  Thanks, buddy. I guess the Pondering Pig will be posting this a day late.

John and I grew up together, albeit thousands of miles and a good part of a generation apart. Me in the Eisenhower midwest of the late ‘50’s and 60’s and him in the bombing raids on Liverpool in the early ‘40s. Yeah, me and John had a lot in common.

Lots of us loved John, but probably an equal number were pushed away or pissed by him. Love and hate are, after all, the same coin.  John’s mission, if you will, was to rile people and enliven their responses. He probably craved acceptance as much or maybe more than we do. But he saw that he was gonna piss off everyone eventually and he accepted that, pushing forward in spite of how much it may have hurt.

John succeeded and screwed up. He laughed and cried and screamed. He made millions that didn’t matter, imagining a larger cause than popularity.  Or did he?  What I’m more concerned with is the way he felt and the ways we’ve felt as a result.  Sometimes it seems like we live in soulless times.  But, yeah, so did John.  A quick listen to a scratchy vinyl “Working Class Hero” confirmed that quickly with the words, “But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.” Yeah, go Johnnie.

John wasn’t in the friend making business, I guess.

So, why do we listen to the guy? I guess because he touches us. Even dead, he speaks of stuff we itch for or struggle to come to grips with or spit out completely.  Man, I listen to John and I hear love and hate and pathos and tragedy and cynicism and anger and fear.

But through it all, I still hear love.  Love for that one illusive girl, love for his kids, love for Yoko, even a frustrated love for his former bandmates at times. The man stomped on the terra, that’s for sure.

In 1978, I met a guy named Nick Topping.  He was a Milwaukee promoter/entrepreneur/shopkeeper. Old Nick was the guy that brought the Beatles to Milwaukee, September 4, 1964.   That was a new kind of gig for Nick. He was usually promoting the likes of Cisco Houston or Odetta or Pete Seeger. The Beatles show was definitely a stretch.

Nick had a weird sort of menagerie of a shop, selling goat cheese, imported wines and Weaver albums, pushing Socialist causes, open housing and antiwar organizations.  One day, my pal Larry and I wandered into his shop looking for stories and Nick had ‘em. He told us about the show and how, when it was over, he spent some time with the boys, especially John.  Seems John was particularly gregarious that evening and he and Nick emptied a bottle of Ouzo together. 

Nick remembered a sad but still laughing Lennon who was concerned that the people liked the show. Nick said the boy was looking for acceptance and love, that he was tender and ornery at the same time.  Nick thought he was, at 24, “the oldest young man I’d ever met.” It was a short time he and John had together, but John touched him none the less.

Lennon lived, that’s for certain. He beat a path on his own terms and succeeded and suffered for it at the same time. I hope someday I can say the same.

“War is over, if you want it. War is over now.”

Paul: “John Lennon NOT Gay!”

We interrupt this blog for important news.  Turns out John Lennon wasn’t gay after all.

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting to lap up Phillip Norman’s new book, John Lennon: A Life when it becomes available in the States.   It’s the one that claims John had a gay crush on his pal Paul.  Well, that got Paul hot under the collar, I can tell you!   Here’s his official statement:

“I slept with him a million times (on tour) I’ve seen him on tour roaring drunk, out of his mind in the early days before he sobered up and went to rehab. Roaring drunk and it was always with a female, never once [with a man]. If you’ve got a little gay tendency and you’re roaring drunk, I’d have caught him once.”

So ease your fears, or hopes as the case may be.  And thanks to the folks at Powerline for this incredibly important factoid.

Now, back to our scheduled programming…

John Lennon’s Last Words

Have you seen this? From the British newspaper The Independent today.

For 40 years Yoko Ono has kept a silent dignity in the face of global vilification meted out by legions of Beatles fans.

But today, in an emotional interview, she reveals the last words her husband John Lennon uttered moments before he was gunned down on a New York street in 1980 by Mark Chapman.

“I said ‘shall we go and have dinner before we go home?’ and John said ‘No, let’s go home because I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep’,” Ono, 73, told Kirsty Young on ‘Desert Island Discs’.

Young then asked Ono if Lennon had said anything after he was shot, to which she replied in almost a whisper: “No.”

This is so endearing. John was the best. And if John loved Yoko, and she stuck by him all these years, then Yoko’s good enough for me too. Full story at the link.

Baby Beatniks Seek Truth Too

And now I’ve started questioning
If anything is true…
Christopher Newton (1966)

All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth.
John Lennon

In my distress I cry to the Lord,
that he may answer me:
‘Deliver me, O Lord,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.’
Psalm 120

I’m afraid I’m making my Christian readers a little nervous here. Believe me, I am not turning my back on Jesus Christ. I am saying there was nothing in the brand of Christianity that I was served up at the age of sixteen, with its tender ritual and mindless rote prayer and comfortable satisfaction with the status quo, that could hold me.

And second, to those who say why don’t I forget about the past and just forge on ahead, I say “Forget about it? Forget about it!”. My mind teems with these images and memories. I am convinced that what I saw and felt and heard is as eternally important as that snowshoe bunny over there running down the glacier. I hope that’s clear. OK?

Now, meanwhile, back in 1959…

I wanted God in my life. I longed for Him/Her/It. But, near as I could tell, the Biblical God was not really God. For instance, I read Psalm 18 about God riding down to earth on his thundercloud with smoke coming out of his nostrils – well, what God is this? Did he create the entire universe and now is riding around shooting lightning out of a thundercloud in the hill country of Israel? How could anybody take this stuff seriously? That’s how I felt. I’m just being honest, okay? At seventeen, this was an issue about truth for me. And it’s still a valid, if sophomoric, question. Especially if you are presenting a struggling truth-seeker with a fundamentalist, every word is literally true, belief about the Book and how it works.

In a world that was full of lies and deception coming at me from every corner like arrows whizzing by – which is how I and every truth-seeker has to feel, why should I believe your version of the truth just because you say it is the real one? Coca-Cola is the real thing too, according to them.

The book Dharma Bums, which I’ve been blogging about the last few days, presented me with another option – seeking God through direct experience of him. I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment – lost or given away in my many years of wandering – but in memory at least, the book is about three guys searching for God, and God is Truth. Simplistically, that’s what Dharma means. In one episode of the book Jack and Gary Snyder (under novelistic pseudonyms) go on a crazy mountain climbing quest in the Sierras. Even at seventeen I could see climbing the mountain was really about two things — first, going on a totally great adventure with great wild friends , and second, about getting higher – higher into the pure truth and out of the smog of the world’s stupidity. A direct experience. An enlightenment. Real proof because it happened to you!

That’s what it still comes down to, guys and girls, truth is true if it happened to you. (For a modernist, I’m quite a good post-modernist). I know God is real. Not because of anything in the Bible, but because I saw him. The Bible fills in the picture because it’s about other guys who saw him.

And there are other scenes in Dharma Bums where Jack (I think this is in Dharma Bums – but maybe it’s On The Road or Subterraneans) is sitting in a library in the Santa Clara Valley day after day surrounded by the spring cherry orchards and reading the Diamond Sutra. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to be some kind of teaching where you didn’t have to belief in all of these stories about God riding around on his thundercloud. He was –Something Else. Unknowable. Ineffable. Something beyond understanding. Both personal and impersonal. Encompassing everything. Wow! I felt that must be the way God really is. Big.

Where was someone who could have shown me the Christian Way in its adventure and power and truth? Who was there to show me Jesus Christ in His awesome complexity?

I didn’t hear you knockin’. In fact, in all those long years from 1959 to 1968, when I encountered my first Jesus Freak, there was not one soul who defended or even spoke to me of the Christian faith with a fair understanding or true commitment. If I didn’t ask – well, who would I ask?

OK, that’s a fair question. Let’s see. At San Francisco State a few years later there was the Campus Crusade for Christ. They had a regular table outside the Student Commons, handing out tracts and stuff. At the next table over there was another group called the Young Americans For Freedom. They espoused every right-wing conservative position available in the early Sixties, from going into Viet Nam to stop the Communists to getting arch-conservative Barry Goldwater elected president. (Man, Goldwater’s looking pretty good these days! He was a man of honor.) Members of both organizations wore the same short sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties, crew cuts and they carried the same kind of bookbags. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t think about it much, but I figured maybe they were both part of the same organization. They both looked like The Enemy. I couldn’t see much difference between them, except they both wanted me to believe things that weren’t true.

I don’t remember ever being “witnessed to” by a Campus Crusade guy but if I had been, you know what I would have said? “The only thing I want to be saved from is having to spend eternity with guys like you! How dare you try to “save me,” whatever that means. You know nothing of the pain I suffer. You haven’t earned the right! Go away!”

No preaching, no witnessing, no handing out of tracts would have had the slightest effect on me. If they pointed out some eternal truth from The Bible, I could counter with an eternal truth from Bambi. They were both just books!

You know who I might have listened to? A Christian girl I was in love with. If she spoke earnestly and I could see through her life that it was true, then I would have given Jesus a fair shot.

Second best would be if I heard about Jesus from another freak. Someone I trusted would speak truth to me about his own experience. Someone I respected. Not some preacher dressed up in hippie clothes, but one of my close friends.

I wish I had known about a secret house church of dirty underground beatniks who were at war against the Great Society of lies and malice for all. In other words, people who were really following Jesus. I would have gone there in a New York minute.

Now that I think about, I STILL want to go to that church!