Were he still alive today, John Lennon would be 70 years old, but instead, 30 years ago, he left this earth. On the December day that he was shot dead outside his New York City apartment, curiosity about the Beatle reached a fever pitch that hasn’t waned since. Last October, we ran a popular story called
“10 Things You Might Not Know About John Lennon” which we’re reprising here with more little-known facts.
Lennon’s life has remained of particular interest to people not just because it was extinguished so abruptly, but also because it was so unconventional. He appeared hell-bent on fashioning his life into a delicious experiment, one that led to many reinventions. Because of this, Lennon’s brief life can be divided into neat chapters, as though he lived the lives of many men within just 40 years. There was his heartbreaking childhood, his early marriage to a college sweetheart, his rise to deafening worldwide fame, his all-consuming love affair with Yoko Ono, his kooky spiritual quests, his drug and alcohol problems, his political convictions – so ardent they almost got him deported. There were famous alliances and feuds, and there was his ever-evolving knack for writing beautiful, meaningful songs. As Paul McCartney said in 1987, “[John] was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.”
With the insight of Beatles historian Robert Rodriguez, who authored the book
Fab Four FAQ(Fabfourfaq.com) and is at work on the forthcoming
Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock and Roll (both available through Hal Leonard), here are 10 more things you may not have known about the most fascinating Beatle.
1. Despite popular opinion, Lennon wasn’t born during a WWII bombing raid.
“Something that’s in all the Beatles books, except for
Fab Four FAQ and one or two others, is that [Lennon] was born in the midst of a Liverpool bombing raid in WWII, and that’s not true,” says Rodriguez. “He was actually born during a period when there wasn’t any heavy bombing going on. People like to make the point that he came into the world in a violent way and that was how he ended as well, but that’s not strictly true.”
2. His artistic talents predated his musical talents.
“As far back as the age of 10, there was a satirical comic book that [Lennon] put together called ‘The Daily Howl’ and he circulated it among his classmates,” says Rodriguez, who explains how Lennon’s talents as an artist actually led to the formation of The Beatles. “When he left what was the English equivalent of high school, he went straight into art school. All of his teachers felt that if he was going to have any kind of future at all that this was where his talent lay. That’s where he met Stuart Sutcliffe, who became a member of The Beatles, and that’s where he met his first wife, Cynthia Powell, who was also studying art.”
3. His first guitar was a gift to himself.
Though Lennon would prefer Epiphone and Gibson guitars throughout his adult life, his first guitar was an off-brand flat top acoustic. Most people think that the guitar was a gift from his mother, Julia, but in fact John purchased the guitar himself and had it shipped to Julia’s house so that his disapproving aunt Mimi wouldn’t discover it. Julia had previously taught John some banjo chords, whetting his appetite for stringed instruments. As reported in Andy Babiuk’s book
Beatles Gear, Lennon has said, “I was about 14 when I got my first guitar. It was a beat-up old Spanish model which costs about 10 quid … When I was young I played the guitar like a banjo, with the sixth string hanging loose.”
4. He preferred small guitars to fit his stature.
In his many years of Beatles-related research, Rodriguez says that two themes in particular have emerged about Lennon’s guitar playing. “Guitar techs and people that were aware of him musically always said he was one of the best rhythm guitarists they’d ever heard but that his arms and his hands were small and that he tended to play short-scale instruments,” says Rodriguez. “They were always amazed at how small John seemed in person.”
5. He apparently didn’t clean his guitars very often.
Lennon probably had guitar techs clamoring to polish his guitars, but it seems that he kept his axes pretty grungy. Joe Jackson guitarist Vinnie Zummo recently related an anecdote to Rodriguez about discovering and playing Lennon’s famous Epiphone guitar while visiting the offices of ABKCO, which was managing Apple in ’69 and ’70. “When I first got [to ABKCO] they told us to wait in a room where I see a case,” says Zummo. “Being a player, I had to open it. Well it was the Epiphone Casino! The one with the paint stripped off that [Lennon] used in the
Let It Be film. I freaked out and immediately played every Beatles tune I could think of. The axe was in terrible shape. Absolutely filthy! When you played a chord and took your hands off the neck, your hands were black with dirt. As if the strings had never been changed. Filthy strings, extremely dead sounding. That kind of explains his guitar sound now that I think of it.”
6. The “Lost Weekend” wasn’t very lost at all.
In the weeks before his death, while granting interviews to promote his forthcoming
Double Fantasy, Lennon spoke of what he called “The Lost Weekend,” a period of 18 months in the mid-’70s during which he had separated from Yoko Ono, taken up with his personal assistant, May Pang, and gotten drunk on a regular basis. “Lennon tried to paint [this period] as this really desolate, drunken, bottoming-out episode, but that was a very small part of it,” says Rodriguez. “In fact, that time was the most productive post-Beatles era of his career, where he produced two albums of his own, he worked with Ringo on
Goodnight Vienna, he produced an entire album [
Pussy Cats] with Harry Nilsson, he recorded with David Bowie, Elton John, Mick Jagger. There was a staggering amount of productivity during that time, and the results just shined. It’s a myth that he himself helped propagate — that during [that] time he was just this pathetic figure who couldn’t get his act together until he was back with Yoko. Professionally, it’s not so.”
7. There was love beyond Yoko.
Lennon was married twice, to Cynthia Powell, whom he wed in 1962 shortly after the couple discovered they were pregnant with son Julian. He then married Yoko Ono in 1969 and carried on a famous, Yoko-sanctioned affair with May Pang from 1973-1975. But were there others, too? Rodriguez says yes. “[Lennon] confessed to countless one night stands with fans and groupies and a few celebrities. But when both sides are dead, it’s hard to know what’s really true. But certainly, during the ’65 tour when The Beatles were in America, he was photographed out with Jayne Mansfield and there are some accounts of them hitting it off, so to speak.” Rodriguez alludes also to rumors of Lennon affairs with
Help! actress Eleanor Bron, English journalist Maureen Cleave and singer Joan Baez.
8. He was on good terms with Paul McCartney when he died.
Sure, there were some rough patches between Lennon and McCartney but Rodriguez says, “The reality is that, yes, the break-up was probably uglier than it needed to be … but most of that had died down by early ’72. When John was apart from Yoko, Paul started visiting him and they actually jammed in the studio in March of ’74, when Paul was in Los Angeles to attend the Oscars. There are photographs of them hanging out poolside at the house that John had rented in Santa Monica. In April of ’76, Paul was in the habit of visiting when he passed through town, and they both happened to be sitting on the couch together watching
Saturday Night Live when Lorne Michaels came on and did this tongue-in-cheek invitation for The Beatles to reunite on his show … There are John and Paul watching it in real time, live, like a 30-minute cab ride away from 30 Rock. They actually toyed with the idea of going down there, but ultimately decided they were too tired. The next day, Paul showed up again, without calling first and with a guitar in his hand, and John kind of chewed him out, like, ‘I’ve been up all night with the baby. Can you just call first?’ And that was the last time they saw each other, although Paul said he didn’t mean it to be that way. They just didn’t cross paths again, but they did maintain contact by phone. One of things that later was a comfort to Paul, after John died, was that the last phone conversation they had was really warm, very friendly.”
9. We can guess what Paul and John talked about the last time they saw one another.
“Paul’s father Jim died on March 18, 1976 and John’s father Alfred died on April 1, 1976,” points out Rodriguez. “John and Paul last saw each other on April 24-25, 1976. The issue of each father’s deaths had to have come up.”
10. The last great Lennon mystery is what he was recorded saying the night before he died.
Jack Douglas – who produced the final Lennon-Ono album,
Double Fantasy – installed a hidden recording device in the studio to capture the natural dialogue that occurred during recording sessions for the album. The night before Lennon died, that device caught Lennon saying something that the public will likely never be privy to. “At first [the recorder] was hidden in secret but when John found about it, he said, ‘Oh, I think it’s a great idea. [These recording sessions are] historic so why not?’,” says Rodriguez. “And the last night of his life they were at the studio working on ‘Walking on Thin Ice,’ Yoko’s track, and Jack Douglas later described it. He said, ‘Some very, very strange things were said that night. Some things that I don’t want to publicly divulge.’ And he wiped the tape clean of that night’s chatter. I’ve questioned him on it myself, and to this day he’s taken this total attitude of stonewalling. Nobody has been able to pry out of Jack Douglas’ mouth what it was that John Lennon said that shook him that he felt he could not share it with the public.”
