December 8, 2000: It was twenty years ago today that Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside the Dakota on West 72nd Street in New York City, bringing whatever was left of the sixties to a definitive and miserable end. Yet Lennon lives on–not just for his now-graying fans, not just for younger kids discovering the Beatles, but in some unexpected and surprising ways.
Case in point: At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia this past August, as Dick Cheney stepped up to the podium to accept the party’s nomination as vice presidential candidate, the band struck up a spirited version of Lennon’s song “Come Together.” This is the one on the Abbey Road album that begins “Here come ol’ flattop” (Cheney of course is mostly bald), and continues, “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free”–a sixties sentiment that meant something quite different from tax cuts for the rich.
Cheney probably didn’t know that Lennon started writing “Come Together” as a campaign song–for Timothy Leary’s planned 1970 campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary never used the song, but Lennon sang it live onstage at Madison Square Garden in 1972 in the midst of another presidential campaign, when Nixon was trying to have him deported to silence a prominent voice of the antiwar movement. Lennon changed the title line to “Come together–stop the war–right now!” and the audience cheered wildly.
The Democrats also played a Lennon song at their convention: They used “Imagine” as the theme of a tribute to Jimmy Carter. While the giant video showed Jimmy and Rosalynn hammering nails and fondling small children, the easy-listening version of Lennon’s song omitted the words “Imagine there’s no heaven/it’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us only sky”–not really appropriate for America’s first born-again Baptist President.
“Imagine” is a utopian anthem, and the utopian imagination was always a keystone of sixties New Left thought, distinguishing it from the bread-and-butter politics of traditional working-class socialism. “Power to the imagination” was a key slogan written on the walls in May ’68. Today the country is full of billboards urging people to “Dial 1-800-imagine.” I tried it. You don’t get John Lennon singing “Imagine no possessions.” Instead you get AT&T Wireless Services: Press 1 to upgrade your wireless plan, press 2 to inquire about new service, press 3 to inquire about an order and, of course, press 4 to hear these options again.
A search of the Nexis database found these variants on Lennon’s “Imagine no possessions”: a Republican who said “Imagine no estate tax,” a television critic who wrote “Imagine no more Regis,” a technophobe who wrote “Imagine no computers” and a Democratic pundit who headlined an opinion piece, “Imagine There’s No Nader.”
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Lennon lyrics appear in print in some other unlikely places. When Time put Bill Clinton on its cover at the beginning of his first term, the cover line was “You Say You Want a Revolution.” Two years later, when the Republicans won control of the House, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by R.W. Apple Jr. headlined “You Say You Want a Devolution.” And just a few months ago, after Joe Lieberman changed his mind about privatizing Social Security, The New Republic headline read “You say you want an Evolution.”
The headline writers probably had forgotten that Lennon wrote “Revolution” in response to the May ’68 uprisings in Paris, criticizing student radicals for advocating violence. He recorded two versions of the song. The single–the “fast” version–came first. It was recorded on May 30, 1968, and released in the United States in August, shortly after the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After the opening line–“You say you want a revolution”–it concluded, “count me out.” The radical press was outraged. Ramparts called the song “a betrayal”; New Left Review called it “a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” Time, on the other hand, reported that the Beatles had criticized “radical activists the world over,” which Time found “exhilarating.” The second, “slow” version of the song was released on the White Album two months later. Now, after the line “count me out,” Lennon added another word: “in.” He later explained, “I put both in because I wasn’t sure.” A year later he was singing “Power to the People.”
Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” was sung by half a million antiwar demonstrators at the Washington Monument in 1969, but since then it’s come in for some revisionism. I remember militant friends back in those days singing “Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance.” Then there’s “Give War a Chance,” which pops up every once in a while–the establishment journal Foreign Affairs used it as the title of a 1999 article by Edward Luttwak arguing against US intervention in local conflicts. Frontline broadcast a story on the Balkans in 1999 with the same title, and P.J. O’Rourke used Give War a Chance as the title for a book that became a bestseller. On the other hand, none other than Trent Lott uttered the words “give peace a chance” on the floor of the Senate–talking about Kosovo. Finally, a company called Peace Software (www.peace.com) is using the slogan “Give Peace a Chance.”
Lennon’s most intense and personal post-Beatle song, “God,” a very slow track on his first solo album, contains a litany that concluded, “I don’t believe in Beatles.” The New York Times ran a full-page interview in September with Philip Leider, the founding editor of ArtForum, that included his own personal version of the lyrics, which took up twenty-three lines of our newspaper of record. Warhol came first: “I don’t beleeve in Andy.” Then: “I don’t beleeve in Haring”; “I don’t beleeve in Fischl”; “I don’t beleeve in Koons”; and so on through nineteen more current art stars.
Several of Lennon’s most memorable lines have not been appropriated by pundits or Op-Ed types: “Instant Karma’s gonna get you” remains untouched, at least according to Nexis, and thus far nobody has found a way to use “I am the walrus, goo-goo g’joob.” But aside from these notable exceptions, the conclusion is clear: John Lennon may be gone, but twenty years after his death his words and ideas are here, there and everywhere.
