Of all the changes in my early adulthood, losing Lennon was the one I never got over.  From his earliest incarnation as “the smart one,” to the horribly optimistic and prescient interview he gave to Jonathan Cott three days before his death, Lennon rode shotgun to a generation of workingclass seekers, of which I was just one.

            In that interview, published last Friday in Rolling Stone magazine (“The Last Interview,” RS1120/21), Lennon said, “The hardest thing for me to do is play.  I can do everything else.”  Cott is disbelieving:

“That’s weird, because your drawings and so many of the songs you’ve written are really playful.”
“That probably came from Paul more than from me.”

John, who had everything—the most massive musical success the world has ever known; all the moxie, the life, the lyrics, the voice, the brownstone in NYC, said he didn’t know how to play, as you would with a child. 

            He was forever looking inward and finding himself lacking, coming square up against the very real limitations of his own personality, his occasional venom, the cheap shots, the bad-drunk (a lightweight partier as per Keith) behavior, and yet he was always …striving.  Always striving against all that.

            John’s words went right up against my skull and rattled around.  His speaking voice was instantaneously to the mark, and his singing voice, well, it can stop you in your tracks at a distance of 30 years.

            Paul was on Saturday Night Live last Saturday, ahead of his live concert at the Apollo.  He was charming, almost ingratiating, (well, pretty ingratiating), a dear man, really.  He performed two cuts from his Wings era material.  He was “pitchy.”  The instrument was weighted with age.  It was a moment of capitulation to the inevitabilities of time.

            None of that for Lennon.  No encores.  No third acts.  No deterioration.  We have only his sense that he was beginning the rest of his life as we all were at the time, with children, spouses, houses, and jobs we could or could not keep up with.  He is frozen in that dream place of Marilyn, and James Dean.  Honestly, I think Lennon fancied a bit of both.

            He said, “I wanted to be this tough James Dean all the time.” … “I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet—the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet feminine side.”  And then… “I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead.”

            Deadpanned, straight on, just like that. A truism every schoolboy in the world learns—or learns the hard way.  Lennon was like that for us.  I mean, he was a guy’s guy. He called it the “macho school of pretense.”  He could heckle with the worst of them. He could be an asshole.  And that was the point. An asshole just like us.  But underneath…

  After years of research into the Beatles catalogue and methodology, I was stunned to read him say, after he was complaining (he loved to complain) about how hard it is to write, “that almost every song I’ve written has been absolute torture.”  He describes his feeling about work, most new work, as thinking, “it’s shit, it’s no good, it’s not coming out, this is garbage…”  “I just think ‘That was tough. Jesus, I was in a bad way then’ [laughs]…except for the 10 songs the gods give you and that come out of nowhere.”

            Songs that come out of nowhere, the ones where you seem to be taking dictation, as if they come from elsewhere, somewhere outside yourself, Cocteau’s radio; I have noted hundreds of songwriters emphasize this state of grace.  And yet Lennon offers that he maybe got 10 that way.  This man, half of the greatest songwriting team in history, had to, if you believe him—and I do—fight for it tooth and nail.

            John embodies so many of our weakest links, and is only triumphant by his existence, the fact that he lived, he created, and he left a record of it all.  We get to savor the results of a life in which he relegated much to outtakes, slagging things once their era was passed. His weakness becomes our strength because we know he did so many good things for the world, at least if you believe in giving peace a chance.

            And he was so gloriously public.  With everything.  Every last blemish on his ass.  He gave us a lot of information:

“You can aim for a small public, a medium public, but for meself, I like a large public.  And I made my decision in art school, if I’m going to be an artist of whatever description, I want the maximum exposure, not just paint-your-little-pictures-in-the-attic-and-don’t-show-them-to-anybody.”

            He said he didn’t want to be a Sunday painter.  And yet, for those of us who became by some measure of the term, Sunday painters, Lennon is a bit the patron saint.  I don’t mean the religious part.  (I can already hear him in my head railing against being up on anyone’s pedestal.)  Do you see what I’m trying to say here?  Something of the anti-saint against anti-success—coming from the man who had it all and learned to count success—as he did vehemently in this interview—as a man in love with a woman, the two of them raising a child together in mid-life.  Nothing more.  Something we all could have.  Sound precious?  Not when you hear it from Lennon.

We have so many legends from what can no longer be called contemporary history, but may still be modern:  Norma Jean, Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., the list is long.  But John is my personal legend, the one whose death I still feel as if he were family.  What creates that ghostly bond with a man I (of course) never met?  I think it is the ultra-vivid reality of his voice and the brutal honesty of his thoughts.  To identify with a star—how childish.  Lennon would have agreed.  That is why he worked so hard to shed the patina of the Fabs, that term he used in tandem with George Harrison in his sardonic rejection of how he was “handled” by fame in those, his “early years.”

I think he offered his public the opportunity to identify with him as a man—just a man, just a confused, often deluded, man, yet one who happened to possess beyond the gift of gab an artistry he yearned to share at a very deep level.  No one else would have written, and shared, and sang, “Mother I needed you but you didn’t need me.”

Jonathan Cott put this interview away when Lennon was murdered three nights later.  He never transcribed it, never brought it to the public until now.  He was an old friend of John and Yoko’s, having first met them in September 1968.  He was probably just too choked up.  After all, John had said to him, on December 5^th, directly, “But there’s time, right?  Plenty of time.”  Like some of us, Cott just stayed that way, for years. Of course, December 8, 2010 marked the 30^th clouded anniversary of that moment.  Deep in midlife, I am amazed at the emotions the loss of Lennon conjures.  I see photos and am stopped in my tracks.  And yet, we move beyond catharsis, beyond acceptance, to a simple amazement that loss can be so real, that culture is so tangible, that he was so much a part of us, that in a way he’s still here.