On the 9th of October 1940, John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool, the only child of Alfred and Julia Lennon, into a family fractured by absence and class tension. His father, a merchant seaman of Irish descent, was frequently away at sea, sending regular pay cheques to the family home at 9 Newcastle Road until he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he returned six months later, he offered to take care of the family, but Julia, who was pregnant with another man's child, rejected the idea. The situation escalated when Julia's sister, Mimi, complained to Liverpool's Social Services twice, leading to Julia giving custody of John to Mimi and her husband, George Toogood Smith. The most traumatic moment of his childhood occurred in July 1946, when his father took him to Blackpool with the secret intention of emigrating to New Zealand. Julia followed them with her partner, Bobby Dykins, and after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. In one account, Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her, a moment that would haunt him for decades. This early abandonment and the subsequent lack of contact with his father for nearly twenty years created a deep-seated insecurity that would fuel his songwriting and his rebellious nature throughout his life.
The Quarrymen And The Beatles
At the age of fifteen, Lennon formed a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, named after his high school, Quarry Bank High School, in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the group played a spirited set of songs that were half skiffle and half rock and roll. It was at the Quarrymen's second performance, held in Woolton on the 6th of July at the St Peter's Church garden fête, that Lennon first met Paul McCartney. Lennon asked McCartney to join the band, and McCartney recommended that his friend George Harrison become the lead guitarist. Although Lennon thought Harrison, then fourteen years old, was too young, McCartney engineered an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus where Harrison played Raunchy for Lennon and was asked to join. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist, and the group became The Beatles in early 1960. The band's first single, Love Me Do, was released in October 1962 and reached number seventeen on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under ten hours on the 11th of February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, Twist and Shout. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks, and with a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying, We were just writing songs... pop songs with no more thought of them than that to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant.
In 1969, Lennon and his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, started the Plastic Ono Band and held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration bed-in for peace. They were married on the 20th of March 1969 and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long bed-in. They planned another bed-in in the United States, but were denied entry, so they held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded Give Peace a Chance. The song was quickly interpreted as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on the 15th of November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. In December, they paid for billboards in ten cities around the world which declared, in the national language, War Is Over! If You Want It. Between 1968 and 1969, Lennon and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, and Wedding Album. The couple also released a series of 14 lithographs called Bag One depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles, and he left the Beatles on the 20th of September 1969, but agreed not to inform the media while the group renegotiated their recording contract. He was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970, reacting with the words, Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it! He later wrote, I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that.
The Lost Weekend And The Return
As Lennon was about to record Mind Games in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his lost weekend in reference to the film of the same name, was spent in Los Angeles and New York City in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the Plastic U.F.Ono Band, was released in November 1973. In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. In March, two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club. In the first incident, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress. The second incident occurred two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats, and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians. After a month of further debauchery, the recording sessions were in chaos, and Lennon returned to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. The album Walls and Bridges, released in October 1974, included Whatever Gets You thru the Night, which featured Elton John on backing vocals and piano, and became Lennon's only single as a solo artist to top the US Billboard Hot 100 chart during his lifetime. A second single from the album, Number 9 Dream, followed before the end of the year. On the 28th of November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if Whatever Gets You thru the Night, a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted, reached number one.
The Househusband And The Final Album
Lennon began what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry, during which time, he later said, he baked bread and looked after the baby. He devoted himself to his new son Sean, rising at 6am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him. He wrote Cookin In the Kitchen of Love for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure in 1976, performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980. Sean Lennon, Lennon's only child with Ono, was born on the 9th of October 1975, Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday, after which Lennon took on the role of househusband. He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family. During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed mad stuff, all of which would be published posthumously. Lennon emerged from his hiatus in October 1980, when he released the single Just Like Starting Over. In November, he and Ono released the album Double Fantasy, which included songs Lennon had written in Bermuda. In June, Lennon chartered a 43-foot sailboat and embarked on a sailing trip to Bermuda. En route, he and the crew encountered a storm, rendering everyone on board seasick, except Lennon, who took control and sailed the boat through the storm. This experience re-invigorated him and his creative muse. He spent three weeks in Bermuda in a home called Fairylands writing and refining the tracks for the upcoming album. The music reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey, which was issued posthumously, in 1984.
The Shooting And The Silence
In New York, at approximately 5:00 p.m. on the 8th of December 1980, Lennon autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Ono for a recording session at the Record Plant. After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota in a limousine at around 10:50 p.m. EST. They left the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building. Chapman then shot Lennon twice in the back and twice in the shoulder at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15 p.m. EST; he was 40 years old. Ono issued a statement the next day, saying There is no funeral for John. Later in the week we will set the time for a silent vigil to pray for his soul. We invite you to participate from wherever you are at the time. She requested that instead of flowers, people could donate to Lennon's personal charitable foundation, the Spirit Foundation. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him. Love. Yoko and Sean. His remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman avoided going to trial when he ignored his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. In the weeks following the murder, Just Like Starting Over and Double Fantasy topped the charts in the UK and the US. Imagine hit number one in the UK in January 1981 and Happy Xmas peaked at number two. Imagine was succeeded at the top of the UK chart by Woman, the second single from Double Fantasy. Later that year, Roxy Music's cover version of Jealous Guy, recorded as a tribute to Lennon, was also a UK number-one.
The War On Lennon And The Peace
Following the impact of Give Peace a Chance and Happy Xmas War Is Over on the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration heard rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the 1972 Republican National Convention and tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that deportation would be a strategic counter-measure against Lennon. The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next years in and out of deportation hearings until the 8th of October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds. While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. He and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America. In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating: John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay! On the 23rd of March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on the 1st of April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. Waving the white flag of Nutopia two handkerchiefs, they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and appeared in a 2006 documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, D.C. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. In December 1974, when he and members of his tour entourage visited the White House, Harrison asked Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, to intercede in the matter. Ford's administration showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, Lennon received his green card certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono were free to stay.