Dan Coleman
The news came over the radio 30 years ago this week: John Lennon had been murdered outside his Manhattan apartment building. If you grew up with Lennon, especially if holding a sensibility toward his music and politics, his death marked a profound loss, one that still resonates.
For me, news of Lennon’s death brought tears and a profound feeling of grief, far beyond that felt for any public figure before or since. It is challenging to attempt to explain why this was such a singularly tragic event. Doing so seems alternately too episodic, too nostalgic, too personal and invariably inadequate.
I was an ardent Beatles fan, like so many teens in the late 1960s. But when the Beatles broke up, my attachment went with Lennon. I believe this was because he had become a kind of anti-celebrity, creatively engaging with pressing political issues and effectively blending his personal life with political endeavors.
The year 1969 was formative for many coming of age at the time, but I was too young to participate directly in the era’s events. This was a year of great political theater, as anti-war protests grew increasingly varied and creative. Government and industry have since learned to prevent the recurrence of anything like the courtroom circus that was the Chicago Seven trial or CBS’ ongoing censorship battle with the Smothers Brothers (over, for example, airing Pete Seeger’s first televised appearance since being blacklisted in the 1950s).
For me, the strangest, most captivating and most inspiring event that year was John and Yoko’s “Bed-In for Peace.†During weeklong wedding events in Amsterdam and Montreal, they opened their hotel room to friends and the press, announcing their wedding as a moment of opposition to the Vietnam War and of promoting peace. It was here that Lennon, along with a chorus of well-known figures, sang and recorded the soon-to-be peace anthem “Give Peace a Chance.â€
Since the 1967 Summer of Love, the great vision of the counterculture had been one of love, peace and happiness. But on the cusp of the new decade, the peace movement was becoming factionalized and efforts to “bring the war home†were using more radical tactics. Rallies were facing violent reprisals from the National Guard, agents provocateur and right-wing opponents. Any sense of love and happiness was increasingly hard to find.
It was left to John and Yoko to say to the world, here is our love and it is to serve the cause of peace – an amazing message that no one, certainly no celebrity, has been able to repeat so effectively since.
The Bed-In was followed by the December 1969 release of the song “Happy Christmas (War is Over),†with the Harlem Children’s Choir in the background singing “war is over, if you want it.†That prompted the Nixon Administration to begin a years-long, unsuccessful effort to deport Lennon in what Sen. Strom Thurmond called “a strategic counter-measure†against his influence.
Lennon’s advocacy broadened from primarily a concern with peace to an indictment of a broad range of contemporary injustices. His 1972 album, Some Time in New York, included such songs as “Woman is the Nigger of the World,†“Attica State†(about the New York prison riots) and “Sunday Bloody Sunday†(about that year’s massacre in Northern Ireland). But, as with the Bed-In, he coupled protest with a sense of hope and of the possibility of a better world.
The sensibility that spoke so provocatively to me with the Bed-In for Peace came to full bloom with what, along with “All You Need is Love,†is Lennon’s most beautifully inspiring song, 1971’s “Imagine.†Here Lennon offered an idealistic prospect of life with no possessions, no heaven, no hell and no nations, instead offering a utopian vision of all the people sharing the world and living life in peace.
Now, decades later, multiple conflicts rage in a global context much less stable than 30 or 40 years ago. In the United States, protests have been marginalized through government repression and media indifference. Much of the citizenry is pacified, misdirected and distracted. This week we can honor the memory of John Lennon by reflecting on his vision and on the possibility of meaningful public engagement, which was so central to his life.
Dan Coleman is a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen.