John Lennon, The Man Who Have Got the Love of Billions

The intelligent, yet deeply troubled 15-year-old boy was raised under the thumb of his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. Then he discovered his free-spirited mom, who gave him away for complex personal reasons when he was just a toddler, was living just blocks away. While forming a relationship with his estranged mother, young Lennon develops a fascination with Elvis Presley and the American import of rock n’ roll, and learns to play guitar after meeting Paul McCartney–We are talking about the legendary musician John Lennon. John Lennon, the revolutionary musician and member of arguably the greatest band of all time, the Beatles, would have been 70 years old this Saturday had he not been shot to death in 1980 by a deranged fan outside of his New York apartment building. Lennon was 40 years old.


Since Lennon’s death, his legacy has become bigger than the man himself was. For better or worse, Lennon’s music, creative vision and his message of peace have been kept alive through songs, film, TV and products. When I was about 10, my mother, a Beatles superfan and memorabilia collector, took me to exotic New Jersey to experience Beatlemania firsthand. In a hotel convention room I saw table after table of Beatles products, Beatles impersonators, Beatles karaoke. You name it, they Beatle’d it. Today, that interest in Lennon and his fellow Liverpudlians is still going strong in the pop culture world.


Lennon’s death broke hearts around the world. In the U.S., it recalled nothing so much as the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, an event for which, ironically, the arrival of the Beatles a few months later had provided a welcome tonic. In the twenty-five years since, Lennon’s influence and symbolic importance have only grown. His music, of course, will live forever. But he has survived primarily as a restless voice of change and independent thought. He is an enemy of the status quo, a bundle of contradictions who insisted on a world in which all the various elements of his personality could find free, untrammeled expression. Innumerable times since his death Lennon has been sorely missed. And just as many times and more he has been present – evoked by all of us who find ourselves and each other in the music he made and the vision that he articulated and tried to make real.