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John Lennon, 1940-1980

John Lennon was shot and killed 29 years ago today, in front of his home at the Dakota Building in Manhattan. He was 40 years old.

I was a Beatlemaniac from an early age, my receiving the Anthology set for my tenth birthday serving as the catalyst for this life long love. Though the band had broken up 16 years before I was even born, in many ways, their music, and the meaning behind it, grew alongside me.

Above all else, it was Lennon I was drawn to from the beginning. He stood by himself on the Ed Sullivan show when they invaded the US, while George and Paul harmonized together. Through the years, he was the one peering over his glasses, the one with the long hair, the writer of Beatles hits but vaguely far too cool for it all.

We deify our stars, assigning them genius of soul so long as they can play guitar or sing. We heap impossible expectations of depth. Most times, we’re disappointed when we find the idols as fallen titans, unable to keep the spotlight because they have no idea how they got it in the first place, beneficiaries of timing and circumstance and business more than genius.

There are no such disappointments with Lennon.

The son torn from his ship worker father as a toddler, raised by a strict aunt mere miles from a mother that functioned more as an older sister until her death when he was 18, we expect his crippling fear of abandonment, his anger, his sacrilege and the acid tongued teddy boy tough exterior. And we love the anecdotes of his rebel ways, imagining their seismic impact in conservative parochial schools and his aunt’s house. He was dangerous.

But there is the poet, the bookworm, the artist, the jokester, the polite nephew, the homebody, the kid who wants to play at the orphanage, the dedicated musician and the dreamer, the sensitive interior buried deep beneath the protective layer of wit.

He drew cartoons and published his own newspapers as a teenager, his dream to be an artist until he heard Elvis Presley. Then, he found his way.

The path meandered, of course, we all know that. But its rock n roll aim was true, guided along by the black rockers he so loved, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. What else could he do but rock n roll? Art school was safe, Liverpool was safe. Black leather, dank music clubs and the red light district in Hamburg were rock n roll.

There was no choice. John would be a rocker.

You watch early footage of the Beatles — not the raucous Hamburg, pre-fame Beatles, but the Royal Albert Hall and Ed Sullivan Show Beatles — and you wonder, is this so dangerous? The Times of London’s classical music critic lauded Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting. And he was right — they were revolutionary in their combination of black rock and skiffle and other genres. But the Times isn’t exactly your local underground revolutionary rag.

John ingested uppers like a madman, rampaging through Germany in anger and exhilaration and pure youthful adrenaline, owning the world and the night. He loved his black leather. He was stuffed into the rounded collar suits that made them stars, but he was always loosening his tie or making wise cracks to the audience. They were screaming so loud they didn’t hear, but John was rock n roll even then, by a million little cuts.

He wasn’t ready to be a father or a husband, not with his total lack of understanding of how those roles worked, with his roller coaster life, with fame enveloping, calling for “Help!” even if the plea was so much more upbeat than he had wanted. No, Lennon wasn’t perfect, and it’s hard to celebrate the imperfection when it hurt others, in this case his first wife and son. But it’s part of the complicated picture, and a sign of who he was at that time.

Once unconcerned with the future, like all of us, he began to look beyond himself. But he was too smart for enlightenment, calling those chanting Hare Krishna “elementary penguins.” He left India when he saw that meditation was bullshit. He had to find his own way.

Of course, we all grow up, in some way or another. But none of us leave a record of art and revolution like John left the world. His guitar, his unaffected Liverpudlian voice, his studio tricks and cross pollination to create the very essence of nearly all the music we listen to today. Along with McCartney, he left the greatest catalog of rock n roll ever produced, along with a million little seeds for the future.

There was the drugs, the Revolution, the Ono, the lost weekend, the fatherhood. In short, he grew up. He didn’t believe in Beatles or God. Just himself. I think, beyond the music, the allure of Lennon comes in his clear troubles, his rebellion, his advocating working class shoulders, his Imagination — and most importantly, the very public journey he went through during each of these steps. It was to become the best version of himself that was always there.

He was so publicly flawed, but so perfect and cool that he made each of those flaws the way we want to be. And in his later years, the voice for those who had none, emerging from his journey to fight for justice. This was a true hero, who had seen the highs and lows and was on our side.

In reading this long Lennon biography I’m in the middle of right now, I nearly forgot that he was a real person, who was really born and really lived and is really dead. Today hit me like a ton of bricks, the idea that Lennon was mere flesh and blood and that a mere bullet could stop short this life that seemed to have been a once in a forever gift.

But he was a mere mortal, which is why we love him with such passion, 45 years after he hit our airwaves and 29 year after he passed.

It’s impossible to pin down genius, but reflecting on his turbulent, brilliant, all-too-short and infinite life, Lennon emerges as everything I am, as you are, as we are.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.