Today is John Lennon's 70th birthday, if he were still with us. As the musicians with whom I grew up start to wane into their late sixties and approach seventy, it simply serves as a reminder that even though having no children lets you kid yourself for a long time that you're staying in one place and not getting older yourself, time marches on.
I have to wonder how Lennon would have been viewed had he not been murdered that night in 1980. Because with all the unreleased tracks and all the biographies and all the recollections of Lennon's life and music both with and without the Beatles that have appeared over the last few years, and from the vantage point of time, it becomes more clear every day that Lennon/McCartney was greater than the sum of its parts. Looking at both John Lennon's and Paul McCartney's post-Beatles careers, we can see how desperately these two guys needed each other to do what they did. Without Paul McCartney to temper Lennon's tendency towards pompous self-importance, Lennon's music veered off into pretentious self-indulgence. Without John Lennon to temper McCartney's tendency toward sappiness, McCartney is more like a Tin Pan Alley pop composer than an influential musician.
The irony is that the most interesting post-Beatles career was had by the late George Harrison, whom it turns out may have been the most gifted Beatle of all.
There will be much typing done today and conversation about the greatness of John Lennon, but while there's no denying how influential he was, that influence was as part of a duo. I mean seriously:
If that were not John Lennon, would anyone have listened to it?
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