Did you read the news today? Oh boy

So how did my employer commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of John Lennon's assassination? By assigning a negative outlook to a Barbados-based reinsurer called....wait for it....Imagine Insurance Co. Ltd.

How's that for freaky coincidences?

***

To participate in the obligatory "where were you when...," I was a week shy of my seventh birthday, and my bedtime then was 9 o'clock, so I didn't actually hear about it the night that he died. When I learned the news at school the next day, it hit me quite hard. In part, because my family's Beatles records were a very big part of my earliest musical education, and also because it marked probably the first time in my life that I can remember pondering the fact that someone I was aware of and familiar with...was now dead.

I have a distinct memory of the subject coming up in the context of a conversation that began on the playground -- but would proceed to dominate much of the day -- focusing on whether or not John would go to Heaven. Because this was a Catholic school, and because my little crew of mates were an unusually precocious lot, there were a number of moral theories forwarded that, in retrospect, seem pretty advanced for our years.

For instance, I remember one kid, who came from a family of police and fireman (and who is now a cop himself) saying he didn't think John went to heaven because "he was on the drugs." We kicked this one around a bit, and ultimately decided it didn't hold water. Drugs made your life bad, but God wouldn't punish you for doing them, because that prohibition wasn't included in the Ten Commandments. I do naturally have to wonder whether we would have had that same bias had we been fledgling evangelicals, rather than Catholics-in-training.

A separate line of inquiry regarded whether he was a "holy" person. In some photos, he looked quite a bit like Jesus, which seemed to us a point in his favor. There was also the song "All You Need Is Love," which we actually had been taught in our music class, and which sounded an awful lot like a whole host of other hippie-dippy quasi-psalms that had come in vogue in certain Christian circles at the time (the puerile "Friends Are Like Flowers (In The Garden of Life)" immediately comes to mind.) It's interesting to ponder that, to kids who didn't know any better, hippies really did seem to have a reasonable claim to being Christ-like.

But an appeal to our pastor, a cranky old German named Father Miller (a man who would, a few years later, be relieved of his post by the Archdiocese for making headlines when he offered to baptize Cabbage Patch Dolls --- though, in retrospect, I suppose there are far worse things he could have been doing with them) put the kibosh on that line of thought. He told us that John Lennon "rejected Jesus," and so he could never go to Heaven. I'm not certain what evidence the good Father was using as the basis of his charge (perhaps it was the proto-Marxist lyrics of "Imagine," but more likely a holdover grudge from the "bigger than Jesus" hubbub of the 60s) but since his word on the matter was, to us, about as authoritative as they came, we decided that the issue was settled. John wasn't going to Heaven. I spent the rest of the day in what I can only conclude was my very first experience with depression.

So, that's where I was when John Lennon died.

***

And just one last piece on this theme. Over at Reason's Hit and Run, responding to Matt Welch's assertion that "the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death is as good an opportunity as any to to close the apple-shaped circle of revisionist history -- he really was the best Beatle, people," I offer a theory that I'll just cross-post here:

Paul was a musical genius. John was not. John was a musical visionary. Paul was not.

Paul had (still has, when he really puts his mind to it) an innate, once-in-a-generation gift for composition, melody and arrangement that really has no other parallel in the rock era. To find his peers, you have to look to the likes of George Gerschwin and Richard Rogers. But for all of that, Paul often didn't know what to do with his gifts, leading him to craft an awful lot of technically masterful schlock.

John had the opposite problem. He had lots of big ideas, but didn't have the chops to execute them. In some cases, he was just rewriting "Three Blind Mice" over and over again. His best songs are "atmospheric" pieces -- "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Instant Karma," "Norwegian Wood" -- that play to his strengths by layering unusual instrumentation on top of relatively simple and straightforward (some would say monotonous) compositions.

Paul at his worst was saccharine, and John at his worst was self-indulgent. They needed each other, both as complements (the idea man and the master of execution) and to smooth over each other's rough edges. John would ridicule Paul when he got too sappy, and Paul would slap the shit out of John when he got too pretentious.

They're a beast with two backs. There is no "best" Beatle, because when you split the two of them apart, neither would have been able to produce what they did together.

Comments

[comrade_chimp]

And here was me thinking the best one was George Harrison.

[jon corzine]

Imagine........