![]() John, the hipster IT guy at your local startup. He seems to be trying to figure out what’s above the mountain, and from there leads LSD immersion, compulsive meditation, the diminished ability to tell friend from foe Michael Gerber has discussed here, and various efforts to be bigger than John Lennon, Beatle. Do you think without the animus to be bigger than Elvis, he needed something else to motivate him? Like being a guru? After the Beatles reached the “top of the mountain,” John doesn’t seem interested in pursuing his other artistic interests. Do you think he sought protection because its absence left him feeling vulnerable? I could see that. Do you think that when it was gone, John knew it? I can’t imagine he didn’t. It took enormous energy to build up the charge to be shot out of that cannon, and that energy was almost entirely self-generated. Unlike Paul, who came into his own during the Sixties, John hit the world stage shot out of a cannon. I think there are many reasons for this, some of which Seaman didn’t see (i.e., John’s about to buy a place with May Pang, swings by the Dakota for a stop-smoking cure, emerges three days later unsure of what day it is, complains of having thrown up endlessly, and ends the relationship), but that volitional laziness is present as early as January 1966, when Paul uses his break from recording/touring/filming to study piano and music theory George, to learn the sitar, and John, to hang out at Weybridge and do LSD. He’s exercising agency by not exercising agency. Lennon’s encagement in the Dakota is enforced by “Mother” to degrees great and small, but until maybe the last six months of 1980, there’s a pervasive sense that John is choosing this. ![]() I see someone who had given all he could give by 1966, and who knows it. One of the central impressions I get from Seaman’s book is exhaustion. Most of us on this site don’t think about these things, but understanding the isolated, paranoid Lennon of the late Seventies probably depends on putting ourselves in the shoes of someone who did.Įxhaustion. He is very interested in what it’s like to be shot and thinks a fair amount about assassination, which he believes is modern crucifixion. He also believes that he is living on borrowed time and that he is headed for a violent end because he was a violent man. He believes that because Yoko was able to accomplish this feat, she has magical powers of some sort. He is certain that Sean will inherit his soul when he, John, dies, because they were born on the same day. John appears to believe earnestly in what seem to be some pretty odd things. That the Dakota years were less rosy than the Ballad claims is not really up for debate anymore amongst anyone even semi-serious about the Beatles as people, not legends, but it’s still stunning to see what that looks like up close. ![]() If there’s a spectrum of Dakota-era John Lennons stretching from Goldman’s smack-addled burnout on the far left to the drug-free, happy, bread-baking househusband on the right, Seaman’s is somewhere believably to the right of Goldman’s: functional enough to put on some clothes, walk down the block, and turn on the Lennon charm when he’s in the mood to do so, but stifled and depressed enough to retreat to his room for hours or days on end, where he does drugs, looks at Playboys or the TV, doesn’t write music, listens to Muzak versions of his own songs, and reads about psychology or the occult. ![]() Seaman, John’s personal assistant for the last two or so years, depicts a rock star in his late thirties who may as well be in his late eighties for the way in which his happiness seems to be confined to rare moments when he reminisces about something he did in his early twenties. It’s a very quick read, but not a particularly pleasant one. Belatedly for someone as into the Beatles as I, I’ve been reading Fred Seaman’s The Last Days of John Lennon.
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