Generations who followed the first boomers carry another memory: the day John Lennon was assassinated, 41 years ago next week, and 10 years after the Beatles dream, as decreed by the same Lennon, was over. Let’s talk about John.Įvery baby boomer carries a Dylanesque blood-on-the-tracks memory: the day JFK was assassinated. So allow me to attempt something different. And the resolution of the cliffhanger, delivered at the Apple rooftop live concert ( here it is, in full): an iconic pop performance for the ages. Paul building “Get Back” out of scratch (with George soon adding some mean funky licks). George building “Something” out of scratch.
In the end, what really matters is the – glorious – music. Globalized Beatlemania knows seemingly all the details about the slow-motion disintegration already in effect in early 1969 – from George Harrison sitting on a triple album of fabulous songs being constantly sidelined by the Lennon-McCartney Leviathan to the arguably divisive role of that Japanese woman.
It may be idle to deconstruct in writing what is in effect a stream of consciousness developing in a time machine of gorgeous colors at the end of a musical rainbow: the evolving, artistic creative process as a series of non-sequiturs and – Buddhist – illuminations.
We are watching the pop Valhalla of a work in progress: the Beatles “with our back against the wall” (Paul) trying to write new songs for a full LP and a live concert, in real time, after concocting stunners such as Sgt Pepper’s and The White Album.
We are all now re-living a snapshot of those times – and in countless cases being introduced to it – via Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, the three-episode film within the film released on Disney +, culled from 57 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio recorded way back in January 1969.
John Winston Lennon, self-styled working-class hero, prodigal son of a lower-middle-class fragmented family, may be qualified as the unifier of the sensibility of an era – that 60s “pandemonium with a big grin on,” as Tom Wolfe coined it.įor the first time in history, a group of pop musicians – led by such a Nijinsky of ambivalence as Lennon – had metastasized into a social phenomenon that simultaneously reverberated and influenced the planet’s collective unconscious. Those who forget it are essentially visionaries, incurable romantics, prone to melancholy – an inextricable quality of genius, according to Aristotle. The sensibility of an era may be unified – even though it’s never uniform. Image: Screen shot from Peter Jackson’s Get Back