Cityside: Longer gone than lived. Remembering John Lennon.

Peter Jackson’s three-part re-examination of The Beatles, Get Back, aired on Disney+ this Thanksgiving weekend. It’s hard to believe the events depicted happened 52 years ago, but harder still to realize it was 41 years ago today that John Lennon was murdered. For those of us who came of age when The Beatles first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, we need no reminder,

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected US President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues-oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions.

The perspiring and aspiring rock and roll kids in the United Kingdom who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of any R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted and to a considerable extent castrated by safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read/seen, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed because they had talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched-we on other hand never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be.

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for less than a decade.

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match.

With Lennon's murder forty-one years ago, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy of his two sons, Julian, and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his late first spouse, Cynthia, felt and feel every day of their lives, but most especially today.

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, the husband, were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie Mark David Chapman so abruptly and completely ended forty-one years ago.

For many who never knew Lennon, except through his music, today is a painfully long day. There's little we can do except watch the wheels go round and round and wonder what might have been.

Bill Kenny, of Norwich, writes a weekly column about Norwich issues. His blog, Tilting at Windmills, can be accessed at NorwichBulletin.com.