Readers of my blog know that I am a huge fan of the Beatles. I have been so since I was four or five years old. I have posted many entries about them in the past. For decades I’ve had an idea in the back of my head that someday I’ll write my own book about the Beatles and how they influenced my life. But that’s still just an idea.

Meanwhile, I do try to keep up with Beatles literature now and then. Last winter, while in the USA for a short visit, I picked up the book Being John Lennon by Ray Connolly (Pegasus Books, 2018). I’d been listening to the podcast Something About the Beatles frequently (and still do), and Ray came on as a guest and talked about his memories and experiences covering the Beatles as a journalist. He knew the Beatles and their entourage quite well and was present for many of the biggest moments in Beatles history. Robert Rodriguez, the podcaster, highly recommended his book and so I kept an eye out for it and finally scored it in a book shop in Berkeley, CA (book shops are a dying breed and we must do what we can to keep them alive.)

Like most of the books I collect while on the road, this one went onto my bookshelves, joining other Beatles books I’ve collected and read in the past. I had the intention of reading it this year, and eventually I got round to it. After starting the book in late September, I found myself hooked. Connolly is a good writer. He’s written novels, plays, TV shows, a bio of Elvis—the man can write. And it shows. The book is a real page-turner. I found myself digging into chapter after chapter. The chapters are short, there are a lot of them (64 to be precise) and each one digs into a nugget of John and Beatle history (the two are inseparable, even after their separation c. 1970). It’s a biography for sure, focusing on John’s life, from early childhood to his death in 1980. But it’s more than that. It’s an intimate portrait by a man who was both a journalist and a good friend—somebody who spent time in the intimate inner circle of Beatledom and continued to remain close to John after the group split up.

In terms of knowledge gained, I’d say the book mainly reinforces everything else I picked up over the decades of reading Beatles books, listening to podcasts, and watching doc films about the Beatles and about John Lennon. There are far more Lennon docs than any other Beatle. Let’s face it—John is by far the most interesting member of the Fab Four. I love the others just as strongly, the way one would love a group of dear uncles (the Beatles were basically my parents’ age, so they could have been my uncles in terms of age difference). Yet John stands out from the group as the main instigator of the band, and the most eccentric, creative, and outrageous personality of the lot. He was after all the oldest Beatle, so the others were like his younger brothers. As Connolly makes clear throughout his loving yet candid portrait of John, the Beatles was a family. They were like brothers, or sometimes, like a marriage. The book contains lots of references to John and Paul being “married” in a way through their songwriting partnership, and their breakup being like a “divorce,” and certainly Yoko seems to have thought of them in that way.

John was special. The book certainly emphasizes that. First, his upbringing. He was basically abandoned by both his parents and raised by his stern yet loving Aunt Mimi and his Uncle George (bless them both). He did reunite temporarily with both parents in different points of his life but lost them both for different reasons. His mother was killed in an accident when he was young, and his dad was continually estranged and even after reconciliation in his later years, John ultimately rejected his father. Though it can’t explain everything about John, his alienation from his birth parents certainly had a huge influence on his life, his behavior, and his music. And that lasted until the bitter end of his life and career.

But what really made him special was his verbal and artistic genius. There is no doubt in my mind that John had a unique mind, and that was reflected in all his art and songwriting throughout his life, not to mention his capacity for verbal quips, puns, putdowns, and shattering humor. In this regard, he shared some of that talent with the other Beatles—they were certainly clever wordsmiths and full of humor, which contributed to their charm and ultimately to their success as a band. But John was off the charts. Just look at the songs he wrote and compare them to Paul and George’s songs, which are far more down to earth. John wrote the best Beatles lyrics, including “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Julia” (a song about his mother). Paul was certainly more gifted musically, which John realized, but John’s poetic abilities were stronger. When the band met Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s, it was John who really cottoned on to Dylan’s lyrical gifts and attempted to better him (and did in many ways), thereby changing the course of Beatles history and by extension the history of pop music.

I’m not saying John was a better lyricist than Bob Dylan. Dylan still holds the crown and deserves his Nobel Prize. But for a while, John put up a good fight, and musically he was more creative in my opinion. Dylan tends to take tried and true musical structures as his baseline and build incredible verses on top of them, but John’s musical structures were as complicated and rich as his lyrics. It helps that he had Paul with whom to bounce ideas. Collaboration was ultimately the not-so-secret sauce that made the Beatles great. But without John’s unique genius, they wouldn’t have achieved nearly what they did. That much is indisputable.

Connolly shows how John’s early interest in children’s literature like Lewis Carroll’s books and poems contributed to his wordsmithery. Even his song “I Am the Walrus” was taken from Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. As Connolly points out, the walrus in the story was the capitalist exploiter, not the carpenter, but as John pointed out, “I Am the Carpenter” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, and the walrus is a lot more fun.

Throughout his life, John was chomping at the bit for more creative pursuits, which explains his attraction to Yoko Ono. Not happy to just be a rock star or pop idol, he published his own books, wrote articles in news journals, and consistently drew throughout his life. His cartoon artworks are masterpieces of the form. As Connolly suggests, he could easily have been a cartoonist or an ad man—he also had the uncanny ability to come up with jingles and catchy refrains that would have made him rich on Madison Avenue. But instead, he chose the path of the true creative artist. Or did he? One never gets the sense that John or any of the Beatles wrote hits merely to rake in the dough. The only case where they were given a song title to work on as an assignment was for the film A Hard Day’s Night—and they created a masterpiece of rock and roll out of it.

In other words, John and the Beatles had a sense of integrity that is rare in the world of pop music, and getting increasingly so in my own opinion. Not to say they didn’t enjoy the cashola that flowed with each hit song, but obviously they were not businessmen. When Brian Epstein, their hardworking yet tragically addicted manager, died of what appears to be an overdose, they were suddenly thrown into the deep end of the pool, and these boys didn’t know how to swim in the shark-infested waters of the music industry. This partly explains their ultimate breakup, since John brought his own shark to the table, aka Allan Klein, while Paul preferred to work with his father-in-lawyer Lee Eastman (after he married Linda). John would come to regret bringing Klein into the picture, and Paul would have his I-told-you-so moment, but that would be years later, and in the meantime, the two ex-Beatles hurled musical thunderbolts at each other—these were the gods of songwriting after all, and until this day, it’s hard to think of anyone else who comes close.

Of course, the other explanation that often comes up when discussing the Beatles breakup is Yoko. Connolly is as fair as can be to John’s second wife, and hardly blames her for the Beatles bustup. He certainly is up front about her egotism, her cunning manipulations of other people, her opportunism, and her codependency on John, his money, and drugs (in that order). Yet he does spend time in the book discussing her artwork, which though not popular or widely regarded at the time, was certainly avant-garde, in-your-face, and pioneering in its own way. Johnandyoko (as he calls them, or perhaps they called themselves) loved to push the boundaries of both the art world and the world of popular culture and did so incessantly after they became a couple in the late 1960s. Whatever you say about Yoko, she comes across as a fascinating human being, one not to be reckoned with lightly, a person who was firm, fierce, and controlling, yet who in her own way was also a visionary. It’s easy to see how the two coming together caused so many sparks, and so much heat, if not a great deal of light.

Yoko was much older than John. If Cynthia became like a sister to him (which helps explain his impotence towards her later in their marriage), Yoko was a like a mother figure, and indeed he came to call her mother. Yet the relationship was a complicated one, not just the codependency, the drugs, and the “bed-ins”, the forays with political activism, but also in terms of their mutual fidelity. John after all was one of the most sought-after young men in the world, and had been surrounded by adoring women throughout his career as a Beatle, which didn’t help either of his marriages. Yoko was a twice-married woman with a husband (whom she divorced to marry John) and a daughter Kyoko, who her ex-husband Tony Cox took custody of when their marriage broke up.

Then there is the episode known as the “lost weekend,” as expressed in a sad joke the couple shared after the fact. As has been well documented in books, doc films, and her own autobiographical account, May Pang, the young 22-year-old assistant who worked for the couple in New York City, was approached by Yoko in a scheme to tame John’s ever-errant libido by becoming his temporary mistress. With Yoko’s approval, John and May became lovers, and of course (who could resist?) she fell in love with her boss man. Unlike Yoko, May was seriously into rock music (Yoko pretended I think but didn’t seem to really catch the vibe). May was young, tall, smart, capable, and good looking, and she and John became a natural couple very quickly in their relationship. Obviously, there was a great deal of mutual love if not respect (the respect like so many of John’s relationships was largely one-sided on her part).

May even put up with John’s worst behavior, exacerbated by his tendency to mix drugs and alcohol while partying with veteran rockers like Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, and Harry Nilsson. As Connolly puts it, he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a trait shared by many alcoholics, who seem quite charming when sober but get mean, ornery, and verbally and physically violent while under the influence. Connolly does not shy away from telling stories that reveal the dark side of the man. Yet, the devil’s pact they signed on to with Yoko at the beginning of their 18-month romance had to be paid in blood, so to speak. John eventually went back to Yoko, breaking May’s heart in the process, though he continued to see her secretly for years afterwards, and she remained a close confidante.

Eventually, the couple had a son, Sean Lennon, who was born strangely on October 9 1975, sharing the same birthday with his dad. Yoko’s obsession with numerology and astrology might have something to do with the unusual birth date. Sean quickly became the apple of their eye, and John spent several years in the Dakota apartments in NYC taking care of his son, though it’s dubious whether those were blissful years or not. After all, John was one of the world’s most gifted creative individuals, and it’s hard to imagine him content with diaper changing and toddler care. Nevertheless, Sean was certainly a great boon to the couple in their last years together. Eventually, John got off his rocker and started writing songs again, and by 1980 the album Double Fantasy came out, which shared John and Yoko songs (needless to say, John’s songs are the reasons the album is great).

As we all know too well, John’s life ended tragically and violently on the night of December 8, 1980. Connolly notes that anybody alive and above a certain age would remember where they were when they heard the sad news. I was in my bed when my step-dad came into the room early in the morning to tell me what had happened. “John Lennon was murdered,” he told me somberly. We were all deeply shocked by the news. I was in sixth grade back then, and our whole school was grieving as we took in the news. This was our own Kennedy moment. It was the first time someone who had been the object of so much love, affection, and high regard had been taken from us like that. To this day, I’ve never completely recovered from the shock of that day.

John Lennon would be 84 years old if he’d lived a long and healthy life. I won’t speculate how or why he was murdered—there are plenty of others who do so. It’s obvious there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I do remember is that that year his album Double Fantasy came out, and the radio stations were playing his songs in high rotation. “Watching the Wheels” is still one of my favorite Lennon tunes, and when I used to sing in karaoke pubs, “Just Like Starting Over” was one of me faves. I also think “Nobody Told Me” is up there with his best work.

While I don’t recall any great revelations or big stories I hadn’t known about already, the beauty of Connolly’s book lies in the details. There are all the conversations he gathered patiently and methodically over the years with John and others, the personal observations he has of the man and his life, the deep wisdom that age has brought to the writer, who has had a long lifetime to ponder the subject of his book. Connolly comes at the subject with a great deal of love and respect, deep honesty, and a sense that this is a “great man” in modern human history, all of which I share as a fan of John and the Beatles. “To know know know me is to love love love me” he once sang in the Cavern Club of Liverpool, and “yes it is, it’s true.” John was a “yes” man, for whom love was an art and a religion. Even if his own personal flaws and foibles prevented him from being as loving and caring to other humans as he could have been, that’s still the ultimate legacy of John Lennon and the Beatles, and their greatest gift to the world.