John Lennon: Biography from Answers.com

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Born John Winston Lennon, October 9, 1940, in Liverpool, England; died of gunshot wounds December 8, 1980, in New York City; son of Alfred (a merchant seaman) and Julia (Stanley) Lennon; married Cynthia Powell, August 23, 1962 (divorced, 1968); married Yoko Ono (an artist and singer), March 20, 1969; children: (first marriage) John Charles Julian, (second marriage) Sean Ono Taro. Education: Attended Liverpool College of Art, 1957-60.

Learned to play guitar, 1955; formed group the Quarry Men, 1957; group performed as Johnny and the Moondogs, the Moonshiners, the Rainbows, the Nurk Twins, and Long John and the Silver Beetles; group’s name changed to the Beatles, 1960; performed in Liverpool area, northern England, Scotland, and Hamburg, Germany, 1960-62; group signed with EMI/Parlophone records and recorded first single, “Love Me Do,” 1962; recorded more than a dozen albums and numerous singles and EPs, 1962-70; toured Europe, America, and Asia, 1963-66; appeared in films A Hard Day’s Night, 1964, Help, 1965, Yellow Submarine, 1968, and Let It Be, 1970; group disbanded, 1970.

With Yoko Ono, released Two Virgins, Apple, 1968; with Ono and others, recorded several albums, 1968-80, and made occasional concert appearances. Author of books including In His Own Write, 1964, and A Spaniard in the Works, 1965. Graphic artist, works exhibited in Great Britain and the U.S.

Selected awards: With the Beatles, numerous Grammy awards and platinum albums; gold album for Imagine, 1971.

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

John Lennon was born as German born bs fell on Liverpool during the Battle of Britain—a time many considered Britain’s "finest hour" until Lennon and the Beatles provided a finer one twenty-odd years later. He grew up in austere, depressed, postwar England. His father abandoned the family when John was a baby, and his mother never could bring herself to settle down to parenthood, leaving her son to be raised by his aunt, Mimi Smith, in a respectable, lower-middle class milieu in which he never really fit.

Lennon was a mediocre student, but his obvious intelligence and artistic talent enabled him to move through the rigidly stratified British school system in spite of poor grades. He went to high school and on to Liverpool Art College, but from the mid-fifties on, his attention was increasingly focused on music. In 1955, inspired by the popularity of skiffle—a sort of speeded up jug-band blues sound—Lennon persuaded his aunt to buy him a guitar. In the spring of 1957 he and some other students at Quarry Bank High School formed the Quarry Men; at one of their first performances, on July 6, he met Paul McCartney and invited him to join the group. George Harrison joined in February of 1958.

The Quarry Men’s style began to move from skiffle to rock and roll; they graduated from playing youth club dances and church halls to pubs, nightclubs, and dance halls. Along the way they acquired amplifiers, a bass player, and a series of drummers. By the time they were booked into the Kaiserkeller Club in Hamburg, Germany, they were experienced, if not quite seasoned, musicians. Their two stints in Hamburg, in 1960 and 1962, made them professionals, though the crude recordings made at the Star Club in 1962 give little hint of the impact they were to have in only a few months.

Beatlemania
In 1964 Lennon and the Beatles "came out of the f—in’ sticks to take over the world," as Lennon told Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner seven years later. They had taken over England the year before, exploding out of provincial, industrial Liverpool into a British pop music scene dominated by American rock and roll and jazz, and by feeble home-grown imitations. Almost overnight the Beatles’ energy and originality made them the biggest stars in the history of British popular music. Skeptical Americans who doubted that foreigners could play such a distinctly American music as rock were won over almost as quickly.

The Beatles went on to revolutionize rock music several times over. "The Beatles are a pivotal part of rock’s

story," wrote Tim Riley in Tell Me Why, "not just because their music can still dazzle but because their arrival as rock ’n’ rollers with an endless stream of original material challenged what anyone had imagined pop could become. … They may not be responsible for everything, but nearly everything that comes after would be impossible without them." As Griel Marcus wrote in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, "What you heard was a rock and roll group that combined elements of the music that you were used to hearing only in pieces.… The Beatles combined the harmonic range and implicit equality of the Fifties vocal group, … the flash of a rockabilly band, … the aggressive and unique personalities of the classic rock stars, … the homey this-could-be-you manner of later rock stars, [and] endlessly inventive songwriting.… The result was that elusive rock treasure, a new sound— and a new sound that could not be exhausted in the course of one brief flurry on the charts."

Perhaps more significant than the Beatles’ sound was the way in which they made the recording studio their instrument and the long-playing record their medium. Though some producers, notably Phil Spector, had expanded the concept of recording beyond merely the capturing of a live performance, the Beatles were the first artists to make records the focus of their work. "The Beatles are our first recording artists, and they remain our best," Riley wrote. "The Beatles’ work came to be conceived with the studio in mind—all the production values a mixing board had to offer were used to serve the ideas conveyed in their music. A Beatles record is more than just a collection of songs: it’s a performance for tape…. As time went on, the Beatles weren’t so much songwriters as they were record writers; the studio became a lab where musical ideas were exchanged, reworked, and restructured for tape."

The core of the Beatles’ brilliance was the musical relationship between Lennon and McCartney, a relationship that was as complex as the music it spawned. McCartney had begun writing songs before he met Lennon, and inspired Lennon to try his hand at it. They sometimes wrote songs together (Hunter Davies, in his biography of the Beatles, describes them sitting down at a piano to write "With a Little Help From My Friends") but seem at least as often to have served as each other’s editors, helping to fix or finish a song that the other was having a problem with. McCartney wrote the verses of "We Can Work It Out," and Lennon contributed the bridge; Lennon wrote most of "Ticket to Ride," but McCartney came up with the off-center drum pattern that anchors the rhythm. After the Beatles broke up, Lennon played down the importance of their teamwork, but in his final interview with Playboy he acknowledged, "I said that, but I was lying…. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball…. In those days we absolutely used to write like that—both playing into each other’s noses."

That was particularly true in the early days, from the time they first went into Abbey Road studios in London in 1962—insisting to skeptical producer George Martin that they wanted to record their own songs—until the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. By that time, Lennon told Playboy "the creativity of songwriting had left Paul and me … well, by the mid-Sixties it had become a craft" Their personal relationship had become strained as well. According to Ray Coleman in Lennon, the tension began to build with the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967. Lennon was deeply into drugs, unhappy in his marriage, and bored with being a Beatle. McCartney took over the direction of the band, leading them into the ill-conceived and chaotically executed film project Magical Mystery Tour and taking the dominant role in most of their recordings.

Lennon reacted by withdrawing further from the Beatles and focusing on his relationship with artist Yoko Ono. He brought her to the 1968 sessions for The Beatles, the so-called White Album, breaking what Coleman called "a rigid, unwritten rule of the group: that their women would never be allowed in the studios." The other band members resented her presence and treated her coolly, alienating Lennon further. The resulting album, with its fragmented sound, heralded the disintegration of the Beatles into four individualistic musicians rather than a band.

The release of The Beatles was followed a week later by the release of Two Virgins, an album of avant-garde music Lennon and Ono had recorded in his home studio. The cover photo, which showed the couple nude, was banned in some countries and sold in brown paper wrappers in the United States. The music, an aural collage of electronic sounds, attracted much less attention. The Lennon-Ono relationship had become public. Lennon’s divorce was in progress, and Ono suffered a miscarriage in November of 1968. They had also been arrested for possession of drugs, a hazard from which the Beatles had been considered exempt in spite of their public admission that they had used marijuana and LSD.

End of the Beatles
The Beatles’ musical estrangement deepened and was documented in the movie Let It Be, filmed in 1969 as they worked on what was to be their last album. Their financial affairs were also in disarray: their company, Apple Corps, Ltd., was losing money rapidly, and Lennon said in an interview with Coleman in January of 1969 that "if it carries on like this all of us will be broke in the next six months." It was the business crisis that brought things to a head: Lennon invited Allen Klein, an American promoter, to take over as the Beatles’ manager, but McCartney refused to sign a contract with Klein. Late in 1969 Lennon informed the others that he no longer considered himself a Beatle, but was persuaded not to make a public announcement until the group’s financial position was stabilized. The breakup became public when McCartney released his first solo album in the spring of 1970.

Lennon had already moved on, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Yoko in 1969, releasing three singles, "Give Peace a Chance," "Cold Turkey," and "Instant Karma," and performing at the Toronto Peace Festival in September of 1969. He released his first real solo album, Plastic Ono Band, in 1970. The record, made in the wake of his primal scream therapy with psychiatrist Arthur Janov, was as much a therapeutic as a musical exercise. Riley, in Tell Me Why, wrote: "These confessional songs seek out the idealized state of childhood, the pain of individuation, the fragility of fantasies and the very real power of illusions…. The soul-baring leanness of the sound embodies the crux of what rock ’n’ roll is all about: a restlessness with the status quo, a hopeful dissatisfaction, and a gnawing sense of encumbrance that finds release as it expresses itself."

Lennon’s next album, Imagine, was much more successful commercially, and the title song became the most popular song of Lennon’s solo career. Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone, who considered Plastic Ono Band "a masterpiece," found Imagine a disappointing follow-up, faulting it for it’s "sloppiness and self-absorption." He wrote that Plastic Ono Band, "in its singing and instrumental work, was as much a triumph of artifice as of art. It managed to sound both spontaneous and careful, while Imagine is less of each. Even though it contains a substantial portion of good music, on the heels of [Plastic Ono Band] it only serves to reinforce the questioning of what John’s relationship to rock really is."

Politics and Conceptual Art
Lennon was questioning that relationship, too. Freed from the confines of the Beatles’ wholesome image—something he had resented and struggled against ever since Brian Epstein took the band out of black leather and put them in suits—he began branching out into other activities. Inspired by Ono’s conceptual art, he made several avant-garde films and exhibited a series of erotic lithographs entitled "Bag One." He also began to speak out about politics, which had been another Beatle taboo. He had started to cross that line earlier with the song "Give Peace a Chance" and by returning the medal he had received when the Beatles were made members of the Order of the British Empire, partly as a protest against British support of America’s war in Vietnam. He became especially outspoken after moving to New York City in 1971 and falling in with a group of prominent American radicals.

The radicals wanted Lennon to join the protests at the 1972 Republican Convention in San Diego. Lennon, who suspected they were trying to provoke a riot similar to the one at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, never intended to go. Nevertheless, rumors began to spread, and they were believed by some officials of the Nixon administration, who began a campaign to have Lennon deported as a convicted drug user. The FBI shadowed him, tapped his phone, and filled thousands of pages of files with notes on his musical and other activities. The case was finally settled in 1975 when a court declared that Lennon’s British marijuana conviction was not grounds for deportation under U.S. law.

While Lennon was still under the influence of, as he wrote in Skywriting by Word of Mouth, "male-macho ‘serious revolutionaries’ and their insane ideas about killing people to save them from capitalism," he recorded a politically didactic single, "Power to the People"—which he recalled as "rather embarrassing"—and another album with Ono, Some Time in New York City. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden called the record "incipient artistic suicide," while acknowledging that "John sings better than ever." Holden observed: "Some Time in New York City is … entirely devoted to propaganda. But as propaganda it is so embarrassingly puerile as to constitute an advertisement against itself…. The tunes are shallow and derivative and the words little more than sloppy nursery rhymes that patronize the issues and individuals they seek to exalt."

In 1973 Lennon and Ono separated, she staying in New York and he going to Los Angeles on what he later described to Playboy as a "lost weekend that lasted eighteen months." Drinking heavily, Lennon was thrown out of nightclubs and was a staple of gossip columns for much of that time. He also released three albums. The first two, Mind Games and Walls and Bridges, turned away from politics, back toward the musical territory of Imagine. While neither was particularly well received by critics, Walls and Bridges did bring Lennon his first American Number One hit, the single "Whatever Gets You Through the Night."

For his next record—which was to be his last for five years—he turned to legendary producer Phil Spector to make an album of old rock and roll songs. This was in part a legal obligation, part of an out-of-court settlement with Chuck Berry’s publisher who claimed that Lennon had lifted the line "Here come old flattop" in "Come Together" from Berry’s "You Can’t Catch Me." To avoid a lawsuit, Lennon had agreed to record several Berry tunes, and he decided to fill out the album with other fifties classics. The sessions did not go well: Spector’s eccentric, paranoid behavior, combined with Lennon’s drinking, made the sessions prolonged, expensive, and unproductive. Finally Spector took the tapes and withdrew to his walled house with its armed guards and attack dogs and refused to give the recordings to Lennon. It took months to recover the tapes, and when Spector finally did relinquish them they turned out to be all but unusable. Eventually Lennon went into a New York studio to record ten songs in a week to complete the album. Rock ’n’Rollwas released early in 1975 to lukewarm reviews and unimpressive sales, though a few critics, including Steve Simeis of Stereo Review, considered it among his best work.

Five-Year Musical Hiatus
At about the same time Lennon and Ono were reconciled, and the Beatles were finally dissolved as a legal entity. Chet Flippo recalled in The Ballad of John and Yoko that Lennon later remarked to him that it was "the first time in thirteen years that he had not been under written contract to at least someone …. It was his desire now to exert that freedom by quitting rock & roll." Quit he did, resisting calls for a Beatles reunion from fans and promoters; he always insisted that he had no regrets about the breakup of the band and no desire to look back, and he believed that his solo work was as good as, if not better than, anything the Beatles had done. He retired to his apartment in the Dakota building on Central Park West to raise his new son, Sean, and dabble in house-husbandry. "I’m a housewife who also has a nanny and an assistant and a cook and a cleaner," he told Playboy. "I wasn’t a poor strugglin’ housewife who had to cook three meals a day…. [But] it wasn’t a lark. The serious intent was to orchestrate what went into the baby’s mind and body for at least five years."

Lennon’s sabbatical came to an end in 1980 when, on a trip to Bermuda, he heard the music of the B-52s. "It sounds just like Yoko’s music," he told Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone, "so I said to meself, ’It’s time to get out the old axe and wake the wife up!" Lennon and Ono wrote 25 songs in the next few weeks, and were soon in the studio recording. The resulting album, Double Fantasy, was different from their previous collaborations: it was their first album of pop songs on which they received equal billing, alternating writing credits and lead vocals throughout. Subtitled "A Heart Play," it presented, as Rolling Stone’s Holden wrote, "the Lennon’s marriage as an exemplary pop fairy tale."

Double Fantasy received mixed reviews, with some critics expressing disappointment that the pop music trends of the late seventies seemed to have passed Lennon by. As Steve Simeis of Stereo Review noted, much of the music on Lennon’s comeback album was nearer to "what the industry calls Adult Contemporary" than to the cutting edge of rock. Nevertheless, the single "Starting Over" went quickly to number one, and Lennon and Ono continued to spend many hours in the studio working on their next record.

Upon returning home from a recording session on December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot five times by a self-described fan, Mark Chapman, for whom he had signed an autograph earlier that day. He was dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. Crowds gathered outside the Dakota as soon as the news broke, and many remained there for days, singing "Give Peace a Chance," "Imagine," and other Lennon songs.

Ken Tucker wrote in Rock of Ages: "Lennon’s death was a crucial event in rock culture…. [It] was the ultimate example of the era’s fragmentation. All the media pundits repeated the same phrase—‘the dream is over’—and it was: Rock fans were forever separated from the myth of the Beatles. There was nothing left but to face the future." Lester Bangs, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted that much of the grief was at odds with Lennon’s own attitude toward the past: "John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you. … The Beatles were most of all a moment. … It is for that moment—not for John Lennon the man—that you are mourning."

Stereo Review’s Simels summed up that moment: "John Lennon was the coolest guy in the universe. Cooler than Elvis (dumb greaser!), cooler than Brando or James Dean or Lord Byron or Willie Sutton or Muhammad Ali or Cary Grant or Robert de Niro or Bruce Springsteen. Cooler than Elvis Costello even…. He had wit, style, and songwriting genius. He invented the world’s most exclusive men’s club and made millions of dollars thumbing his nose at the Establishment. He gave countless people joy and in the process changed the world a couple of times…. His finest work … constitutes an achievement as personal and innovative and moving as can be found in the history of the music he helped shape."

Selected discography

With the Beatles
Please Please Me, Parlophone, 1963.
With the Beatles, Parlophone, 1963.
A Hard Day’s Night, Parlophone, 1964.
Beatles for Sale, Parlophone, 1964.
Help!, Parlophone, 1965.
Rubber Soul, Parlophone, 1965.
Yesterday … and Today, Capitol, 1966.
Revolver, Parlophone, 1966.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967.
Magical Mystery Tour, Capitol, 1967.
The Beatles, Apple, 1968.
Yellow Submarine, Apple, 1969.
Abbey Road, Apple, 1969.
Let It Be, Apple, 1970.
Hey Jude, Apple, 1970.
The Beatles—Circa 1960—In the Beginning, Polydor, 1970.
The Beatles 1962-1966, Apple, 1973.
The Beatles 1967-1970, Apple, 1973.
Rock ’n’ Roll Music, Capitol, 1976.
The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, Capitol, 1977.
The Beatles Live! At the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany: 1962, Lingasong, 1977.
Love Songs, Capitol, 1977.
Rarities, Capitol, 1979.
Dawn of the Silver Beatles, PAC, 1981.
Reel Music, Capitol, 1982.
Twenty Greatest Hits, Capitol, 1982.
Past Masters Volume One, Parlophone, 1988.
Past Masters Volume Two, Parlophone, 1988.

With Yoko Ono
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Apple, 1968.
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions, Apple, 1969.
Wedding Album, Apple, 1969.
Some Time in New York City, Apple, 1972.
Double Fantasy, Geffen, 1980.
Milk and Honey, Polydor, 1984.

With the Plastic Ono Band
The Plastic Ono Band—Live Peace in Toronto, Apple, 1969.
Plastic Ono Band, Apple, 1970.

Solo releases
Imagine, Apple, 1971.
Mind Games, Apple, 1973.
Walls and Bridges, Apple, 1974.
Rock ’n’Roll, Apple, 1975.
Shaved Fish, Apple, 1975.
The John Lennon Collection, Geffen, 1982.
Reflections and Poetry, Silhouette, 1984.
Menlove Avenue, Capitol, 1986.
John Lennon: Live in New York City, Capitol, 1986.
Imagine John Lennon: Music From the Original Motion Picture, Capitol, 1988.
Lennon, Capitol, 1990.

Selected writings
In His Own Write, Simon & Schuster, 1964.

A Spaniard in the Works, Simon & Schuster, 1965.

John Lennon’s Erotic Lithographs, edited by Ralph Ginzburg, Avant-Garde Media, 1970.

The Writings of John Lennon, Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Skywriting by Word of Mouth, Harper & Row, 1986.

Sources
Books
The Ballad of John and Yoko, edited by Jonathan Cott and Christine Doudna, Rolling Stone Press, 1982.
Bangs, Lester, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Vintage Books, 1988.
Castleman, Harry, and Walter J. Podrazik, All Together Now: The First Complete Beatles Discography, Ballantine, 1975.
Coleman, Ray, Lennon: The Definitive Biography, McGraw-Hill, 1984, revised, Harperperennial, 1993.
Davies, Hunter, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography, McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Goldman, Albert, The Lives of John Lennon, Morrow, 1988.
Lennon, John, Skywriting by Word of Mouth, Harper & Row, 1986.
Lewisohn, Mark, The Beatles: Recording Sessions, Harmony Books, 1988.
Martin, George, All You Need Is Ears, St. Martin’s, 1979.
Reinhart, Charles, You Can’t Do That: Beatles Bootlegs and Novelty Records, Contemporary Books, 1981.
Riley, Tim, Tell Me Why, Knopf, 1989.
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’Roll, edited by Jim Miller, Rolling Stone Press, 1986.
Sheff, David, and G. Barry Golson, The Playboy Interviews With John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Berkley Books, 1981.
Wenner, Jann, Lennon Remembers, Popular Library, 1982.
Wiener, Allen J., The Beatles: A Recording History, McFarland, 1986.
Wiener, Jon, Come Together: John Lennon and His Time, Random House, 1984.
Ward, Ed, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll, Rolling Stone Press, 1986.

Periodicals
Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1980.
Rolling Stone, October 28, 1971 ; July 20, 1972.
Stereo Review, March 1981.

"Lennon" redirects here. For other uses, see Lennon (disambiguation).

For other people named John Lennon, see John Lennon (disambiguation).

John Lennon MBE
Lennon rehearses "Give Peace a Chance" in Montreal, Canada, in 1969
Background information
Birth name	John Winston Lennon
Born	(1940-10-09)9 October 1940 Liverpool, England, UK
Died	8 December 1980(1980-12-08) (aged 40) New York, New York, US
Genres	Rock, pop
Occupations	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, artist, writer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica, harmonium, electronic organ, six-string bass
Years active	1957–75, 1980
Labels	Parlophone, Capitol, Apple, EMI, Geffen, Polydor
Associated acts	The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Plastic Ono Band, The Dirty Mac, Yoko Ono
Website	www.johnlennon.com
Notable instruments
Rickenbacker 325 Epiphone Casino Gibson J-160E

Lennon's signature

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film, and in interviews. Controversial through his political and peace activism, he moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him, while some of his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement.

As of 2012 Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units, and as writer, co-writer or performer, he is responsible for 25 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart. In 2002 a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all-time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

History

1940–57: Early years

Further information: Julia Lennon, Alfred Lennon, and Mimi Smith

Lennon was born in war-time England, on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia and Alfred Lennon, a merchant seaman who was away at the time of his son's birth.^[1] He was named John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.^[2] His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother,^[3] but the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944.^[4]^[5] When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia—by then pregnant with another man's child—rejected the idea.^[6] After her sister, Mimi Smith, twice complained to Liverpool's Social Services, Julia handed the care of Lennon over to her. In July 1946 Lennon's father visited Smith and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him.^[7] Julia followed them—with her partner at the time, 'Bobby' Dykins—and after a heated argument his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her.^[8] It would be 20 years before he had contact with his father again.^[9]

A grey two-story building, with numerous windows visible on both levels

251 Menlove Avenue, the home of George and Mimi Smith, where Lennon lived for most of his childhood and adolescence

Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence he lived with his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, who had no children of their own, at Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton.^[10] His aunt bought him volumes of short stories, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving crossword puzzles.^[11] Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and when he was 11 years old he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, and taught him the banjo, learning how to play "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino.^[12]

In September 1980 he talked about his family and his rebellious nature:

Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not. Because of my attitude, all the other boys' parents ... instinctively recognised what I was, which was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their kids, which I did ... I did my best to disrupt every friend's home ... Partly, maybe, it was out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home, but I really did ... There were five women who were my family. Five strong, intelligent women. Five sisters. Those women were fantastic ... that was my first feminist education ... One happened to be my mother ... she just couldn't deal with life. She had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and when I was four-and-a-half, I ended up living with her elder sister ... the fact that I wasn't with my parents made me see that parents are not gods.^[13]

He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood. Seven years Lennon's senior, Parkes took him on trips, and to local cinemas.^[14] During the school holidays, Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, often travelling to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby.^[15] After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16."^[16] He was 14 years old when his uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955 (aged 52).^[17]

Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School.^[18] From September 1952 to 1957, after passing his Eleven-Plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, and was described by Harvey at the time as, "A happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad."^[19] He often drew comical cartoons which appeared in his own self-made school magazine called The Daily Howl,^[20] but despite his artistic talent, his school reports were damning: "Certainly on the road to failure ... hopeless ... rather a clown in class ... wasting other pupils' time."^[21]

His mother bought him his first guitar in 1956, an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she "lent" her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house, and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations.^[22] As Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, she hoped he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it".^[23] On 15 July 1958, when Lennon was 17 years old, his mother, walking home after visiting the Smiths' house, was struck by a car and killed.^[24]

Lennon failed all his GCE O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art only after his aunt and headmaster intervened.^[25] Once at the college, he started wearing Teddy Boy clothes and acquired a reputation for disrupting classes and ridiculing teachers. As a result, he was excluded from the painting class, then the graphic arts course, and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour, which included sitting on a nude model's lap during a life drawing class.^[26] He failed an annual exam, despite help from fellow student and future wife Cynthia Powell, and was "thrown out of the college before his final year."^[27]

1957–70: The Quarrymen to The Beatles

Further information: The Quarrymen, Lennon–McCartney, Brian Epstein, The Beatles, Beatlemania, British Invasion, and More popular than Jesus

1957–65: Formation, commercial breakout, and touring years

Lennon playing with The Beatles in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania

The Beatles evolved from Lennon's first band, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by him in September 1956 when he was 15, and began as a skiffle group.^[28] By the summer of 1957 the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half skiffle, and half rock and roll.^[29] Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, held in Woolton on 6 July at the St. Peter's Church garden fête, after which McCartney was asked to join the band.^[30]

McCartney says that Aunt Mimi: "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon.^[31] According to Paul's brother Mike, McCartney's father was also disapproving, declaring Lennon would get his son "into trouble";^[32] although he later allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the McCartneys' front room at 20 Forthlin Road.^[33]^[34] During this time, the 18-year-old Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", a UK top 10 hit for The Fourmost nearly five years later.^[35]

George Harrison joined the band as lead guitarist,^[36] even though Lennon thought Harrison (at 14 years old) was too young to join the band, so McCartney engineered a second audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" for Lennon.^[37] Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist.^[38] Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year The Beatles, engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, Germany, and desperately in need of a drummer, asked Pete Best to join them.^[39] Lennon was now 19, and his aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with him to continue his art studies instead.^[40] After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. Like the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg,^[41] and regularly took the drug, as well as amphetamines, as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.^[42]

Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager from 1962, had no prior experience of artist management, but nevertheless had a strong influence on their early dress code and attitude on stage.^[43] Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying, "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me".^[44] McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and drummer Ringo Starr replaced Best, completing the four-piece line-up that would endure until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached #17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, Please Please Me, in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963,^[45] a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold,^[46] which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, Twist and Shout.^[47] The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With few exceptions—one being the album title itself—Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs ... pop songs with no more thought of them than that–to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant".^[45] In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised John: "He was like our own little Elvis ... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest".^[48]

The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK during the beginning of 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at his audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands ... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery."^[49] After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, moviemaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works.^[50] The Beatles received recognition from the British Establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1965.^[51]

Lennon grew concerned that fans attending Beatles' concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result.^[52] Lennon's "Help!" expressed his own feelings in 1965: "I meant it ... It was me singing 'help'".^[53] He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his "Fat Elvis" period),^[54] and felt he was subconsciously seeking change.^[55] The following January he was unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by Lennon, Harrison and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug.^[56] When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in an elevator at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire: "We were all screaming ... hot and hysterical."^[56] A few months later in March, during an interview with Evening Standard reporter Maureen Cleave, Lennon remarked, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink ... We're more popular than Jesus now—I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity."^[57] The comment went virtually unnoticed in England but caused great offence in the US when quoted by a magazine there five months later. The furore that followed—burning of Beatles' records, Ku Klux Klan activity, and threats against Lennon—contributed to the band's decision to stop touring.^[58]

1966–70: Studio years, break-up and solo work

Lennon (right) performing "All You Need Is Love" with The Beatles in 1967 to 400 million viewers of "Our World".

Deprived of the routine of live performances after their final commercial concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon felt lost and considered leaving the band.^[59] Since his involuntary introduction to LSD in January, he had made increasing use of the drug, and was almost constantly under its influence for much of the year."^[60] According to biographer Ian MacDonald, Lennon's continuous experience with LSD during the year brought him "close to erasing his identity".^[61] 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by TIME magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness",^[62] and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed Lennon's lyrics contrasting strongly with the simple love songs of the Lennon–McCartney's early years.

In August, after having been introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended a weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales,^[63] and were informed of Epstein's death during the seminar. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared".^[64] They later travelled to Maharishi's ashram in India for further guidance, where they composed most of the songs for The Beatles and Abbey Road.^[65]

The anti-war, black comedy How I Won the War, featuring Lennon's only appearance in a non–Beatles' full-length film, was shown in cinemas in October 1967.^[66] McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project,^[67] the self-written, -produced and -directed television film Magical Mystery Tour, released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's acclaimed, Lewis Carroll-inspired "I am the Walrus", was a success.^[68]^[69] With Epstein gone, the band members became increasingly involved in business activities, and in February 1968 they formed Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation comprising Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve, "artistic freedom within a business structure",^[70] but his increased drug experimentation and growing preoccupation with Yoko Ono, and McCartney's own marriage plans, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role, but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon approached Allen Klein, who had managed The Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr,^[71] but McCartney never signed the management contract.^[72]

	"Give Peace a Chance" Sample of "Give Peace a Chance", recorded in 1969 during Lennon and Ono's second Bed-In for Peace. As described by biographer Bill Harry, Lennon wanted to "write a peace anthem that would take over from the song 'We Shall Overcome'—and he succeeded ... it became the main anti-Vietnam protest song."^[73]
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At the end of 1968, Lennon featured in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (not released until 1996) in the role of a Dirty Mac band member. The supergroup, comprising Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell, also backed a vocal performance by Ono in the film.^[74] Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969, and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon,^[75] eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated.^[76] Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond The Beatles and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins^[77] (known more for its cover than for its music), Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions and Wedding Album. In 1969 they formed The Plastic Ono Band, releasing Live Peace in Toronto 1969. In protest at Britain's involvement in the Nigerian Civil War,^[78] Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen, though this had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced.^[79] Between 1969 and 1970 Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance" (widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam-War anthem in 1969),^[80] "Cold Turkey" (documenting his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin^[81]) and "Instant Karma!".

Lennon left the group in September 1969,^[82] and agreed not to inform the media while the band renegotiated their recording contract, but he was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!"^[83] He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."^[84] In later interviews with Rolling Stone magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record."^[85] He spoke too of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison, and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"^[86]

1970–80: Solo career

1970–72: Initial solo success and activism

Advertisement for "Imagine" from Billboard, 18 September 1971.

In 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for four months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but they felt no need to continue and returned to London.^[87] Lennon's emotional debut solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), was received with high praise. Critic Greil Marcus remarked, "John's singing in the last verse of 'God' may be the finest in all of rock."^[88] The album featured the songs "Mother", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection,^[89] and the Dylanesque "Working Class Hero", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric "you're still fucking peasants", fell foul of broadcasters.^[90]^[91] The same year, Tariq Ali's revolutionary political views, expressed when he interviewed Lennon, inspired the singer to write "Power to the People". Lennon also became involved with Ali during a protest against Oz magazine's prosecution for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as "disgusting fascism", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single "God Save Us/Do the Oz" and joined marches in support of the magazine.^[92]

	"Imagine" Sample of "Imagine", Lennon's "most famous post-Beatles' track."^[93] Like "Give Peace a Chance", the song became an anti-war anthem, but its lyrics offended religious groups. Lennon's explanation was, "If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion, but without this 'my God is bigger than your God' thing—then it can be true."^[94]
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With Lennon's next album, Imagine (1971), critical response was more guarded. Rolling Stone reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant".^[95] The album's title track would become an anthem for anti-war movements,^[96] while another, "How Do You Sleep?", was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics from Ram that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed,^[97] were directed at him and Ono. However, Lennon softened his stance in the mid-1970s and said he had written "How Do You Sleep?" about himself.^[98] He said in 1980: "I used my resentment against Paul ... to create a song ... not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta ... I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and The Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go 'round with those thoughts in my head all the time".^[99]

Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971, and in December released "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".^[100] To advertise the single, they paid for billboards in 12 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "WAR IS OVER—IF YOU WANT IT".^[101] The new year saw the Nixon Administration take what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war propaganda, embarking on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him: embroiled in a continuing legal battle, he was denied permanent residency in the US until 1976.^[102]

Recorded as a collaboration with Ono and with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory, Some Time in New York City was released in 1972. Containing songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland, and Lennon's problems obtaining a green card,^[103] the album was poorly received—unlistenable, according to one critic.^[104] "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", released as a US single from the album the same year, was televised on 11 May, on The Dick Cavett Show. Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger".^[105] Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility.^[106] Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances.^[107]

1973–75: "Lost weekend"

Publicity photo of John Lennon and host Tom Snyder from the television program Tomorrow. Done in 1975, this was the last television interview Lennon gave before his death in 1980.

While Lennon was recording Mind Games (1973), he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his "lost weekend",^[108] was spent in Los Angeles and New York in the company of May Pang. Mind Games, credited to the "Plastic U.F.Ono Band", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed "I'm the Greatest", to Starr's album Ringo (1973), released the same month. (an alternate take, from the same 1973 Ringo sessions, with Lennon providing a guide vocal, appears on John Lennon Anthology).

In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. Two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club in March, the first when Lennon placed a menstruation "towel" on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress, and the second, two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers.^[109] Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album Pussy Cats and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians^[110] but after a month of further debauchery, with the recording sessions in chaos, Lennon moved to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on The Very Best of Mick Jagger (2007).^[111]

Settled back in New York, Lennon recorded the album Walls and Bridges. Released in October 1974, it yielded his only number-one single in his lifetime, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", featuring Elton John on backing vocals and piano.^[112] A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's Goodnight Vienna (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano.^[113] On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night"—a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted—reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There", which he introduced as "a song by an old estranged fiancee of mine called Paul".^[114]

Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording.^[115] The same month, Elton John topped the charts with his cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals (Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of "Dr. Winston O'Boogie"). He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. Lennon released Rock 'n' Roll (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. "Stand by Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years.^[116] He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special A Salute to Lew Grade, recorded on 18 April and televised in June.^[117] Playing acoustic guitar, and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from Rock 'n' Roll ("Stand By Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine".^[117]

1975–80: Retirement and return

With the birth of his second son Sean on 9 October 1975, Lennon took on the role of househusband, beginning what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry during which he gave all his attention to his family.^[13] Within the month, he fulfilled his contractual obligation to EMI/Capitol for one more album by releasing Shaved Fish, a compilation album of previously recorded tracks.^[13] He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6 am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him.^[118] He wrote "Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)" for Starr's Ringo's Rotogravure (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980.^[119] He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family."^[120] During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed "mad stuff",^[121] all of which would be published posthumously.

He emerged from retirement in October 1980 with the single "(Just Like) Starting Over", followed the next month by the album Double Fantasy, which contained songs written during a journey to Bermuda on a 43-foot sailing boat the previous June,^[122] that reflected Lennon's fulfillment in his new-found stable family life.^[123] Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album Milk and Honey (released posthumously in 1984).^[124] Released jointly with Ono, Double Fantasy was not well received, drawing comments such as Melody Maker's "indulgent sterility ... a godawful yawn".^[125]

8 December 1980: Death

Main article: Death of John Lennon

At around 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980, as Lennon and Ono returned to their New York apartment in The Dakota, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times at the entrance to the building. Lennon was taken to the emergency room of the nearby Roosevelt Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:07 pm.^[126] Earlier that evening, Lennon had autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Chapman.^[127]

Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John", ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him."^[128] His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created.^[129] Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life; as of 2011, he remains in prison, having been denied parole six times.^[130]^[131]

Personal relationships

Cynthia Lennon

Further information: Cynthia Lennon

John Lennon and Cynthia Powell in 1959

Lennon and Cynthia Powell met in 1957 as fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art.^[132] Although being scared of Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he screamed out, "I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?"^[133] She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend at the time to visit him.^[134] Lennon, jealous by nature, eventually grew possessive and often terrified Powell with his anger and physical violence.^[135] Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude to women. The Beatles' song "Getting Better", he said, told his own story, "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically—any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace".^[13]

Recalling his reaction in July 1962 on learning that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married."^[136] The couple were married on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool. His marriage began just as Beatlemania took hold across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day, and would continue to do so almost daily from then on.^[137] Epstein, fearing that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his son until three days later.^[138]

Cynthia attributes the start of the marriage breakdown to LSD, and as a result, she felt that he slowly lost interest in her.^[139] When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales, in 1967, for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolize the ending of their marriage.^[140] After arriving home at Kenwood, and finding Lennon with Ono, Cynthia left the house to stay with friends. Alexis Mardas later claimed to have slept with her that night, and a few weeks later he informed her that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian on grounds of her adultery with him. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to her divorcing him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court, with Lennon giving her £100,000, and custody of Julian.^[141]

Brian Epstein

Starr, McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Epstein at the preview of A Hard Day’s Night in 1964

Further information: Brian Epstein

The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in 1962, when all four Beatles were introduced to Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual. According to biographer Philip Norman, one of his reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was physically attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, leading to speculation about their relationship. Questioned about it later, Lennon said, "Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this."^[142] Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club MC Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke,^[143] but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the honeymoon, deferred, was still two months in the future.^[144] To Lennon, who was intoxicated with alcohol at the time, the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in".^[145]

Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish.^[146] When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered Queer Jew; on learning of the eventual title, A Cellarful of Noise, he parodied, "More like A Cellarful of Boys".^[147] He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't."^[146] During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".^[148]^[149]

Julian Lennon

Further information: Julian Lennon

Julian Lennon at the unveiling of the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool, 2010

Lennon's first son, Julian, was born as his commitments with The Beatles intensified at the height of Beatlemania during his marriage to Cynthia. Lennon was touring with The Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced public knowledge of such things would threaten The Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalls how some four years later, as a small child in Weybridge, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'"^[150] Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles' song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song."^[151] McCartney corroborated Lennon's explanation that Julian innocently came up with the name.^[151] Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into The Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."^[152]

Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono's 1971 move to New York, Julian would not see his father again until 1973.^[153] With Pang's encouragement, it was arranged for him (and his mother) to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland.^[154] Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a Walls and Bridges track.^[155] He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques.^[155] Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."^[156]

In a Playboy interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean was a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to re-establish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future."^[13] After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.^[157]

Yoko Ono

Further information: Yoko Ono

John Lennon with Yoko Ono by Jack Mitchell, 1980

Two versions exist of how Lennon met Ono. According to the first, on 9 November 1966 Lennon went to the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar.^[158] Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono had supposedly not heard of The Beatles, but relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in."^[13] The second version, told by McCartney, is that in late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage was working on, Notations, but McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book, suggesting that Lennon might oblige. When asked, Lennon gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word".^[159]

Ono began telephoning and calling at Lennon's home, and when his wife asked for an explanation, he explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit".^[160] In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn."^[161] When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi."^[162] Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child they named John Ono Lennon II on 21 November 1968,^[129] a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.^[163]

During Lennon's last two years in The Beatles, he and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry,^[164] so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance".^[165] They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in The Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko".^[166] Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, made famous three months earlier by The Beatles' Let It Be rooftop concert. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth.^[167] After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on The Beatles' last album, Abbey Road.^[168] To escape the acrimony of the band's break-up, Ono suggested they move permanently to New York, which they did on 31 August 1971.

They first lived in the St. Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue, East 55th Street, then moved to a street-level flat at 105 Bank Street, Greenwich Village, on 16 October 1971. After a robbery, they relocated to the more secure Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street, in May 1973.^[169]

May Pang

Further information: May Pang

May Pang

ABKCO Industries, formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records, recruited May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. After she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged from one another. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, "He likes you a lot." Pang, 22, astounded by Ono's proposition, eventually agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon moved to California, beginning an 18-month period he later called his "lost weekend".^[108] In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles' roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson. Whilst drinking with Nilsson, after misunderstanding something Pang said, Lennon attempted to strangle her, relenting only when physically restrained by Nilsson.^[170]

On moving to New York, they prepared a spare room in their newly rented apartment for Julian to visit.^[170] Lennon, hitherto inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he was refusing to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono—who said she had found a cure for smoking. But after the meeting he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her Lennon was unavailable, being exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment, stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.^[171]

Sean Lennon

Further information: Sean Lennon

When Lennon and Ono were reunited, she became pregnant, but having previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon, she said she wanted an abortion. She agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband; this he agreed to do.^[172] Sean was born on 9 October 1975, Lennon's 35th birthday, delivered by Caesarean section. Lennon's subsequent career break would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year, and created numerous drawings for him, posthumously published as Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. Lennon later proudly declared, "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish."^[173]

Former Beatles

Further information: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr

Lennon (left) and the rest of The Beatles arriving in the US in 1964

Although his friendship with Starr remained consistently warm during the years following The Beatles' break-up in 1970, Lennon's relationship with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was close to Harrison initially, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to America. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 Dark Horse tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage, but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve The Beatles' legal partnership. (Lennon eventually signed the papers while holidaying in Florida with Pang and Julian.^[174]) Harrison incensed Lennon in 1980 when he published an autobiography that made little mention of him. Lennon told Playboy, "I was hurt by it. By glaring omission ... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch ... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book."^[175]

Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him through the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974 even played music together again, before growing apart once more. Lennon said that during McCartney's final visit, in April 1976, they watched the episode of Saturday Night Live in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 cash offer to get The Beatles to reunite on the show.^[176] The pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but were too tired.^[13] Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with...only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono....That ain't bad picking."^[177]

Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his five-year career break he was content to sit back so long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre "product".^[178] When McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, the year Lennon returned to the studio and the last year of his life, he took notice. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head.^[178] Asked the same year whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."^[13]

Political activism

Further information: Bed-In and Bagism

Lennon and Ono sit in front of flowers and placards bearing the word "peace." Lennon is only partly visible, and he holds an acoustic guitar. Ono wears a white dress, and there is a hanging microphone in front of her. In the foreground of the image are three men, one of them a guitarist facing away, and a woman.

Recording "Give Peace a Chance" during the Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal

Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as what they termed a "Bed-In for Peace" at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule.^[179]^[180] At a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal^[181] Lennon wrote and recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Released as a single, it was quickly taken up as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 October, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day.^[80]^[182]

Later that year, Lennon and Ono supported efforts by the family of James Hanratty, hanged for murder in 1962, to prove his innocence.^[183] Those who had condemned Hanratty were, according to Lennon, "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets. ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene."^[184] In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty",^[78] and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld.^[185]

Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000.^[186] On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.^[187] Another peace activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug.^[188] In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others.^[189] Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming Some Time in New York City album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, Michigan State had drastically reduced the penalties for Sinclair's crimes and three days after the rally, he was released on bail.^[190] The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on John Lennon Anthology (1998).^[191]

Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, in which 13 unarmed civil rights protesters were shot dead by the British Army, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA (who were not involved in the incident) he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their Some Time in New York City album: "Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5 suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA though this was swiftly denied by Ono.^[192] Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film The Irish Tapes, a political documentary with a Republican slant.^[193]

According to FBI surveillance reports (and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006) Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968.^[194] However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary since he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".^[195]

Deportation attempt

Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", both strongly associated with the anti–Vietnam War movement, the Nixon administration, hearing rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention,^[196] tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his re-election;^[197] Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon.^[198] The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanor conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three and a half years in and out of deportation hearings until on 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating " ... the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds."^[199]^[103] While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. Lennon and Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America.^[200] In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:

John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!^[201]^[202]

On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days.^[203] Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people".^[204] Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.^[205] Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem", which comprised three seconds of silence.^[206] Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, Lennon received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.^[207]

FBI surveillance and declassified documents

The FBI conducted clandestine surveillance on Lennon in the early 1970s. Here is a confidential letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the Attorney General about the surveillance. Historian Jon Wiener used the Freedom of Information Act with help from ACLU lawyers to push for the eventual release of these documents.

After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files documenting the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt.^[208] The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages.^[209] The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991.^[210] The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case.^[211] In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.^[211] Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges".^[212] The story is told in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.^[213]

Further information: Jon_Wiener#Wiener_battles_with_the_FBI

Writing and art

Lennon's biographer Bill Harry writes that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons, and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the Daily Howl. The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the Daily Howl to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen band mate, Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon "had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up", and in Lennon's story A Carrot In A Potato Mine, "the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier." Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, "Why?". Above was a flying pancake, and below, "a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog—also wearing glasses".^[214]

Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that In His Own Write (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around The Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the Daily Howl it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail—until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". The Times Literary Supplement considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". Book Week reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".^[215]

In combination with A Spaniard in the Works (1965), In His Own Write formed the basis of the stage play The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write, co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at the Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together to date.^[216] After Lennon's death, further works were published, including Skywriting by Word of Mouth (1986); Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words; and Real Love: The Drawings for Sean (1999). The Beatles Anthology (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.

Musicianship

Instruments played

Further information: John Lennon's musical instruments and List of The Beatles' instruments

Lennon's Les Paul Jr.

His playing of a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger left it on a bus.^[217] The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play harmonica, often using the instrument during The Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.^[218] As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior.^[219]^[220] Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles' numbers that occupied McCartney with another instrument.^[221] His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including "Imagine", described as his best-known solo work.^[222] His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of The Beatles' first US number one, "I Want to Hold Your Hand".^[223] In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles' recording until "Strawberry Fields Forever" in late 1966.^[224]

Vocal style

When Lennon recorded "Twist and Shout", the final track during the mammoth one-day session that captured the band's 1963 debut album Please Please Me, his voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming."^[225] In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll."^[226] The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it ... Make it different.'"^[227] Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques. Music critic Robert Christgau says that Lennon's "greatest vocal performance ... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically ... echoed, filtered, and double tracked."^[228]

As his Beatles' era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes that Lennon was, "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band."^[229] David Stuart Ryan notes Lennon's vocal delivery to range from, "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style.^[230] Wiener too describes contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair"^[231] Music historian Ben Urish recalls hearing The Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak ... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."^[232]

Legacy

John Lennon Peace Monument, Liverpool

Music historians Schinder and Schwartz, writing of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s, say that The Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionized the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers".^[233] Liam Gallagher, his group Oasis among the many who acknowledge the band's influence, identifies Lennon as a hero; in 1999 he named his first child Lennon Gallagher in tribute.^[234] On National Poetry Day in 1999, after conducting a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric, the BBC announced "Imagine" the winner.^[94]

In a 2006 Guardian article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today."^[235] Whilst for music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."^[236]

Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2010, on what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday, the John Lennon Peace Monument was unveiled in Chavasse Park, Liverpool, by Cynthia and Julian Lennon.^[237] The sculpture entitled 'Peace & Harmony' exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription "Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980".

Awards and sales

Statue in John Lennon Park, Havana, Cuba

The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer Lennon has had 25 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.^a His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units.^[238] Double Fantasy, released shortly before his death, and his best-selling, post-Beatles' studio album^[239] at three million shipments in the US,^[240] won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.^[241] The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music went to Lennon.^[242]

Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons".^[243] Between 2003 and 2008, Rolling Stone recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time"^[244] and 38th of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time",^[245] and his albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, 22nd and 76th respectively of "The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".^[245]^[246] He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965.^[51] He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987^[247] and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.^[107]

Discography

Statue outside the Cavern Club, Liverpool

Main article: John Lennon discography

Notes

^ Note a: Lennon was responsible for 25 Billboard Hot 100 number one singles as performer, writer or co-writer.

Solo (2): "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", "(Just Like) Starting Over".^[248]
With The Beatles (20): "Can't Buy Me Love", "I Feel Fine", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "Love Me Do", "She Loves You", "A Hard Day's Night", "Eight Days a Week", "Help!", "Ticket to Ride", "Yesterday", "Paperback Writer", "We Can Work It Out", "All You Need Is Love", "Hello Goodbye", "Penny Lane", "Hey Jude", "Something/"Come Together", "Get Back", "Let It Be", "The Long and Winding Road"/"For You Blue".^[249]
As co-writer of and performer on release by another artist (1): "Fame" (David Bowie).^[250]
As co-writer of releases by other artists (2): "A World Without Love" (Peter and Gordon),^[251] "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (Elton John).^[252]

Citations

^ Harry 2000b, p. 504.
^ Spitz 2005, p. 24: "Julia offered the name in honour of... Winston Churchill".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 24: "The entire Stanley clan gathered nightly at Newcastle Road".
^ Lennon 2005, p. 54: "Until then he had sent her money each month from his wages, but now it stopped".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 26: "In February 1944 ... he was arrested and imprisoned. Freddie subsequently disappeared for six months".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 27.
^ Lennon 2005, p. 56: "Alf admitted to her that he had planned to take John to live in New Zealand".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 30: "Julia went out of the door... John ran after her".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 497.
^ Lennon 2005, p. 56: "Hard to see why Mimi wanted John, as she had always said she didn't want children".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 32: "When he was old enough, taught John how to solve crossword puzzles".
^ Spitz 2005, p. 48: "To get them started, she applied the triad to 'Ain't That a Shame'".
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Sheff 1981.
^ Spitz 2005, p. 32: "Parkes recalled... Leila and John to the cinema as often as three times a day".
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^ The Very Best of Mick Jagger liner notes
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^ The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum 1996.
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^ ^a ^b Harry 2000b, p. 758.
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^ Warner Brothers 1988.
^ Lennon 2005, p. 305–306: "He had agreed that I should have custody of Julian", "He raised his offer to £100,000".
^ Harry 2000a, p. 232.
^ Harry 2000a, pp. 1165, 1169.
^ Lennon 2005, pp. 94, 119–120.
^ Harry 2000a, p. 1169.
^ ^a ^b Harry 2000b, p. 232.
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^ Times Online 2009.
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^ Two Virgins liner notes
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^ Spitz 2005, p. 800.
^ Kruse 2009, p. 16.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 276.
^ Coleman 1992, p. 550.
^ Coleman 1984b, p. 64.
^ Emerick & Massey 2006, pp. 279–280.
^ "John & Yoko's New York | Baby Boomers | iStopOver Magazine". Magazine.istopover.com. 16 August 2010. http://magazine.istopover.com/2010/08/16/john-yoko-new-york/. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
^ ^a ^b Harry 2000b, p. 700.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 700–701.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 535, 690.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 535.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 195.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 327.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 934–935.
^ Cohn 2010–2011, p. 95.
^ ^a ^b Seaman 1991, p. 122.
^ Miles and Badman 2003, 1969: "They were ridiculed by the world's media".
^ Anderson 2010, p. 83: "The Bed-In stunt was ridiculed by the press".
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 745–748.
^ Holsinger 1999, p. 389.
^ Wenner 2000, p. 43.
^ Clark 2002.
^ Milmo 2002.
^ McGinty 2010.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 344.
^ Buchanan 2009.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 789–790, 812–813.
^ Glenn 2009.
^ Calkin 2002.
^ Bright 2000.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 403.
^ Ali 2006.
^ Brooks 2005.
^ Wiener 1999, p. 2.
^ BBC News 2000.
^ Wiener 1990, p. 225.
^ Coleman 1992, pp. 576–583.
^ BBC News 2006c.
^ Wiener, Jon. "Bob Dylan's defense of John Lennon". The Nation, 8 October 2010
^ "Photo Copy of Bob Dylan's 1972 Letter to the INS in Defense of John Lennon". Lennonfbifiles.com. http://lennonfbifiles.com/natl_comm_john_yoko/bob_dylan.html. Retrieved 8 December 2010.
^ Wiener 1999, p. 326.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 663.
^ Urish & Bielen 2007, p. 143.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 664.
^ Coleman 1984a, p. 289.
^ Wiener 1999, p. 13.
^ Friedman 2005, p. 252.
^ Wiener 1999, p. 315.
^ ^a ^b Wiener 1999, pp. 52–54, 76.
^ Wiener 1999, p. 27.
^ The Associated Press 2006.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 179–181.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 393–394.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 396–397.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 313.
^ Harry 2000b, pp. 738–740.
^ Prown and Newquist 2003, p. 213.
^ Lawrence 2009, p. 27.
^ Everett 1999, p. 297.
^ Blaney 2005, p. 83.
^ Everett 2001, p. 200.
^ Babiuk 2002, pp. 164–165.
^ Wenner 2000, p. 14.
^ Miles and Badman 2003, p. 90.
^ Coleman 1992, pp. 369–370.
^ Wiener 1990, p. 143.
^ Gregory 2007, p. 75.
^ Ryan 1982, pp. 118, 241.
^ Wiener 1990, p. 35.
^ Urish & Bielen 2007, p. 123.
^ Schinder & Schwartz 2007, p. 160.
^ Harry 2000b, p. 265.
^ Wiener 2006.
^ Urish & Bielen 2007, pp. 121–122.
^ The Telegraph (9 October 2010). "Monument to John Lennon unveiled in Liverpool on his '70th birthday'". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/8052634/Monument-to-John-Lennon-unveiled-in-Liverpool-on-his-70th-birthday.html.
^ RIAA 2010b.
^ Greenberg 2010, p. 202.
^ RIAA 2010a.
^ grammy.com.
^ Brit Awards 2010.
^ BBC News 2002.
^ Browne 2008.
^ ^a ^b Rolling Stone 2008.
^ Rolling Stone 2003.
^ Songwriters Hall of Fame 2009.
^ Allmusic 2010a.
^ Allmusic 2010b.
^ Allmusic 2010e.
^ Allmusic 2010d.
^ Allmusic 2010c.

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External links

	Book: John Lennon
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Lennon

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Lennon

John Lennon at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
John Lennon discography at MusicBrainz
John Lennon at the Internet Movie Database
BBC Archive on John Lennon
NPR Archive on John Lennon
John Lennon and Yoko Ono – slideshow by Life magazine
John Lennon hosted by EMI Group Limited
Unveiling of 'Peace & Harmony', European Peace Monument – Dedicated to John Lennon

John Lennon

Studio albums

With Yoko Ono

Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions
Wedding Album
Some Time in New York City
Double Fantasy
Milk and Honey
Double Fantasy Stripped Down

Live albums

Live Peace in Toronto 1969 (with Yoko Ono)
Live in New York City
Live Jam (with Yoko Ono)

Compilations

Soundtracks

Box sets

Books

Films

How I Won the War (1967)
Two Virgins (1968)
No. 5 (1968)
Honeymoon (1969)
Freedom (1970)
Fly (1970)
Legs (1970)
Apotheosis (1970)
Erection (1971)
Imagine (1972)
Dynamite Chicken (1972)
Oh! Calcutta! (1972)
John and Yoko: A Love Story (1985)
Imagine: John Lennon (1988)
Two of Us (2000)
In His Life: The John Lennon Story (2000)
The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006)
The Killing of John Lennon (2006)
Chapter 27 (2007)
I Met the Walrus (2007)
Nowhere Boy (2009)
Lennon Naked (2010)

Family

Alfred Lennon (father)
Julia Lennon (mother)
Mimi Smith (aunt)
George Smith (uncle)
Julia Baird (half-sister)
Cynthia Lennon (1st wife)
Julian Lennon (1st son)
Yoko Ono (2nd wife)
Sean Lennon (2nd son)

People	The Beatles Lennon–McCartney George Harrison May Pang Harry Nilsson John Sinclair Rosaura Lopez Frederic Seaman Plastic Ono Band Mark David Chapman

Media	The Lost Lennon Tapes Come Together: A Night for John Lennon's Words and Music (concert) ROOTS: John Lennon Sings The Great Rock & Roll Hits Pussy Cats Working Class Hero: A Tribute to John Lennon Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur The 30th Annual John Lennon Tribute: Live from the Beacon Theatre, NYC A Toot and a Snore in '74 Lennon (musical) Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon (DVD) The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus

Articles	Assassination 251 Menlove Avenue Bagism Liverpool John Lennon Airport More popular than Jesus John Lennon Museum The Immigrant Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny) Songwriting Contest

The Beatles

v t e The Beatles

John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Stuart Sutcliffe Pete Best

History	The Quarrymen In Hamburg At The Cavern Club Decca audition Beatlemania in the United Kingdom North American releases In the United States In 1966 More popular than Jesus The studio years In India Breakup Death of John Lennon Reunions Anthology Love (Cirque du Soleil) The Beatles: Rock Band Line-ups Religious beliefs Timeline

Filmography and videography	A Hard Day's Night Help! Magical Mystery Tour Yellow Submarine Let It Be The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit The Beatles at Shea Stadium The Compleat Beatles The Beatles Anthology All Together Now

Live performances	Winter 1963 Helen Shapiro UK Tour 1964 world tour 1965 European tour 1965 US tour 1966 US tour List of live performances

Associated places	34 Montagu Square, Marylebone Abbey Road Abbey Road Studios The Bag O'Nails Beatlemania Hamburg Beatles-Platz Blue Angel The Casbah Coffee Club Candlestick Park The Cavern Club Kaiserkeller Kinfauns Savile Row Scotch of St James Stanley Street The Star-Club Strawberry Field Tittenhurst Park The Top Ten Club Wigmore Street Yellow Submarine sculpture

Associated companies	Apple Corps Apple Records Harrisongs Lingasong Records MPL Communications Northern Songs Parlophone Phillips' Sound Recording Services Seltaeb Sony/ATV Music Publishing Startling Music

Influence	Artists who have covered The Beatles Beatlemania British Invasion Fifth Beatle Influence on popular culture Jeff Lynne and The Beatles Recording technology The Rutles Tributes

Lists	Awards and nominations Bootlegs Cover songs Discography Instruments Post-breakup collaborations Record sales Recording sessions Songs Sgt. Pepper cover

Related articles	Apple Corps v Apple Computer Apple scruffs Beatle boots The Beatles (TV series) The Beatles Anthology (book) Beatles Day The Beatles Tapes from the David Wigg Interviews The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes The Ed Sullivan Show How I Won the War In My Life Lennon–McCartney Paul is dead Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (film) Up Against It

Book Category Portal WikiProject

v t e People associated with The Beatles

Personnel	Neil Aspinall Dave Dexter, Jr. Geoff Emerick Mal Evans Glyn Johns Bert Kaempfert Jeff Lynne Magic Alex Ken Mansfield George Martin Giles Martin Phil McDonald Ken Scott Norman Smith Phil Spector Alistair Taylor Chris Thomas Ken Townsend

Businessmen	Peter Bennett Sid Bernstein Peter Brown Lee Eastman Brian Epstein Dick James Allen Klein Larry Parnes Allan Williams

Musicians	Eric Clapton The Dirty Mac Donovan Bob Dylan Johnny Gentle Nicky Hopkins Johnny Hutchinson Mick Jagger Brian Jones Jim Keltner David Mason Tommy Moore Chas Newby Jimmie Nicol Harry Nilsson Peter and Gordon Plastic Ono Band Billy Preston Ronnie Scott Ravi Shankar Tony Sheridan Rory Storm and the Hurricanes Andy White

Writers	Tony Barrow Ray Connolly Hunter Davies Mark Lewisohn Alan W. Pollack Bruce Spizer Derek Taylor

Girlfriends / wives	Jane Asher Pattie Boyd Astrid Kirchherr Cynthia Lennon Linda McCartney Yoko Ono Francie Schwartz Maureen Starkey

Parents / guardians	Mona Best Alfred Lennon Julia Lennon Jim and Mary McCartney George Smith Mimi Smith

Other	Bill Harry Ken Brown George Dunning Horst Fascher The Fool Robert Freeman Bruno Koschmider Richard Lester Murray the K Pete Shotton Ivan Vaughan Jürgen Vollmer Klaus Voormann Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

v t e The Beatles album discography

Albums in the core catalogue are marked in bold.

Studio albums	Please Please Me With The Beatles A Hard Day's Night Beatles for Sale Help! Rubber Soul Revolver Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band The Beatles Yellow Submarine Abbey Road Let It Be

US albums	Introducing... The Beatles Meet The Beatles! The Beatles' Second Album Something New The Beatles' Story Beatles '65 The Early Beatles Beatles VI Yesterday and Today Magical Mystery Tour Hey Jude

Canadian albums	Beatlemania! With The Beatles Twist and Shout The Beatles' Long Tall Sally

Extended plays	Twist and Shout The Beatles' Hits The Beatles (No. 1) All My Loving Souvenir of Their Visit to America Four by The Beatles Long Tall Sally Extracts from the Film A Hard Day's Night Extracts from the Album A Hard Day's Night 4-by The Beatles Beatles for Sale Beatles for Sale (No. 2) The Beatles' Million Sellers Yesterday Nowhere Man Magical Mystery Tour

Live albums	The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl Live at the BBC

Compilations	The Beatles' Christmas Album / From Then to You Past Masters Anthology vol. 1 2 3

Remixes	Yellow Submarine Songtrack Let It Be... Naked Love

Box sets	The Beatles Collection The Beatles: The Collection The Beatles Box The Beatles Box Set The Capitol Albums vol. 1 2 The Beatles in Mono The Beatles Stereo Box Set

v t e The Beatles compilation discography

Bert Kaempfert recordings (with Tony Sheridan)	My Bonnie (GER, 1962) The Beatles with Tony Sheridan & Guests (1964) Ain't She Sweet (1964) The Beatles' First (GER, 1964 / UK, 1967) Very Together (1969) In the Beginning (Circa 1960) (1970) The Early Tapes of The Beatles (1984) Beatles Bop – Hamburg Days (2001)

Hits	A Collection of Beatles Oldies (1966) 1962–1966 (1973) 1967–1970 (1973) 20 Greatest Hits (1982) The Number Ones (AUS, 1983) 1 (2000)

Themes	Rock 'n' Roll Music (1976) Love Songs (1977) The Beatles' Ballads (1980) Reel Music (1982)

Non-album tracks	Hey Jude (US, 1970 / UK, 1979) Rarities (UK, 1978) Rarities (US, 1980) Past Masters, Volume One (1988) Past Masters, Volume Two (1988)

Alternative versions	Yellow Submarine Songtrack (1999) Let It Be... Naked (2003)

Other	The Beatles in Italy (ITA, 1965) The Beatles' Christmas Album (US) / From Then to You (UK) (1970) Por Siempre Beatles (ARG, 1971) Love (2006)

Unreleased	Sessions (due date 1985)

Live albums	Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962 (1977) The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl (1977) First Live Recordings (1979) Live at the BBC (1994)

Anthology	Anthology 1 (1995) Anthology 2 (1996) Anthology 3 (1996)

Boxed sets	The Beatles Collection (UK, 1978 / US, 1979) The Beatles Box (1980) The Beatles: The Collection (1982) The Beatles Mono Collection (1982) The Beatles Box Set (1988) The Capitol Albums, Volume 1 (2004) The Capitol Albums, Volume 2 (2006) The Beatles Stereo Box Set (2009) The Beatles in Mono (2009)

The Beatles singles discography

UK and US
(all labels)

1963	"Please Please Me" / "Ask Me Why" "From Me to You" / "Thank You Girl" "She Loves You" / "I'll Get You" "I Want to Hold Your Hand" / "This Boy" (UK) - "I Saw Her Standing There" (US)

1964	"Can't Buy Me Love" / "You Can't Do That" "A Hard Day's Night" / "Things We Said Today" (UK) - "I Should Have Known Better" (US) "I Feel Fine" / "She's a Woman"

1965	"Ticket to Ride" / "Yes It Is" "Help!" / "I'm Down" "We Can Work It Out" / "Day Tripper"

1966	"Paperback Writer" / "Rain" "Yellow Submarine" / "Eleanor Rigby"

1967	"Penny Lane" / "Strawberry Fields Forever" "All You Need Is Love" / "Baby, You're a Rich Man" "Hello, Goodbye" / "I Am the Walrus"

1968	"Lady Madonna" / "The Inner Light" "Hey Jude" / "Revolution"

1969	"Get Back" / "Don't Let Me Down" "The Ballad of John and Yoko" / "Old Brown Shoe" "Something" / "Come Together"

1970	"Let It Be" / "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"

1978	"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band/With a Little Help from My Friends" / "A Day in the Life"

1995	"Free as a Bird" / "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)"

1996	"Real Love" / "Baby's in Black"

UK only
(Parlophone,
Apple)

1962	"My Bonnie" / "The Saints" "Love Me Do" / "P.S. I Love You"

1964	"Ain't She Sweet" / "If You Love Me, Baby"

1976	"Yesterday" / "I Should Have Known Better" "Back in the U.S.S.R." / "Twist and Shout"

US only
(Vee-Jay, Swan,
Tollie, Capitol,
Apple)

1964	"Twist and Shout" / "There's a Place" "Do You Want to Know a Secret" / "Thank You Girl" "Love Me Do" / "P.S. I Love You "She Loves You" / "I'll Get You" "I'll Cry Instead" / "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" "And I Love Her" / "If I Fell" "Matchbox" / "Slow Down"

1965	"Eight Days a Week" / "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" "Yesterday" / "Act Naturally"

1966	"Nowhere Man" / "What Goes On"

1970	"The Long and Winding Road" / "For You Blue"

1976	"Got to Get You into My Life" / "Helter Skelter" "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" / "Julia"

1982	"The Beatles Movie Medley" / "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You"

v t e Grammy Award for Song of the Year (1959 & 1960s)

1959 Domenico Modugno - "Volare" 1960 Jimmy Driftwood - "The Battle of New Orleans" 1961 Ernest Gold - "Theme from Exodus" 1962 Johnny Mercer & Henry Mancini - "Moon River" 1963 Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley - "What Kind of Fool Am I?" 1964 Johnny Mercer & Henry Mancini - "Days of Wine and Roses" 1965 Jerry Herman - "Hello, Dolly!" 1966 Paul Francis Webster & Johnny Mandel - "The Shadow of Your Smile" 1967 John Lennon & Paul McCartney - "Michelle" 1968 Jimmy Webb - "Up, Up, and Away" 1969 Bobby Russell - "Little Green Apples"

Complete list (1960s) (1970s) (1980s) (1990s) (2000s) (2010s)

Grammy Award for Album of the Year (1959–1969)

Year

Album

Artist(s)

Producer(s)

1959

The Music from Peter Gunn

Henry Mancini

1960

Come Dance with Me!

Frank Sinatra

1961

The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart

1962

Judy at Carnegie Hall

Judy Garland

1963

The First Family

Vaughn Meader

1964

The Barbra Streisand Album

Barbra Streisand

1965

Getz/Gilberto

Stan Getz, João Gilberto

1966

September of My Years

Frank Sinatra

Sonny Burke

1967

A Man and His Music

Frank Sinatra

Sonny Burke

1968

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles (George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr)

George Martin

1969

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Glen Campbell

Al De Lory

Grammy Award for Album of the Year (1980s)

Year

Album

Artist(s)

Producer(s)

1980

52nd Street

Billy Joel

Phil Ramone

1981

Christopher Cross

Christopher Cross

Michael Omartian

1982

Double Fantasy

John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Jack Douglas, John Lennon, Yoko Ono

1983

Toto IV

Toto (Bobby Kimball, Steve Lukather, David Paich, Jeff Porcaro, David Hungate, Steve Porcaro)

Toto

1984

Thriller

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones

1985

Can't Slow Down

Lionel Richie

James Anthony Carmichael, Lionel Richie

1986

No Jacket Required

Phil Collins

Hugh Padgham, Phil Collins

1987

Graceland

Paul Simon

Roy Halee, Paul Simon

1988

The Joshua Tree

U2 (Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr.)

Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois

1989

Faith

George Michael

Authority control: PND: 118571575 | LCCN: n80017868 | VIAF: 196844 | WorldCat

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Persondata
Name	Lennon, John
Alternative names	Lennon, John Winston (birth name); Lennon, John Winston Ono
Short description	Rock musician
Date of birth	9 October 1940
Place of birth	Liverpool, England, United Kingdom
Date of death	8 December 1980
Place of death	New York City, New York, United States of America

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John Lennon

John Winston Lennon

John Winston Lennon

John Lennon

John Lennon

John Lennon

Biography

John Lennon

John Lennon

John Lennon

Biography

John Lennon

History

1940–57: Early years

1957–70: The Quarrymen to The Beatles

1957–65: Formation, commercial breakout, and touring years

1966–70: Studio years, break-up and solo work

1970–80: Solo career

1970–72: Initial solo success and activism

1973–75: "Lost weekend"

1975–80: Retirement and return

8 December 1980: Death

Personal relationships

Cynthia Lennon

Brian Epstein

Julian Lennon

Yoko Ono

May Pang

Sean Lennon

Former Beatles

Political activism

Deportation attempt

FBI surveillance and declassified documents

Writing and art

Musicianship

Instruments played

Vocal style

Legacy

Awards and sales

Discography

Notes

Citations

References

Further reading

External links