For John Lennon’s birthday today, why not one from his last
album, Double Fantasy, made with his
wife Yoko Ono alternating tracks?
I had mixed feelings about the album when it came out—in
mid-November of 1980. Then Lennon was killed in early December and the status
of the album changed. Whatever its quality, we were glad to have it. It had
been five years since Rock ’n’ Roll,
his album of covers of oldies, was released and six since Walls and Bridges, which I rather liked. Yet Lennon’s vaunted comeback
in 1980 still seemed too minor. Whatever one’s feelings about Yoko’s music, it
decidedly is not Lennon music. And new Lennon music is what was wanted. I don’t
know that the world was waiting for more Yoko Ono tunes, hers equal his in number, so you only get half an album of Lennon.
As time goes on and things change, the fact that Yoko’s
tracks sound very Eighties—with rhythms smacking of Talking Heads with a bit of
disco worked in—doesn’t distract so much. At the time—1980—it seemed a bit too
much like pandering. And what one wanted was Lennon music that would remind us
why we cared about him in the first place.
Double
Fantasy almost convinces in that way. Lennon’s portion is pretty much as
good as anything he did post-Beatles, with the exception of the standout tracks
on his earlier albums, and with the exception of Plastic Ono Band, which, like
a good Leonard Cohen album, simply has to be accepted in toto. Double Fantasy,
because it comprises a portrait of a couple—of a family—based on John and Yoko
and kids, works as a glimpse of the joys and the tensions of couple-life.
Today’s song seemed to be a sop to the Lennon of old, the
one who wanted to end war, have people dispossess material things, the one who
was a bit of a hippie, bit of a rabble-rouser, bit of an ironic showman. Lennon
the savant, the guru. But not in all seriousness. Lennon was too tongue-in-cheek—and
cheeky—to be preachy, usually. He seemed to be appealing to decency and
intelligence more than to some particular ideology. But what can you expect
from the man who sang “all you need is love”?
“Watching the Wheels” defends Lennon’s decision to drop out
of “the game” and “the big time” in favor of raising his son, Sean. This was a
few years before the film Mr. Mom
(1983) put the idea into general parlance—and that for the sake of humor—that a
man could be the child-tending, homebody while Mrs. Dad went out into the
work-a-day world to find meaning in a career. That’s not quite the Lennons, of
course, since our particular Mr. Mom was no doubt making a decent income from
the music he’d worked “like a dog” to make as a young man. He’d already played “the
game” and hit “the big time” in one of the biggest ways imaginable. Still, the
song indicates that he’s often approached and reproached for his decision to
drop out and throw it all away. That he’s “lost his mind” or is simply “lazy.”
Ah, the work, the work, just the working life. In one view,
work is soul-robbing drudgery; in another, it's fulfillment and meaning. Depends
on the work, we say. What Lennon is saying is, though he found great success
and has people asking him questions because they want more meaningful work from
him, he himself questions the worth of the whole process. He contrasts with his
meaningful—and lucrative—activity—that he prefers “watching shadows on the
wall.” Or “watching the wheels go ’round and ‘round.”
What I like about that formulation is that he’s not
suggesting he’s following a higher calling. He doesn’t seem to be saying he
dropped out for the sake of some spiritual non-attachment to the materialistic
pursuit of success. Rather he’s saying that, having had all that already, he
doesn’t particularly feel the need for more of it. In other words, his view is
that he’s an artist taking time off and that he has the wherewithal to do as he
likes.
It was 1980 and the gifts that made The Beatles international
celebrities as well as respected, admired and emulated recording artists had
long since made their mark. We might say that competing with one’s earlier self
is a losing proposition. And the Sixties and Seventies, as the time of using
the public eye to protest and to spend time on television on the Mike Douglas Show, with Yoko, explaining
themselves and their causes, to say nothing of the time of his infamous “lost
weekend” in LA with hard-partying friends like Harry Nilsson, had waned. Lennon
fashioned himself as the heart and soul of his marriage and Double Fantasy bears that out. But the “Yoko
and me” raison d’être had already been espoused and become the dominating
mantra of his life after The Beatles. Was there really anything new in touting
the couple above all other ties, causes, pursuits?
Well, yes and know. The songs on Double Fantasy, by Lennon, are all easily likeable. Gone is the
brash, abrasive Lennon. The bluesiest is “I’m Losing You,” the catchiest is “(Just
Like) Starting Over,” the sweetest is “Woman” and the most profound is today’s
song. And I say “profound” because Lennon’s detachment in the song is almost
that of the guru who has found “the way.” Or rather, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
would say, “his way, for the way does not exist.” The way to be
happy? And does he not have the right to exercise that? So the questioners are
really those who don’t believe he is—that something’s missing. Or who believe
that the bottom will fall out and he’ll have nothing—a long forgotten has-been.
Or who make statements “designed to enlighten me” as though there is some worthwhile
pursuit he is unaware of. But what could that be? Saving the world? Teaching
the world to sing? Making a name for himself? A mark?
“I tell them there’s no problems, only solutions.” Well,
that’s a nice bit of zen-like paradox. And aren’t the wise given to quips like
that? Maybe he has attained wisdom? Or maybe, at least, he knows that
everything being offered as a “solution” to his “problem” presupposes the
existence of a problem that’s not there. That does not exist, for him. As when
Lou Reed proclaimed, with glee: “Oh there are problems in these times / Oh, but
none of them are mine.” Or Dylan: “And I know you’re dissatisfied with your
position and your place / Don’t you understand it’s not my problem.” These are
ready dismissals of a certain kind of fellow-feeling that says, Christ-like, I
will carry your cross, I will help you surmount the difficulty of life. Lennon,
it seems, was content to carry that burden for himself, his wife and his kids.
And the rest can take care of themselves.
The interesting phrase “I’m such sitting here doing time” is
perhaps revealing. The incarcerated “do time” in prison. The release from such
time could be, if he’s feeling imprisoned by parenthood, the moment when his
child is ready to be on his own. But the release from the “time” we’re all
doing is, of course, death. How much time do we have? We never really know.
What shocked us, hearing the song—as the third single from the album—after Lennon’s
death, was that he was no longer “doing time”—neither in the marriage nor on
the planet. He was “no longer riding on the merry-go-round” in any sense—except
to the extent that his music continues to live and to be played and listened
to (unless you believe his spirit is still strapped to some karmic wheel).
What that promoted, to me, was a detachment from the
enraging aspects of the manner of his death, and, perhaps, an inkling of the more cosmic
contemplation that Lennon might have found more appropriate: you just have to
let it go.
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