DB's Song of the Day (day 342): "NOBODY LOVES YOU (WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND OUT)" (1974) John Lennon

This date in 1980 we lost John Lennon, killed by some asshole with a gun.

Lennon wrote some great songs when with The Beatles, and I could’ve chosen one of those—I’ve already done two of my faves, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Norwegian Wood” but there are lots more. Moving to his solo work, his first album, Plastic Ono Band (1970) is a must and I’ll allow that his final album, Double Fantasy (1980) is too. In between, Lennon can be something of a wanker. Talented and sometimes with the courage of his convictions, but oft a wanker nonetheless. Still, there is probably at least one double album’s worth of worthwhile Lennon tracks between those two releases and today we look at one of them.

Walls and Bridges I generally look at as Lennon’s second best solo album, liking its relaxed jauntiness better than Imagine (1971). And when Lennon was gunned down and we were reeling with the news—the recent “comeback” had us thinking about him again, more warmly, after years of silence—I had two Lennon LPs to listen to. Plastic Ono Band and Walls and Bridges. I played them while drawing a pastel picture of Lennon, based on the photo I’ve placed at the top of this post. That sunny smile—rarely captured—was worth contemplating.

And so is this song because Lennon, adapting the old blues line “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” makes a statement about how the formerly great get treated when they are perceived as no longer great. This isn’t about being “down and out” in the sense of having nothing and nowhere to go. It’s down and out in the sense of falling off the radar, yesterday’s news, has-been, old hat. And even the best of that generation that began their recording careers in the Sixties had faced that chill by the mid-Seventies. “Everybody’s hustling for a buck and a dime” Lennon says, then gives us the old saying “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine” to indicate how self-serving praise is in show-biz, then alters it to “I’ll scratch your back and you knife mine.” Lennon, who sunk a few knives of his own (he made barbed remarks about most of his contemporaries at one time or another), has something of a persecution complex, we might say, but listening to the song after he was killed, the figure doesn’t seem overstated.

Indeed, the song—which looks at how hard it is to maintain true love in the slipping away of all things that time affronts us with—can seem rather plaintive, with Lennon’s speaker searching his image in the mirror and lying in bed unable to get to sleep. Asked about love—here, the lines seem to address Yoko more than a generalized “you”—he replies “what it is, what it is” and “what you say, what you say,” as if there’s no way to say anything meaningful about what the heart decides. “All I can tell you is, it’s all show-biz” (even private life between a couple) and, the line I like best, “every time I put my finger on it, it slips away.” That statement seems in keeping with Lennon’s general attitude during his hiatus from recording. The effort to make something is too elusive.

The song uses horns tellingly, letting them come in with the “show-biz” and “slips away” lines to create a cartoonish effect. The joke is on the person trying to make something out of these slippery moments, the person who wants something authentic in the midst of all this phoniness. Finally, Lennon, who didn’t live to become “old and grey,” reflects that aging is the surest way to lose affection. Set against this, his “Everybody’s hollerin’ ‘bout their own birthday” riffs on aging as, if not rued, then celebrated as a date that makes someone special. Then comes the corker: “Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.”

Listening to this song that night and hearing Lennon go whistling through the track’s close after delivering his jaded pronouncement on how death tends to conquer personal aversion, making heroes and martyrs out of those we reviled in life, I couldn’t help thinking how the same would happen to Lennon. He had been something of a thorn in the side of show-biz, refusing to be a good will ambassador for ongoing Beatlemania or making career moves that would make him a player. He was a celebrity gadfly, mostly, and the one liable to smear “bullshit” over efforts to lionize him and his peers. Whatever they had all achieved at one time, none were living up to it.

His comment on all that, though, seemed to be contained in the line “nobody needs you when you’re on cloud nine.” That’s where he would end up spending a lot of his time, detached from the world-at-large, as claimed in “Watching the Wheels” (1980), and he’s looking toward that here. But, from the point of view of the night of his death, he was on “cloud nine” in another way, lifted right off the planet. That whistling seemed to me an authentic moment of transcendence, as if, from beyond the grave, Lennon were saying “it’s all show-biz,” and “it slips away,” and that’s as it should be.

I felt a surge of admiration at that moment for someone who—mortal like all of us—had managed to get down on tape his indifference to this little pageant that concerns us all so much, while we’re here, and won’t mean shit the second we’re gone. You might say that those who congregated to mourn Lennon on that night were hollerin’ about him and not about themselves, but I’ve long been one who believes funerals and commemorative gatherings are for those who are alive and not for the person who has died. They do these things to ease their own grief. Meanwhile, “the late, great Johnny Ace” goes whistling down the years. Here and gone, at once.

DB's Song of the Day (day 282): "WATCHING THE WHEELS" (1980) John Lennon

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.