John Lennon was born with a gift for music and comedy that would carry him further from his roots than he ever dreamed possible.
Such enthusiasm could be grating, but Norman's is refreshing and heartening, offering reminders that divine music has unholy creators that great is separated from good more often than not by accident (or by drugs) and that people will like what they're told to like, but only love what they embrace themselves.īest Books of 2008 Alan Cheuse's Best Holiday Books 2008 In extravagant sentences, Norman revels in the single dimension of his subject that he unequivocally loves and appreciates. The music, though, is another story, and this is where Norman - author of the definitive 1981 Beatle biography Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation - shines. And then they were groping and all that, and we were all quiet.Īnyone who didn't see John's adulterous brazenness was subsequently treated to the sounds of it. She didn't come on to him at all, he just pulled her and went into the next room. She was the kind of girl you'd never think John would be attracted to, I don't want to describe her but anyway she was sitting there. When we walked in to Jerry's, there was a girl there. So, for example, we're treated to Ono's recollection of a party at Jerry Rubin's New York apartment on the night of Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection: John was totally out of his head with drugs and pills and drink because he couldn't stand the fact that George McGovern lost. And his treatment of Cynthia Powell, his first wife Ono, his second and Julian, his first son, is shoddy enough to embarrass even the worst failed father or philanderer. Tellingly, Norman writes, "John was always scrupulous about giving, however long after the event." Juvenile John and adult John alike made sense of disputes, jealousies and even plain confusion with fists, booze or both. To Norman's credit, the reader comes away from the multifaceted John Lennon feeling like he almost knew him - and that he probably wouldn't have liked him if he did. Written "for a hypothetical reader who has never heard of or listened to a note of his music," the book neither denigrates nor extols the man.
Indeed, it would take but a brief glance at the definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder to make an armchair assessment of what ailed this impulsive and sometimes cruel artist. Had Norman been "mean to John" (and he's not), he'd certainly be no meaner than John himself was to almost everyone he knew, Ono included. Norman, in her opinion, had been "mean to John." Well, then. A novelist and biographer, Philip Norman is the author of Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly.Īt first receptive, Yoko Ono ultimately refused to endorse Philip Norman's exhaustive and artfully sketched new biography, John Lennon: The Life.
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