25 years later, Lennon's loss still being felt

Another version of “Imagine,” by country singer Dolly Parton, is in music stores now. In her own tribute, Parton shot part of a video for the song in Strawberry Fields, the Central Park memorial for Lennon. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot the Dakota in the background.

Parton had been on a plane from Nashville to Los Angeles the night Lennon was shot. She was supposed to go out with friends, but instead they all went to her house to watch the news and talk about it. “Everyone was so heartbroken,” she said.

“Like all young teenage girls back then, I fell in love with the Beatles,” she said. “Back there in the Smoky Mountains, it was like something had been dropped from outer space.”

Also in California, rock singer John Fogerty felt the loss of a kindred spirit. In 1969, Fogerty’s band Creedence Clearwater Revival had sold more records than the Beatles, then an astonishing accomplishment. But both men spent the latter half of the 1970s publicly silent; Fogerty because of a business dispute, Lennon because he was “watching the wheels.”

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“I thought about him every day because he was that important to me,” he said. “I was still a recluse but I was working on music in some fashion every day, and I would say to myself, ‘I wonder what John Lennon is doing?’ For several years we didn’t hear from him and I would always think about that fact.”

From Neil Diamond to Fall Out Boy
Singer Neil Diamond had been in New York that December night for the premiere of his movie “The Jazz Singer.”

Diamond had been a struggling songwriter when the Beatles hit. No one was interested in hearing him sing. No one was particularly interested in his creativity, either: They just wanted him to churn out songs that sounded like current hits. The Beatles made it standard for musicians to interpret their own songs, and to experiment.

“Aside from being broken-hearted about the loss of this man, I felt I owed him something,” he said. “My life would not have been the same without the Beatles.”

Lennon’s music has even touched artists who weren’t alive when he was, like 21-year-old singer Patrick Stump of the hit pop-punk band Fall Out Boy.

“It is like the Bible,” he said. “You can’t cite it without sounding cliched, but here’s the thing, there’s a reason why it’s so citable like that. His body of work was so interesting and had so many valid points.”

What has the world missed in 25 years without John Lennon?

Yoko Ono has grown old without a husband; she still lives in the Dakota and is the caretaker of the work he left behind. Sean Lennon grew up without a dad. He’s tried music, too.

John’s legacy remains frozen in time and, like James Dean’s or Kurt Cobain’s, burnished by sudden death far too young. Lennon didn’t grow old in the spotlight, didn’t have to contend with tired “steel wheelchairs” jokes like his peers in the Rolling Stones. He didn’t have to watch his talent fade, his instincts betray him or hear the whispers that he’d lost it. McCartney could tell him a few things about that.

It’s impossible to predict from his catalogue where his muse would have taken him.

Truth be told, his track record as a solo artist was wildly uneven in style and quality. The brutal confessional of “The Plastic Ono Band” was followed by the perfectly polished “Imagine.” There’s the leftist screeds in “Some Time in New York City,” the tired wistfulness on “Walls and Bridges” and the domesticated work he made at the end.

Even during the Beatles’ intense creative period, author Bob Spitz in this fall’s new “The Beatles: The Biography” portrays Lennon as tormented by personal demons and drug abuse. Would it have crippled him as he got older?

“The level of engagement wouldn’t have gone away,” said music journalist Alan Light. “If he was going to be an activist, he would have been all the way an activist. If he was going to be a father, he would have been all the way a father.”

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