Customer Reviews

The Lives of John Lennon

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

For many years I refused to read this book because I did not want to blot or tarnish, with content that had been repeatedly described as putrid, hostile, slanderous, character-damaging dreck, my image of John Lennon. After finding a hardcover in mint condition for only five bucks, however, I couldn't resist, and I'm glad I buckled. First off, like me, anyone wanting to read the book probably loves John so much that nothing anyone could ever say about him would really sully or ruin their affection for the man. Secondly, I realized quickly why Yoko Ono had so fervently condemned this book as I reached the second half. Overall, Goldman says nothing horribly negative about John (yes, he's described as neurotic and slightly crazy, but didn't we always know that about John, and wasn't that part of his appeal?) The person Goldman painstakingly describes as evil is Yoko. She comes across as satanic in nature, and while I was initially hesitant to accept this harsh assessment of her, too many other books, such as Pete Shotton's and Tony Bramwell's, paint a similar portrait for Goldman to be completely wrong. For instance, Goldman is the only writer to reveal that no record exists of the phone calls Yoko Ono famously and dramatically claims to have made to Paul and Mimi the night John died. An abundance of facts of this nature are to be found in the book.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and I recommend you read it. The experience made me realize that my love for John is impenetrable, and if yours is too, then I recommend you check this book out. Ask yourself, who is the person who has done the most campaigning to destroy this book? The answer is the woman about whom Goldman does a good deal to expose.

(As a final asterisk, I meant to only give this a four star review, but I edited the review so many times that I ultimately hit the wrong button)

I can understand the anger some of the reviewers have toward this book; I am like them in the sense that I grew up buying and listening to the Beatles' records. So, in a sense, I am disappointed in reading about and finding out just how complex, and yes, how tortured a man John Lennon was.

Is the book bias? Of course! Does that necessarily mean the book is bad? No! From a sheer reading perspective, the book reads very well. I think it is about time some author had the guts to take on Yoko Ono, and show her in the full light and all of her shallowness.

I am only puzzled as to why the author Goldman did not spend more time addressing John Lennon's songs when he was a member of the Beatles. For example, to really show how lazy Lennon had gotten during the making of 'Sgt. Peppers,' Lennon sat around at home and rarely came to the recording studio. Yet even then, as a mark of the man's ability to produce good songs, Lennon was 'inspired' to write the album's "Good Morning" from a television cereal commercial, and "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" from (word-for-word) an advertisement. Yet Goldman fails to even mention this, giving virtually all of the album's credit, except for "A Day In The Life" to Paul.

It would have been a better book had Goldman spent more time on Lennon's song writing, and less time on Lennon's personal failings.

I wasn't going to review this book, but I am shocked at the immature and personal reader reviews so far. Why pick on Goldman?

I read this book cover-to-cover in one night several years ago, and it never even occurred to me to hate the author. Whether or not all of the tackier details are true, this is biography of the highest order- we learn who Lennon was in each of his "lives" , in painstaking detail. Writers don't go to that much trouble with a subject they don't like. Goldman not only nails each of Lennon's masks, he gives a spot-on analysis for why he need ed them... and it wasn't just his hypocricy. Far from resembling a tabloid, The Lives of John Lennon is similar to Alice Miller's Thou Shall Not Be Aware in the absolutely subjective view of history through one person's wonderful and horrible life. This book will be enjoyed by ANYONE who is interested in the varieties of human emotion, music business, Jungian psychology and modern history. It will be rejected by anyone who takes criticsm of any kind as an attack.I am not a Beatle's fan ( although my mother was, and I love Primal Scream),but my I feel more, not less, for John Lennon after reading this book. If your image of your loved ones is so fragile that you reject them for being human, well, I refer you to the first chapters of Lennon's life. Oh, and incidentally, Albert Goldman is the only person I have ever heard of who made sense of Lennon's attraction to Yoko.

I hope Goldman got paid for his deserved abuse. Perhaps a good debunking job requires reams of salacious detail. The book certainly comes highly recommended for readers who enjoy that kind of stuff. But it must be conceded that Lennon was sainted after his tragic murder (boy, would he have been surprised!) and there were many who wanted to believe. So Goldman talked to Lennon's domestic help and Yoko Ono's parttime love and to second lady May Pang and in the end Goldman delivers this news: Lennon and Ono, like so many other sixties figures, succumbed to substance addiction and its accompanying ennui. The public relations picture of domestic amity was a fraud. A pity and a very sad story, made all that much sadder by Lennon's murder by a deranged and disillusioned former fan at the very moment he returns to the music biz. There seems to be a good amount of fiction amongst the facts in this book, but the fundamental picture rings true.

This book has been unfairly maligned ever since it was published. This hostility says a lot more about the childishness of the average rock fan than it does about Goldman's work. Goldman has written a work of the highest and deepest biography. It does not pretend to be a hagiography, nor a work of music criticism. Anyone with a sincere interest in John Lennon's life as he lived it will be riveted by Goldman's revlations. To begin with, he gives us much more of Lennon's childhood than was previously known -- here's John's mother and stepmother and father and half-brothers and -sisters -- and he uses this information to fashion a compelling analysis of John's personality and character, attributes that defined him for the rest of his life. He's also tremendously insightful about Yoko Ono, Brian Epstein, Phil Spector, May Pang, Stu Sutcliffe and Allen Klein, all of whom were key in John's life. Likewise, Goldman opens up the world of the business of the Beatles and makes it interesting. The portrait of John Lennon that emerges after 700 pages is by far the most nuanced, intelligent and, yes, sympathetic portrait that has been, or ever will be written of Lennon. It will only disappoint those who insist that biographies of the great man must paint him as a saint.

Goldman should be credited with his in-depth research into such popular icons in the past as Lenny Bruce, creating the most definitive bio of Bruce and managing to convey why he was important and how he did what he did better than anyone, and Elvis Presley (equally well-researched, but Goldman is beginning to favor the shocking and distasteful details more than the insightful commentary there).

Here Goldman does a (-n apparently) fabulous job of research into the later years especially that reveals Lennon the man in a way never before. Being in love with the Beatles music, and the "idea" of the Beatles from way back, I found it fascinating even though it clearly devolved into tabloid name-smearing and smarmy details that revealed more about Goldman's declining journalism skills than anything Mr. Lennon may have been thinking or working through.

The biggest fatal flaw of this book is that Goldman clearly doesn't like or appreciate the talent or art of Lennon, or even rock music in general! It makes you wonder why he took on such a subject. The impression is he did it just to trash a pop icon. And it's sad, more so than the decadent hints that whisper around the seams of the Lenny Bruce book and nearly sink the Elvis book.

This isn't as bad as any Giuliano piece of trash, but Goldman just doesn't have a love for his subject, through good and bad (an example being Peter Brown's "The Love You Make", a damning but "affectionate" trashing of the Beatles myth, or even Goldman's own Lenny Bruce bio, when talking about Bruce while high). The venom, the distaste, the moral corruption is in the prose, and Lennon actually comes across as a victim of the writer's inability to get under his skin. You learn only the details of Lennon's last long decline, but more about Goldman's sick jealous/self-hatred than about JL's inner psychology.

Long live the memory of John. Be here now.

If somebody wrote a book examining your life in intimate detail, with much of the data provided by people who don't like you, that focuses on every mistake or mean thing you ever did (while ignoring or downplaying every good thing you did), takes gossip about you as gospel, and looks at every one of your motives with utter cynicism and suspicion, I daresay you wouldn't come out looking very good either.

John and Yoko may well have done some of the nasty things Goldman claims, but although he scoffs at them for it, he inadvertently proves that John and Yoko were right, that some of the hatred towards Yoko was based on misogyny and racism.

Goldman consistently implies that strong women ruined John Lennon, starting with Aunt Mimi and he refers to feminists as "women's libs." The caricature of John and Yoko by David Levine for an article entitled "John Rennon's Excrusive Gloopie" and reprinted in this book is a perfect illustration of the racism that some people were not ashamed to express in the early 70s. But aside from reprinting the Levine illustration, Goldman doesn't mention ANY of the abuse heaped on Yoko by the media. Lennon appeared once on a British talk show and complained that Yoko was called "ugly" by the British press. Goldman can't be bothered to mention the talk show appearance nor the original source. No doubt because to mention such things could possibly inspire sympathy for Yoko, and Goldman avoids that whenever he can.

The strangest thing about this book is the characterization of John Lennon. One minute Goldman portrays him as a brain-dead zombie recluse being held prisoner by Yoko, and in the next portrays Lennon as coherent and sharp in the recording studio. There's no way this could be the same person.

Goldman writes as if he can read peoples' minds, and the text is liberally sprinkled with his own opinions, especially about the Beatles' work. He considers "Tomorrow Never Knows" a bad title, for example. I don't agree, but more importantly, I don't want to waste my time reading Goldman's opinions, especially of the Beatles' music.

In some cases Goldman's opinions seem to be based on his own fantasies - for example, he describes the size of Lennon's member, visible on the cover of "Two Virgins" as large. When I saw the photo, I had the exact opposite impression.

The Ono-Lennons may have engaged in media myth-making, but Goldman makes them out to be complete phonies with no true affection for each other or anybody else. And so when Mark David Chapman shows up to kill Lennon, it seems as though Goldman's sympathies are with Chapman.

Some of the facts given seem plausible, but in general the book is so slanted and full of innuendo that you can't trust it, so it's not very valuable. Everything of interest has already been printed elsewhere, and usually without such a heaping helping of contempt.

As Lennon said in the Playboy interview in 1980:

PLAYBOY: But what about the charge that John Lennon is under Yoko's spell, under her control?

LENNON: Well that's rubbish, you know. Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just barely possible.

PLAYBOY: Still, many people believe it.

LENNON: Listen, if somebody's gonna impress me, whether it be a Maharishi or a Yoko Ono, there comes a point when the emperor has no clothes. There comes a point when I will see. So for all you folks out there who think that I'm having the wool pulled over my eyes, well, that's an insult to me. Not that you think less of Yoko, because that's your problem. What I think of her is what counts! Because -- f** you, brother and sister -- you don't know what's happening. I'm not here for you. I'm here for me and her and the baby!

I just tried to use Albert Goldman's "The Lives of John Lennon" to find a fact about John Lennon. I heard Lennon's "Rock'n'Roll" album, and thought it was oretty good, overall, so I wondered who'd played on it. I checked Goldman's book. After all, in a 719 page biography of a musician you should be able to find information about his music, like who played on his albums.

But Goldman only mentioned Jesse Ed Davis, on guitar. I flipped backwards and forwards trying to find another smidgen of musical fact. Instead I found this: "Perhaps the most revealing moment in John's relationship with Jagger had come on their joint appearance on the Rock'n'Roll Circus, when a stoned John, playing a TV interviewer, had done a satiric turn with Mick as pop star, that concluded with John slipping his hand inside Mick's shirt and feeling him up."

That's funny, I thought. I'd just played the DVD of "Rock and Roll Circus", and I never noticed that. So I played the Lennon sequence again. The hand in shirt thing still didn't happen. Seems Goldman had an agenda (claiming Lennon was gay), so he made it up. When Goldman wrote, "Rock'n'Roll Circus" was hard to find; he probably didn't expect that marketing and technology would one day make it easy for people to check little things like that.

I'm no longer confident in claims made by Goldman that stand unsupported by other biographers. Did Lennon take a metric ton of heroin, and make an absolute tool of himself during "The Lost Weekend"? Yep, I believe that, because other biographers confirm it. But did Lennon (for example) kill a man in Hamburg, or go to bed with Brian Epstein, or do a voodoo trip to the Caribbean? Did Yoko arrange for Paul's drug bust in Japan? Nah. Get away with you, Mr Goldman. Only Goldman tells me so, and he offers only malicious hearsay, sometimes filled out by his own imagination, not evidence.

My scepticism isn't because I think Lennon was a saint. It seems that the real, historical, John Lennon could be a right bastard, angry, violent, including to women, and a mean drunk. It also seems that the historical John Lennon could be funny and kind and thoughtful. He could tell terrible lies, and be awkwardly honest. He was a bit of a mess, in fact, though he tried to sort out his mess. And historical evidence suggests that a lot of people who were close to him loved him. Not fans. Not "staff". Friends and family. Which suggests that there was more to the man than the sum of his faults.

But Goldman doesn't give us this human complexity, but a hatchet job of no more than fair to moderate reliability on matters of fact. The real problem is not so much that his most sensational claims don't stand up. It's more that the whole portrait is out of register. Goldman mainly portrays Lennon not as a bastard but as a dweeb, a pitiful, weak, loser, stupid, gullible, characterless schlemiel. It's not the details, but the basic picture that simply fails to ring true.

It's hard to present yourself as witty, cocky, sharp, sharp-tongued and astute, in interview after interview over many years, also in private with observer after observer, and for 15 or so years solid with three guys who know you better than anyone else, unless wit, cockiness, sharpness, and astuteness are actually a large part of your nature. It's easy to fake stupid, but hard to fake intelligent.

We know too much about what Lennon was like, from other sources, to believe in Goldman's Lennon. Goldman's Lennon is a wet slug, who could never have made any records.

In a sense Goldman's Lennon doesn't make music, since Goldman avoids the topic as much as possible. The single most important thing about Lennon is that he was a musician, but this book is useless on Lennon's music. Goldman doesn't provide the most rudimentary information about its creation. And if a biography of a musician doesn't do that, what's the point of it?

Not that Goldman's musical judgements inspire confidence. Goldman's Lennon was too incapacitated to make music at the time the real Lennon made the superb "Walls and Bridges" album, so Goldman simply dismisses what the record clearly demonstrates. But Goldman reaches true weirdness with his claim that Lennon couldn't play guitar, but faked it all the way through the Beatles and his solo career.

But had Goldman ever listened to a Beatles record, he'd have noticed that there was a good drummer, a brilliant bass player, a limited lead guitar player and an occasionally powerful rhythm guitar player. That last player was Lennon; there were only four of them, for heaven's sake. From the opening chords of "I wanna hold your hand" to the driving riff of "Yer Blues" - on "Rock and Roll Circus" you can watch Lennon playing rock guitar on "Yer Blues", not disgracing himself in company with Eric Clapton and Keith Richard - Lennon could create riffs and drive a band along, as he once described the rhythm guitar player's job. He was also a good acoustic guitar player, on songs like "You've got to hide your love away" and "Working Class Hero".

I guess Goldman had come to so dislike his Lennon that he was prepared to say any old thing about that literary character. With hindsight, it now seems amazing that a book that contained the guitar claim got taken seriously. Goldman stepped out of serious biography and into "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory territory.

So here's this big fat book about Lennon. It was probably useful, in a way and in its day, for debunking the idealised portrait of Lennon the martyred saint. But can you use it as a source of factual information about Lennon's life and music? Basically, no. No, you can't. It's no use, for that.


Laon

I've read the book and, like many of the other reviewers, was aghast to have my idealistic view of John and The Beatles altered so irrevocably. I can't pretend to know what percentage of this book is actually true or what exactly Mr. Goldman's "agenda" was.

One thing I do like about the book is the insight about John and Paul's relationship and their contributions to The Beatles music. Like many of you, I've always been a devout student of their music and really tried to learn as much about who wrote what song and how the creative process of the band really worked. I've always been a bit confused by the general perception that "Saint John" was somehow the greater artist of the two and Paul was the cute tunesmith who wrote silly love songs. If you think that, I'd love to have a one on one debate with you. Along with reading this book, the debate would make you reconsider your view.

John was supposedly the "leader" of the band, yet, as the book shows and nobody disputes, at the most critical junctures of the band's artistic evolution, it was Paul who rose to the occasion and brought them to the next level, while John was off on his latest self indulgent, navel gazing search for himself. Paul was the chief architect of Pepper and John's contributions were relatively minimal. While Paul was writing and producing with George Martin the groundbreaking elements of Abbey Road, John was taking the usual path of an artist who's run out of ideas - going back to basic rock and roll (and stretching an average song fragment like "I Want You" in to an eight minute song by playing it three different ways). If it weren't for Paul, the story of The Beatles would have ended much sooner and we'd have less great music to cherish and enjoy.

In short, John was the second best musician and songwriter in the greatest rock and roll band in musical history. He contributed some of the greatest songs and lyrics the band produced. That doesn't make him a great man. If you want to idolize a great Englishman, read one of the many books written about Winston Churchill - a man of truly great character who did a tad bit more for world peace than sit in bed with his wife.

If you think Goldman was wrong about John as a person, you have a remedy. Do your research and write an 800 page book about what a selfless person, loyal husband, great father and all around great guy he was. Lotsa luck.

Before writing this review, I must first mention that unlike some reviewers and cynics I have read the entire 700 pages of Albert Goldman's biography of John Lennon; secondly, I must mention that I had read many reviews elsewhere on the internet, and what I have found is mixed praise and scorn for this book. Allow me to summarize the reviews in such a manner: John Lennon purists should not read this book, partly because they will only fall into the category of fundamentalists, many of whom you can read reviews from below, who write one line reviews such as, "I can't believe this guy gets off bashing Lennon's image" or somesuch comments. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and if cherishing the legacy of John Lennon as saint and genius of rock music is your bag, then by all means, maintain that perspective - and do not read this book.
However, if you're interested in the most deepest personal aspects of John Lennon's life and legacy, then this book was written for those of us who seek truth. And that is the point of contention among those who read this book: Goldman is either the boy who cried wolf one too many times, or he's telling the truth really well, so well that you're not inclined to believe it. For example, let's say a teenager goes out for a night of partying with his friends, gets drunk, and wrecks his parents car into a tree. The next morning he tells them the full truth about him partying and wrecking the car - and the parents are skeptical. The truth is often unacceptable. However, I'm not saying this book contains 100% truth. In fact, if you were to arrange the book statistically, I would suggest that 92% of this book were truth and 4% would be craft and the other 4% would be rumour. A lot of people who find this book unacceptable had similar opinions about Peter Brown's book, "The Love You Make" back in the early 80's - that the truth was unacceptable. In a Playboy interview with Paul McCartney in 1984, Paul never discredited Brown's book, but only claimed that Peter Brown betrayed the friendship of the Beatles. Quite similarly, McCartney calls this book, by Albert Goldman "trash," but he does not discredit its contents. Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, and the remaining Fab Three never once said, "This book is not true," but were only upset by the publication of its contents. That, in and of itself, makes reading the book all the more intriguing: to find out what made everyone else so upset!
What you find inside is a very personal side of John Lennon who is as human as the rest of us: prone to faults, such as anger, adultery, and indecisiveness as he was a man and leader of Peace and Love. By the time you reach page 700, if you're a sympathetic reader like myself and others, you won't pity John's life, but you'll feel closer and be able to embrace the legend a little more.