>>REVIEW
JOHN LENNON: THE NEW YORK YEARS
Bob Gruen
becker&mayer! Books, 176 pp.
In Bob Gruen’s photo memoir, John Lennon: The New York Years, there’s a telling anecdote about a fan seeing Lennon in Central Park in the 1970s and shouting, "Hey, John Lennon! When are you getting The Beatles back together?" Lennon retorted, "Hey, when are you going back to high school?"
It’s a reminder – as is this whole book – that, in addition to his trailblazing as a songwriter and musician, Lennon was also the first rock star to grow up.
The former Beatle did most of that growing up in America, primarily in New York, where he relocated with Yoko Ono in 1971 and resided until he was murdered on his doorstep on December 8, 1980. Gruen, who became the couple’s unofficial photographer and a good friend, witnessed Lennon’s evolution during that period and captured it with his camera.
He began by shooting the recording sessions for Some Time in New York City, Lennon and Ono’s most political album. The pair, already the poster couple for the peace movement, had arrived in New York only to be taken up by the radical left – notably Yippie activists and Chicago Seven members Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman – and the result was a torrent of protest songs about all the hot topics of the time, from the Attica State prison riot, to the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland, to the emerging women’s movement. But even as Lennon was singing "Woman is the Nigger of the World," he was still acting like a macho asshole, getting blind drunk almost every night and picking up women right in front of his wife.
Although, to those who admired him, Lennon had appeared heroic in rejecting the Beatles "dream" and turning to the revolutionary and avant garde, by the mid-’70s both his music and his life seemed to be slipping. Not surprisingly, Ono finally kicked him out of the house and he went off to L.A., where he got pissed regularly with legendary party animals like Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon and made a public fool of himself, while intermittently penning songs with wrenching lyrics like, "Please help me, you know I’m drowning."
Finally, he returned to New York, then to Ono, and began to clean up his act. The decisive turning point, though, was the birth of their son Sean in 1975. Gruen’s photographs from that period are among the most moving in this collection, with a smiling Lennon looking leaner, healthier and happier than in any of the previous pictures, as, wearing a kimono, he tends lovingly to his infant son. He took five years off to raise Sean – becoming the first celebrity househusband and finally living that ideal of equality between the sexes he’d espoused. Then he came back in 1980 with a series of new songs, still couched in his sharp wit and wordplay, but also gently philosophical and radiating his deep love for his wife and child.
Gruen, a fly-on-the-wall-style lensman, clearly has the kind of discreet, unassuming personality that led Lennon and Ono to trust him as their primary photographer, and he brings the same self-effacing qualities to his accompanying text. His photos, meanwhile, include some of the most famous post-Beatle Lennon portraits – the Statue of Liberty images, Lennon in a "New York City" muscle shirt – as well as the kind of intimate, revealing shots you only get from hanging out for hours with your subject and becoming his friend.
In the 1970s, rock was still generally perceived as music for teenagers and people in their 20s, and many Beatles fans resented Lennon for refusing to stay in "high school" and extend that period of adolescent innocence artificially. Instead, he decided to embrace all those adult qualities – responsibility, fidelity, moderation – that seemed inimical to his chosen art form and, in the process, proved that rock music and maturity could happily co-exist. |
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