Next month, the ex-Beatle would have been 70. Here, one of his confidantes(女性知己) reflects on his enduring importance.
John Lennon on his return from honeymoon with Yoko Ono.
In two weeks' time, on 9 October 9, John would have been 70. On 8 December 8, it will have been 30 years since his death. The remains of the record industry he helped create, its pistons(活塞) still warm from the fevered(发烧的，激昂的) launch of the Beatles Remasters series and the Beatles: Rock Band video game a year ago, is cranking itself up(做好准备) again. Next week, the troubled EMI Music will put on a happy face and issue not just remastered(重新灌录) versions of eight existing Lennon solo albums, but a bunch of new compilations(编写) and boxes(弦乐), squeezing yet more blood from the carcass(尸体) of the group whose phenomenal success brought it the prosperity that has subsequently been frittered away(慢慢消耗).
Yoko has been heavily involved in all this activity. How could she not be when a line on the cover of all the reissues of her late husband's work states: "The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Yoko Ono Lennon/EMI Records Ltd"? Much more satisfactory, of course, to have it owned by the widow and the original record company than by some bunch of hustlers to whom the Rat Pack represented the pinnacle(顶峰) of 20th-century popular culture, which is what happened to the Rolling Stones' early recordings. If barrel-scraping has to be done, then better that the royalty cheques should be paid into a bank account bearing the name Lennon.
It was Yoko, however, who agreed to let an advertising agency working for the PSA Peugeot Citroën group buy the rights to a clip from an interview given by John in 1968, for use in a television commercial earlier this year. "Once a thing's been done, it's been done," the long-haired Lennon is saying. "So why all this nostalgia(怀旧的)? I mean, for the 60s and 70s, you know, looking backwards for inspiration, copying the past. How's that rock'n'roll? Do something of your own. Start something new. Live your own life." The message: buy our "anti-retro" car, the Citroën DS3.
Except he was actually saying something else. A YouTube detective posted the original footage(影视片段), shot by the BBC, in which John is actually talking about reading Sherlock Holmes in Tahiti before writing his own book, A Spaniard in the Works. The new words are from a different source and to anyone familiar with Lennon's speaking voice, it seems that they have been slightly slowed down to create an approximate match with the film.
Sean Lennon, his younger son, apologised for that one. Well, sort of. He tweeted(在Twitter上发言) in defence of his mother: "She did not do it for money. Has to do w hoping to keep dad in public consciousness. No new LPs, so TV ad is exposure to young. Having just seen ad I realise why people are mad. But intention was not financial, was simply wanting to keep him out there in the world."
Pull the other one, Sean. This is a man, your father, whose Wedgwood-style lavatory, originally installed at Tittenhurst Park, Ascot, his last home in Britain, was auctioned for £9,500 last month.
The last album he autographed – Double Fantasy, inscribed at the request of Mark Chapman a couple of hours before the 25-year-old returned to the Dakota building to make himself famous – went for $525,000 seven years ago. One of last year's most successful British films was Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood's scrupulous and sensitive account of his early days. John Lennon's name is hardly one that needs to be artificially hoisted into the public gaze.
But that hasn't stopped his widow exploiting it in fields that have nothing to do with music. In the last couple of weeks, the Montblanc company has been promoting a John Lennon special-edition fountain pen, with a clip shaped like a guitar fretboard. The newspaper ad has a CND symbol in the background and a slogan: "To John, with love." An earlier pen was dedicated to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, with a picture of the spiritual leader engraved on its £16,000 gold nib.
John would have laughed at that, wouldn't he? Perhaps with scorn, certainly with amusement at the incongruity(不调和) of the project. But only diehard(顽固的) Beatles fans seem to be upset. The rest of the world accepts it as part of a new culture in which everything – particularly if it evokes(唤起) a set of desirable values – is for sale, everything is negotiable, everything is there to be sampled and remixed and put to some new purpose.