Mind Games, Talking Heads
Amnesty International asked me to chair a discussion earlier this week. The theme was 'John Lennon: Revolutionary Or Fool?' and the event was featured in the Belfast Festival programme. There were four quality speakers on the stage. Anne Devlin is a playwright and author. Johnny Rogan has written books about Lennon, Van Morrison, The Byrds, Neil Young and more. Gavin Martin is an old colleague from the NME who hosts regular events in London called Talking Musical Revolutions. Finally we had Eamonn McCann, writer and activist from Derry.
Everyone was riffing about the music, the politics and the incendiary times. Anne made a strong case for Yoko, her art and the fact that she was a strong Oriental role model at a time when the Vietnam war showed so many female victims. Eamonn was respectful of the singer's engagement with the world and tolerant of the sloganeering. Gavin spoke eloquently about songs such as 'I'm Only Sleeping' and his joyous 'Rock And Roll' album.
Meanwhile, Johnny Rogan supplied many of the known facts about Lennon's Irish dimension, especially the polemic of 1972 and the LP 'Sometime In New York City'. This collection included 'The Luck Of The Irish' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', and critics have mostly dismissed the work. But Rogan suggested that it deserved a more sympathetic listen. He even regarded the sneery line about "Anglo pigs and Scotties" as part of the black and white logic of agitprop.
McCann was scathing of Bono, who wrote 'God Part Two' as a reaction to the Goldman biography of Lennon. There was spontaneous applause in the hall and a consensus that few acts these days are political at all. Lennon was a bag of contradictions, but he sure left an interesting trail.
Comment number 1.
At 13:48 24th Oct 2010, BluesBerry wrote:When I first read the title, I thought you were going to write about the "mind games" of the current "talking heads". So I was momentarily disappointed to see the topic was really: 'John Lennon: Revolutionary Or Fool?'
John Lennon was no fool; he was an idealist, a dreamer.
"Everyone was riffing about the music, the politics and the incendiary times." But were there any times in history that were more poltical, more incendiary than the current times?
If you look at the FBI files on John Lennon, you might think he was a "revolutionary" - @ 300 pages of documentation on John Lennon in 1971-72, part of President Nixon's effort to get John Lennon deported. Nixon wanted him silenced as a critic of the Vietnam War. So much for free speech in the American democracy where all politicians play mind games and tell the talking heads what to say!
The FBI files were requested (FoI) and released to historian Jon Wiener. Wiener wrote about these files in his book "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files."
The Mind-Gamers withheld some information while the talking heads claimed that releasing them would "endanger the national security." (Where have we heard this before?) Jon Wiener, one courageous dude, sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, asking the courts to order release of all Lennon files.
Even now, when Lennon would be 70 years old, I don't think that everyone, including me, really gets the totality of his message. Remember the song, "Imagine". In this sone, Lennon is talking about "Imagine" a world without possessions, where everyone had enough.
And lastly, the incredible "Give Peace a Chance". Well, so many years after the four shots that took Lennon's life, when oh when do you think the world of mind-gamers and talking heads will give peace a chance?
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