Quote of the Day (John Lennon, on His Childhood)

"I was hip in kindergarten. I was different all my life. The second verse [of "Strawberry Fields"] goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius- 'I mean it must be high or low,' the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people couldn't see."--John Lennon in 1980, quoted in "The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs," Rolling Stone (Special Collectors' Edition)

The young boy on the bike in the accompanying post would have been 70 today. Technically, John Lennon, like Jack and Bobby Kennedy, died in early middle age. But in the mind's eye he, like those other '60s icons, seems preserved in youth, his voice ringing louder than the gun fired by his murderer.

Revisionism may have retouched the Kennedy's images in the eyes of historians, but the depredations of Albert Goldman have left Lennon almost totally unsullied as a kind of secular saint. After all, how much of a shock can anyone create about Lennon when he had said virtually all of it about himself anyway--including about his infinitely sad childhood away from his mother?

Is that new film, Nowhere Boy, about this period in his life, any good? Whatever the case may be, I strongly suspect it won't be the last consideration of his early days. We've already had a cinematic re-examination of his pre-Beatlemania days (Backbeat), and Black 47 frontman Larry Kirwan came up several years ago with an alternative vision of the possible futures of Lennon and the other Beatles in the novel Liverpool Fantasy.

The Lennon of "Imagine" obscures a man whose childhood left wounds as stinging as those afflicting Charles Dickens and Angela's Ashes memoirist Frank McCourt. He left us no clues on how to achieve the world of peace he craved other than the magnificently simplistic "All You Need Is Love." (You can imagine the weary musical rejoinder of Noel Coward: "If Love Were All.")

But the best moments of his adult life were hard-won object lessons for those of us who, like Lennon, have wondered how to fit in. Lennon lanced his anger, first through sardonic humor, then through introspection. He committed--at first to his craft, then, when he was ready, to others.

In the end he lived the advice, offered to millions of kindred spirits, of fellow English Invasion musician Ray Davies, who counseled, in his own wondrous "Misfits": "This is your chance,/This is your time so don't throw it all away."