John Lennon was born 83 years ago today in Liverpool, England. His middle name is Winston, after Winston Churchill. His father was in the merchant marine and wasn’t much involved in the family, until when John was 5, his father tried to emigrate to New Zealand, taking his son along. The parents evidently had quite the argument — in front of John, unfortunately, and left it up to John to choose which parent he would stay with. He initially chose his father, but then changed his mind. At least that’s the official story. Someone else who saw the exchange later said that wasn’t how it happened.
Lennon lived with his sister Mimi after that, but his mother visited often, and provided the boy with early musical influences including Elvis Presley records, a banjo, on which she taught him to play early rock and roll songs. He was also an artist and drew cartoons for the Daily Howl magazine — the whole thing was his own creation. He told his sister Mimi that he was going to be a famous musician some day, but she scoffed at the idea, telling him “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.”
Lennon’s mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18 (and she was 44). For the next two years he turned to drinking and fighting, and his schoolwork suffered. He only managed to get into the Liverpool College of Art after his school headmaster intervened, but he was expelled more than a year before he might have graduated.
Outside of school, though, Lennon had formed a band, the Quarrymen. The name came from Quarry Bank High School. At the group’s second performance, Paul McCartney showed up, and Lennon asked him to join the band. Lennon was only about 15 at the time, but already had a reputation as a troublemaker, and McCartney’s family disapproved, but let the band practice in their flat. During that period, Lennon wrote his first song, Hello Little Girl. A few years later it was recorded by another group and became a top ten hit.
Lennon at first objected when McCartney wanted his friend George Harrison to join the band. Harrison was only 14, and Lennon thought he was too young. But they held an audition — on the upper deck of a bus — and Harrison impressed Lennon so much that he was in. They changed the name of the band to The Beatles in 1960, and everything took off after that. As McCartney later said, “[John] was like our own little Elvis … We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest.”
Over the next three years, the group began to be internationally famous, and in addition to songwriting, Lennon wrote two books. By 1966 he had begun experimenting with acting as well, and appeared in the comedy How I Won the War. It wasn’t his only movie role, but it was the only one in which he’s just an actor playing a part, not singing, and not portraying a version of himself.
He met Yoko Ono, an artist from Japan, around 1968 — they were married the next year, and Lennon partnered with her to create music with a new band, as well as visual arts including lithographs. He started a solo music career around 1970, and started to encounter political “counter measures” (the phrase used by the US Nixon administration) due to his anti-war activism. When he and Ono separated in 1973, Lennon spiraled downward, much as he had after the death of his mother. He drank heavily and got into trouble — but this time, he was internationally famous and followed by reporters and photographers everywhere he went. He recovered, but his fame kept following him — and didn’t just attract the media. In 1980 he was shot and killed outside his New York apartment by a mentally ill man.
