John Lennon's Primal Screams

“I hated Lennon,” one of the old madcaps says, defiantly, in Jonathon Green’s oral history “Days in the Life: Voices From the English Underground, 1961-1971.” “Oh yes. Lennon’s no hero of mine. I cannot separate people and what they do from what they are. Lennon was unmitigatedly evil as far as I was concerned.” Doesn’t that sound terrible, like a kind of spiritual deformity — hating John Lennon? Tangled deep in the nervous system of every earthling over the age of 40, I would argue, is some fiber or filament of peak Beatlemania, some flicker of the old wild adoration. We want, we need — still — to love these men. And yet Lennon in certain aspects was really quite hateable. Cruel at times, chaotic, dissociated: on his bad days little more, so it seems, than a gigantic human flaw through which the shifting light of genius displayed itself.