Paul isn't dead.
We buried that "28 If" hoax — named for the license plate on the VW Beetle on the cover of "Abbey Road" — long ago, though some of the tin-hatted probably still hold on to it.
Paul is very much alive, 50 years after the breakup of the Beatles, canceling his 2020 tour, working on a Netflix animation project called "High in the Clouds," overseeing a special reissue of his entirely decent 1997 album "Flaming Pie," and a 50th anniversary limited-edition release of his charming first solo album "McCartney," singing carpool karaoke with James Corden. He's working on a musical version of "It's a Wonderful Life."
Yes, Macca is still very much with us. A beloved, twinkly, young-hearted old man.
It's John who's dead, and has been for nearly 40 years (George too, having died Nov. 29, 2001).
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John would be 80 if a crazy young man named Mark David Chapman had not shot him five times in the back outside his 72nd Street apartment building across from Central Park on Manhattan's Upper West Side on the night of Dec. 8, 1980.
They say there are advantages to dying young, and chief among these is that you never get old. You are preserved in amber, the fans never see you hanging on past the time you should have left the building. You are remembered as you were, not as what you became.
I don't know if it's a good trade, but maybe it's some consolation.
But the funny thing about dead Lennon, as opposed to dead Elvis or dead Jim Morrison or dead Jimi Hendrix or dead Kurt Cobain, is that his artistic reputation hasn't weathered reconsideration all that well. Rightly or wrongly, and probably wrongly, Lennon was widely considered the leader of the Beatles during the seven years the band existed. It was only after the fact — and after Lennon's assassination — that McCartney came to be viewed as his equal, and maybe even the genuine engine of the band.
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Lennon was once considered the smart Beatle, the artistic one, who raised the band's aspirations and political consciousness and made them more than pop stars. Now we know McCartney was the real mad scientist in the band, the melodious one. Lennon-McCartney wasn't a convenient fiction in the beginning; at first the boys wrote nose-to-nose, strumming guitars and scatting lyrics until they snatched something from the air.
But later, you could tell whose was whose, and how they complemented and needled each other. Their vocal ranges were nearly identical, but most of the time you could tell who was singing what. Lennon's timbre was a little nasal, grittier, a better instrument for a certain kind of working-class pop music, but he hated how he sounded and became bored by the fiddly bits in the studio. McCartney gloried in the tech and befriended all the engineers.
They were friends who got sick of each other.
I can relate to Lennon. Who wouldn't find the gifted yet seemingly facile McCartney annoying, what with his brilliant off-the-cuff bass part and his dance hall granny songs designed to delight and endear while you're working on big stuff like world peace and all that?
McCartney enjoyed entertaining, but Lennon was an "artist." No wonder a lot of us outgrew him.
If you'd asked in 1979 who my favorite Beatle was, I might have said Ringo Starr, but probably would have allowed I liked Lennon's work in the band better than McCartney's or George Harrison's. But in 2020, that sounds stubborn. Lennon wrote some great songs, sure, but it's McCartney's work, and the work they did together, that defines the Beatles. I might even suggest that the best solo artist to emerge from the band was Harrison.
I hadn't listened to much of Lennon's solo work until, in anticipation of the 80th anniversary of his birth on Oct. 9, I downloaded tracks from the forthcoming Capitol/UMe's boxed set "Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes."
I'm always skeptical of posthumous gestures, not because they aren't done in good faith by people who care about the music and the artist, but because I wonder about their utility to the obsessive people who are bound to buy them.
Records are as addictive as cigarettes, and some of us are just OCD enough that we can't resist a new John Lennon package "mixed and engineered by multi-Grammy Award-winning engineer Paul Hicks, who also helmed the mixes for 2018's universally acclaimed 'Imagine – The Ultimate Collection' series, with assistance by engineer Sam Gannon who also worked on that release, the songs were completely remixed from scratch, using brand new transfers of the original multi-tracks, cleaned up to the highest possible sonic quality."
Like almost all boxed sets released these days, "Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes" will be available in a variety of editions from a bare-bones single CD best-of to a 2-CD/1-Blu-ray version that comes with a book by Simon Hilton that includes annotation on all 36 tracks by Lennon, Yoko Ono and others who worked on the recordings, along with hundreds of previously unseen images.
It's also available in double and quadruple LP configurations, and digitally.
Other ephemera included in the deluxe pack are a bumper sticker, poster, postcards and a replica of the letter Lennon sent to the queen when he returned his MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1969.
What I like about the set, which should not be confused with the 72-track four-disc box "Gimme Some Truth" from 2010, is that it really does seem to be a fair representation of Lennon's solo career, and the remixes, while strengthening and in some cases clarifying Lennon's vocals, don't radically depart from the original versions. That's to say, the remixes sound better, but not necessarily different.
If you've got your "Shaved Fish" compilation album from 1975, maybe you're good on Lennon's solo career. I used to think I appreciated the Plastic Ono Band and the experimental albums Lennon did with Yoko Ono, but the truth is they didn't lay a glove on me. I'm not that big on "Imagine" either.
I didn't care much for "Double Fantasy," in part because it was a gentler, kinder album than I expected from John Lennon. I like my Lennon nasty, taunting — the Lennon of "How Do You Sleep?" as opposed to the Lennon of "Watching the Wheels" or "Beautiful Boy." I prefer the primal-scream Lennon who didn't "believe in Beatles" to the domesticated cat who sang about starting over.
That said, I like the 36 tracks on "Gimme Some Truth," and think maybe it's time for a reconsideration of Lennon's solo work, especially in light of the McCartney revisionism of recent decades. Lennon not only balanced McCartney's sweetness, but keynoted the band's snarky wit and kept things from becoming too precious. He was not only aware of what the Beatles had become, but probably smart enough to have been frightened by it.
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The farther away we get from these events, the more compressed they seem — the Beatles were a moment, not an epoch.
And Lennon was murdered, not martyred. Even so, we call it an assassination, implying that it was an ideologically inspired assault. We flattered ourselves by imagining he was one of us, that we were like him, more than we were like his killer. Someone organized a vigil, there were candles, there was weeping. There were all sorts of posturing and wallowing and bingeing on sentiment. We were sad, no doubt about that, but there was something self-aggrandizing about the way we exploited the occasion of his death. We were so sensitive and dashing with our moist eyes and broken hearts.
Every generation needs its pickup saints and tragic ballads; Lennon was a guitar player and a songwriter, a singer in a rock 'n' roll band. He was talented and uncommonly intelligent, and the facts of his execution secured his place among the tragically slain famous young. He wasn't so fascinating that we couldn't make him stand for whatever we wanted. We still do.
Lennon wasn't what we made of him in our heads. He was flesh and blood and bone; a painfully thin 40-year-old man who had been through a lot. He was very rich and probably passably happy when he died. He had a family, he had re-entered public life. He seemed less shrill, less angry than he had a few years before.
The tragedy of John Lennon — which may not be the whole truth, but seems a reasonable guess — is that he was in a pretty good frame of mind when he was killed. He might have been poised for a major comeback. He might have made a lot more good music.
None of the Beatles escaped mediocrity in their solo work. Perhaps that was inevitable. You can only burn so hot for so long, and in retrospect you can see the strain starting to show as early as" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and certainly in the albums that followed it.
These days, you can get by on the collateral Beatles you encounter; "Penny Lane" bleeds from a passing speaker and you smile. You don't need to hunker in the dark with headphones, listening for the point where the chicken at the end of "Good Morning Good Morning" turns into a guitar. If you are of a certain age and inclination, you have probably assimilated the entire Beatles catalog. You might not have any trouble describing Lennon as one of your heroes.
I don't know that there's anything wrong with that other than the sneaking suspicion that Lennon might not approve. He might be flattered, but so much of his work seems to be aimed at the demystification of idols.
Lennon was nothing if not a reflexive iconoclast. He could be ruthlessly careerist — all the Beatles were — but it's difficult to imagine him buying into the idea that he was essentially more than a Liverpool lad who had a run of luck and a bit of talent.
"I saw him as a cardboard cutout on an album cover," Chapman said at his parole hearing in 2003. "I was very young and stupid, and you get caught up in the media and the records and the music. And now I — I've come to grips with the fact that John Lennon was a person. This has nothing to do with being a Beatle or a celebrity or famous. He was breathing, and I knocked him right off his feet, and I don't feel because of that I have any right to be standing on my feet here, you know, asking for anything. I don't have a leg to stand on because I took his right out from under him, and he bled to death. And I'm sorry that ever occurred."
80 IF.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com