Lennon

Ray Coleman's biography Lennon is a fantastic read if you would like to believe the best about John Lennon. It's not a whitewash, by any means...and Coleman goes into many of the dark areas that lurked in John's soul. So, if you're at ease with the well-publicised version of the John & Yoko love story and can accept that Lennon, Warrior for Peace, unfortunately had feet of clay, then this is the book for you.

It's a great fan's book, that you probably won't want to put down, exhaustive in detail, including:

Lennon's tragic childhood
His oppressive Aunt Mimi who brought him up
Lennon's wit and sometimes cruel humor
The Beatles in Hamburg, experiences and excesse
Beatlemania, experiences and excesses
The drugs, experiences and excesses
His love for Yoko, a woman too often maligned, who really loved John, despote her cool veneer
Lennon's callousness to first wife Cynthia and son Julian
His fight to be "real" and why living in New York was so important to him

My problem with Lennon is that it describes a Lennon that just doesn't sit well with what I hear in his music. What I mean is that Coleman writes the way Paul McCartney makes music. It's pretty, it's clean and it's seldom going to ever upset you. In fact, its strength may even be that it soothes, that it makes what was bad seem tolerable.

When a man like that investigates a contradictory (perhaps schizophrenic) phenomenon like Lennon, there's every chance that what he sees is very different to what I would. Coleman isn't a pushover, it's just that he patently wants to make the best of the testimonies he's heard.

And that's why Lennon is great for those who want to remember Johhny Moondog as an avatar from their youth, a grinning moptop who went a bit nuts from taking too many drugs but still managed to keep cranking out the greatest pop music ever made.

Then, as one era came to an end, he found Love with a strange oriental princess who encouraged him to leave The Beatles but fight for Peace, instead...as was his right!

Ray Coleman: Lennon

"...Ray Coleman's...Lennon...remains the very best end-to-end biography and portrait of the complex, often misunderstood, brilliant, and legendary Beatle's leader and visionary - spanning his wholelife from child to death..." Amazon reviewer Derek J. Larsson

"...This is probably the best bio you can get on Lennon. It has lots of details, is very well written and never boring. If you're looking for a bio that rocks, this is it!..." Amazon reviewer nicolas "escobarr"

"...Like most biographies of celebrities, Lennon's bios fall into two extremes:

The most notorious extreme is Albert Goldman The Lives of John Lennon: mean-spirited, doing whatever he can get away with to tear down the subject even if it means passing off rumors as fact, speculating on the flimsiest of evidence and using obscuring resources to the point that you're hard-pressed to know what to believe
but it's just as bad to write something at the opposite extreme, and that's what Ray Coleman does with Lennon. I expect that there's a lot of truth here, particularly when it comes to The Beatles, Lennon's radical period and his fight for U.S. residency but an awful lot of it is fawning, worshipful John-was-always-right fluff..." Amazon reviewer Michael J. West

"...I believe this is a true must have for Beatles fans and those he want to find the truth about a great man stolen from us by some maniac..." Amazon reviewer Jessica Cleveland

So, if that's how you see it, I recommend that you get hold of Imagine, the DVD, a sumptuous banquet of a life story, narrated by Lennon snippets taken from various interviews.

The Lennon Estate has also created some quite beautiful modern music videos that convey this picture of Lennon. You can hopefully find them at my reviews for: