"I Remember the Real John Lennon"

Ray Connolly was a friend of John Lennon’s, who published this peace perhaps to open the mind and eyes of those in society who have such a stagnant view on the late celebrity. Connolly states that John was kind to him, and he really liked him. Yet the perception of Lennon has been somewhat skewed. He writes, “But for the past three decades the man I’ve been reading about has grown less and less like the John Lennon I knew and, generally, more and more like some character out of Butler’s Lives Of The Saints”.

Starting to delve more into the man he knew personally, Connolly discloses the following: “But John Lennon was a complex, often contradictory character, who, while capable of great idealism, was pretty mean to his first wife and their son, Julian, and sometimes did some very foolish things when he let a naïve, well-meaning heart rule a hasty, agitprop head.” He goes on to say that he was more than a musician and peace activist. He was funny and witty and he was human. He had good qualities and bad qualities to him, both of which made up the individual of John Lennon. Connolly wants readers to know that there was more to the man than what he is often seen as in society today. For Lennon to be an idol, which he is to a huge mass of people around the world, there needs to be something to idolize about him. This is how parts of his story get erased, and a specific narrative emerges.

Connolly expresses his thoughts that Lennon has become more and more sensationalized as time has gone on, and that the figure we keep alive in memory today is not the same as the one that, almost 40 years ago, was still on this earth. We take Lennon’s memory and shape it into the best possible mold we can think of, and keep that cycle for as long as we can. In doing so, we sometimes lose the real essence of the figure along the way.