Nasty Bastard # 2: John Lennon….

I asked Mike Nessing to write this one but I guess he didn’t have the desire to take on such an unsavory subject! The truth is it hardly disrespects John Lennon’s memory to note he was a real person living a real life. What can you say about Saint John the Lennon he didn’t say himself. “Everybody loves you when you’re six feet underground, ” Lennon predicted and he was right.

But if you can get past “Imagine” and “Give Peace A Chance” you’d find… a nasty bastard. Lennon said it himself, to be a Beatle you had to be the biggest bastard of them all. To be JL you had to battle demons upon demons….

Albert Goldman destroyed the Lennon mystique in The Lives Of John Lennon a 1988 biography and though that was an unresearched mish mash of truths, half truths, and out and out lies, the first word in that litany was truths. Lennon gay baiting Brian Epstein we can believe in, Lennon having sex with Brian not so much. And anyway, even if he did it hardly makes him a nasty bastard.

But Lennon the wife beater is much more likely. Lennon dimped his first wife, neglected his first son, cheated on his second wife, got drunk in L.A. for a coupla years where he was an insufferable pig, and apparently hit both wives in drunken rages.

John was a part time junkie who graduated from booze to speed (before he even got out of Hambugh) to pot to acid (a big time acid dropper) to heroin and lived to write about it.

Business wise he hooked up with one of the biggest assholes in the music biz Allen Klein, broke up the Beatles and fucked over McCartney who at least took care of beatle business while Lennon at the height of the Beatles artistic abilities fucked around letting Paulie carry the band. Ps: ever noticed how Lennon played Letterman to McCartney’s Leno?

Then he disappeared for five years baking bread (yeah, that’s the ticket), terrifying Sean with his mood swings and flying half way round the world because Ono’s astrologer warned him of bad vibes. Shame it was a sham.

That’s the thing about people’s lives, they are really lived.