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Portrait Of A Rock Star Lacks Strong Framework

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By DAVID L. ULIN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 11, 2009

"John Lennon: The Life," by Philip Norman (Ecco, $35)

When is enough too much? That's the question raised by this book, an oversized biography of the man who gave the Beatles their bite.

Beginning well before his birth - the opening describes another John Lennon, the singer's paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Liverpool to New York in the 1880s and became a touring musician, performing in blackface with Andrew Roberton's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels - and ending with the gunshots that killed him, on Dec. 8, 1980, this is a panoramic effort, exhaustively detailed and researched.

If biography were an art of collection, Norman's book would be a stately portrait, obsessively completist, every brushstroke in place. But biography is an art of interpretation, and too often this book lacks a sense of context - not just in regard to music but also to the way that, perhaps more for Lennon than any other figure of his moment, pop culture and history came to intersect.

Who was Lennon really, after all? Yes, he was a rock star, but that's too simple, for rock stars as we currently conceive of them didn't exist when he came along. In this, as in so much else, the Beatles created the template from which an industry would spring.

"What captivated and fascinated Britain in late 1963," Norman writes about early Beatlemania, "was not just a pop group more extraordinarily and unstoppably successful than any before. It was the new definition of
pop group' they had created, something closer to the Marx Brothers than any forerunners like the Blue Caps or Shadows - a gang laughingly on the run from overblown adulation and desire, a brotherhood that in the brightest glare of publicity still kept its own intriguing secrets, the ultimate impenetrable clique."

That's a great description, and it establishes the key conundrum of the Beatles: the tension between public image and private life. They spoke to us, but at a distance. Their emergence not only helped usher in the era of pop culture but changed society at the broadest level by redefining celebrity as a potent social force.

Between 1963 and 1968, the band went from infectious to insurrectionary, from singing about love to singing about social change. This was partly a function of the times, but what's interesting is the way they employed similar strategies in the service of divergent ends.

There's little difference between the media reaction to the Beatles' first visit to America, in February 1964 ("a cultural mission that became an almost royal progress"), and the response to Lennon's 1969 "bed-ins" with Yoko Ono; what changed was his engagement, the recognition that he could "use" celebrity to make a point. "I noticed this quality he had of standing outside every situation and noting the vulnerabilities of everyone, including myself," observed "A Hard Day's Night" director Richard Lester. "He was always watching."

"We were just a band that made it very, very big, that's all," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. I love that line because it's classic Lennon: ironic and truthful all at once.

Yet if this is the Lennon that Norman means to show us - cheeky, opinionated, cutting - he never quite succeeds in bringing him to life.

David L. Ulin writes for the Los Angeles Times.

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