My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel.

Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

John Lennon

The Beatles arrived at Kennedy International Airport for their 1965 North American tour today in 1965. John Lennon took to screaming off-microphone obscenities at fans and clouded the tour.

The setlist for the tour was ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘She’s a Woman”‘, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie’, ‘Ticket to Ride’, ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Baby’s in Black’, ‘Act Naturally’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘Help!’, ‘I’m Down’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Man.’

Who was John Lennon as a man?

He debunked convention with sarcasm and dry satire, even fans also well knew him as ‘We, me, me’ personality who possessed astonishing self-retention.

He was an individualist, with a lingering appeal as ‘the outsider’, the champion of the simple man who objected to the deceit of capitalism.

The revolutionary song ‘Working-Class Hero’ released in 1970 was mere self-legend as Lennon was never a working-class citizen, albeit his childhood was unusual. Lennon’s father deserted him at five. His mother could not handle raising him, and she gave him to her sister and husband Mimi and George Smith, who were upper-middle class.

Lennon grew up in middle-class suburbia of Woolton, England, in a home named Mendips, with pedigree cats as pets. His extended family was professionals.

Lennon conceded later in life that he spent his childhood ‘in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around, not the poor, slummy kind of image (projected) in all the Beatles stories’

Lennon downplayed his rich background to fans, declaring himself as a torturing self-made artist. He presented himself as the artist from a barren background who wanted to better himself.

The lyrics of ‘Working-Class Hero’ “they hit you at home and they hurt you at school” were much disconnected from the loving home he grew up in, and evidence points more towards he was the tormentor, not the one experiencing it. Lennon was a bad boy, perceived as rebellious, dissolute, and unproductive, who was quick to temper and reply with his fists or with a caustic rebuke. Even his most admiring biographers seek to explain his ruthless streak, his thirst to taunt at anybody different, his ridicule of Jews and homosexuals, his peculiar fascination with dwarves and deformities. Known by his principals at school as lazy, even in art, Lennon was at the bottom of his class. Although he was a skilled illustrator, his work always fell short. One lecturer recalled that when the students pinned up their work: ‘John’s effort was always hopeless — or he’d put up with nothing at all.’

The archetype of a cynical, rebellious young man, he hit 20 without ever experiencing a full-time job.

He sought wealth. When The Beatles were born, that affluent life came.

By the age of 25, he purchased a Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari. When he was filming Help! in 1965, the director asked him to pass into Asprey, the luxury jewelers, through one door and out of another. On the way, he spent some £600 — today’s equal of £20,000.

Yet fans remember John Lennon as an artist, an idealist, and an ascetic who disdained possessions and rejected capitalism. When their manager, Brian Epstein, got them their first contract with record company EMI, Lennon’s telegram asked: “When are we going to be millionaires?”

Once rich he entertained in his creative, political, and spiritual interests.

His image solidified in 1966 when he met Yoko Ono, who was a Japanese conceptual artist. The couple made the permanent image of Lennon as the artistic idealist. Their first ‘bed-in for peace’ with considerable press coverage (and embraced) took place in the presidential suite at Amsterdam’s Hilton Hotel.

The establishment and press mocked John Lennon as a millionaire playboy who should grow up and shut his lip. Time magazine hailed him a “salvation-dispensing preacher for peace and porn”.

It was the press that reinforced his reputation as a misunderstood, lonely idealist set on opposing the petty morals of conventional society, always known in our consciousness in that image.

On August 13, 1971, John and Yoko Ono flew from Heathrow Airport to New York, saying he would never set foot on British soil again. Only weeks after recording ‘Imagine’ they settled into the luxurious Dakota building overlooking Central Park. Here, surrounded by the spoils of his long struggle for self-fulfillment, he spent the last years of his life.

An older friend, the Beatles’ former personal assistant Neil Aspinall, once heard Lennon moaning about the costs of running his business empire. ‘Imagine no possessions, John,’ Aspinall said. Lennon glared back. ‘It’s only a bloody song,’ he said.

Image Credit – George Konix/Rex – Shuttershock