#FlashBack68: “Julia” by John Lennon

1971, public domain

John Lennon was just 20 years old when The Beatles played small clubs in Hamburg. His father was a sailor who abandoned his son shortly after his birth, as Liverpool was being bombed by those damn Nazis. Lennon’s father later did time in jail for desertion, but when he got out, Lennon’s mother, Julia Lennon (née Stanley), had already found a new man. Lennon was sent to live with his mother’s married sister, Mimi Smith, whose husband was a milkman.

His mother lived nearby and was a sort of shadow figure in his life. Lennon slowly emerged from his loneliness. He became a leader of a street gang, shoplifting and hitching rides on trolley cars. He also began to draw and write books starting when he was eight-years-old. Art helped him express his sense of the absurd. When he was 12 years old, Lennon’s report card read:

“Hopeless. Rather a clown in class. He is just wasting other pupils’ time.”

Lennon:

“I felt different. I always felt different from the rest. But I didn’t know what the hell to do about it.”

His Aunt Julia showed him the way. She gave Lennon a guitar as a gift. She showed him a few chords. Skiffle music was all the rage in England at the time. It is a simple, casual, shuffling style that uses one-string bass and washboards. Lennon began playing Skiffle while Elvis Presley was playing a new kind of music in the USA. Rock ‘n’ Roll changed Lennon’s life. The same year, Lennon’s mother died of cancer.

Lennon:

“Rock ‘n’ Roll was a place to put everything. You could have pictures in your head and make pictures into words, and the music would carry the words along, like a big boat. That’s what everybody started to do.”

Young Lennon had wanted to get out of Liverpool, make music, and become rich and famous. He managed to do all of that. He grew to want something else: a purer sound and a more profound art. He felt he could never do that as one of The Beatles.

Lennon:

“Everybody wants to blame someone for The Beatles’ breaking up. They want to blame Yoko Ono most of all. But it was already over musically before I met her.”

On a snowy evening in December 1980, riding together in his car, my new boyfriend (now my husband) and I had to pull over to the side of the road as we heard the announcement on the radio that Lennon had been murdered in front of the Dakota Apartments where he and Ono lived with Lennon’s son Sean Lennon. We wept.

Lennon had only returned to making music that year, with the album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Ono. Lennon never had a chance to experience his career resurgence.

The world grieved, and musical tributes poured in, even from the other Beatles, who all appeared on George Harrison‘s single All Those Years Ago (1981).

Fans found solace in Lennon’s music. After his murder, Double Fantasy‘s first single (Just Like) Starting Over went to Number One on the charts. Lennon’s posthumous album Milk & Honey (1984) included the great Nobody Told Me, with the lyric about “strange days, indeed” that is both bittersweet and comforting.

My favorite Lennon song is Julia, recorded 54 years ago today. It’s not a rock anthem or a message song. It grew out of the guitar lessons Lennon took from the ethereal musician Donovan during their time in India in 1967, studying Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Julia has no soaring melody, no harmonies, no clever arrangement, no discernible chorus, just Lennon on guitar and his heartbreaking voice. The song lacks everything that made The Beatles the most famous band of all time. Lennon said that telling the truth in his songs was more important than anything else. Julia has no social cause or great message. It is the song of a broken man still coping with a childhood with no mother. It is sad and low-key.

Half of what I say is meaningless

But I say it just to reach you, Julia

Julia, Julia, ocean child, calls me

So I sing a song of love, Julia

Julia, seashell eyes, windy smile, calls me

So I sing a song of love, Julia

Her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering

In the sun

Julia, Julia, morning moon, touch me

So I sing a song of love, Julia

When I cannot sing my heart

I can only speak my mind, Julia