We were a provincial lad, thin and with a thick, hard-to-comb, curly bush of hair, transplanted from the old hometown for the first time ever to the freshman dormitory of the Philippines' premier state university when the Beatles long-playing album A Hard Day's Night (June 1964) had just been released. Thus, hardly a day or night passed without someone warbling--without apologies to John Lennon-- I Should Have Known Better along the dorm's long corridors or in the shower room for quite a long period of time.
To us, the Beatles was John Lennon and/or Paul McCartney. The songs we loved simply got stuck in our memory. We didn't get bothered if You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, Ticket to Ride and Norwegian Wood were Lennon's, and Yesterday, Michelle and Hey Jude were McCartney's, although they were marked up as Lennon/McCartney collaborations.
Hey Jude remains a favorite. In some ways it was the theme song of our fraternity's final rites in October 1968, a few months after it was released, because almost everyone would break into singing it whole or in parts every so often during the informal sessions with our candidate brothers. It doesn't matter that McCartney wrote it to comfort Julian Lennon after his father left him and his mother Cynthia for Yoko Ono earlier that year.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono we remember so well for their pacifist stance, and their nude photo in the cover of their album Two Virgins in 1968.
While we somehow lost much of our Lennon/McCartney consciousness during the people's long marches in the late 1960s, we still responded to their Give Peace a Chance (1969) and Lennon's Imagine (1971) with a different kind of dynamics. These songs came at the height of the American war in Vietnam, and the Philippines was confronting a gathering malevolent political storm. There came different songs to voice our protests when we went through the dark night of the Philippine soul in the 1970s to 1986, pulling out from our memory's cache of Lennon/McCartney musical gems something to imagine bright days ahead.
We also deeply grieved when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon four times in the back thirty years ago today, on 08 December 1980, at the entrance of The Dakota on 71st Street, New York City. A few hours earlier, Chapman asked Lennon for his autograph on a copy of the Double Fantasy album cover.
"Just imagine it never happened," Darryl Sterdan, music critic of the Winnipeg Sun Media, wrote, and that last year, "Lennon and Ono celebrate[d] their 40th anniversary by making a new CD. They pose[d] nude on the cover a la Two Virgins. Walmart refuse[d] to stock it until Lennon agree[d] to add tiny fig leaves."
This year, Sterdan added further, it would be "the Beatles embrac[ing] the digital age. Once again rejecting massive offers for a reunion tour, Lennon quietly turns 70, teaming up with Sean and Yoko to reform Plastic Ono Band and Elephant's Memory for a one-off concert. On eBay, an autographed but badly damaged copy of Double Fantasy found on the street in 1980 sits unsold."
For more of Sterdan's Just Imagine scenarios, go to http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/music/2010/12/02/16407886.html
His memory lives on with this official video of him singing Imagine --
For a personal homage to his memory, one can walk across the street from The Dakota to the Strawberry Fields and the Imagine memorials for John Lennon in Central Park. It can not be missed if one follows the trail on the west side. The day we went last year, the memorials were not crowded.
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