Twenty-five years ago today, a lunatic named Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. "I'll probably be popped off by some loony," Lennon predicted in the 1960s. He was right. Throughout the day I'll be listening to "I'm So Tired," "God," "Norwegian Wood," "Mind Games," "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away," and other John tunes. FlynnFiles doesn't do audio, but here are some of John Lennon's words:

John Lennon would have embraced downloads supplanting albums...
"I'm still a record man. There's nobody--including meself--on earth that I can sit down and listen to a whole album. Nobody. The same voice going on . . . Nobody can sustain it. Even as a rock & roll fan of fifteen, there were very few albums I could sit through. Even Elvis, and I adored him, or Carl Perkins or Little Richard. There were always a couple of tracks to miss and go on to the next ones. So I don't sit 'round and listen to artists' albums. Unless they're friends of mine. I like records. I like 'Shame, Shame, Shame.' Shirley and the gang. Some of this disco stuff. Great. I like just individual records. One of me favorites last year was 'I Can Help.' Billy Swan. A real old Elvis imitation kind of record. I like singles. I like jukebox music. That was the thing that turned me on. That's the thing I like."

John Lennon on being different...
"The class thing is just as snobby as it ever was. People like us can break through a little--but only a little. Once, we went into this restaurant and nearly got thrown out for looking like we looked until they saw who it was. 'What do you want? What do you want?' the headwaiter said, 'We've come to bloody eat, that's what we want,' we said. The owner spotted us and said, 'Ah, a table sir, over here, sir.' It just took me back to when I was 19, and I couldn't get anywhere without being stared at or remarked about. It's only since I've been a Beatle that people have said, 'Oh, wonderful, come in, come in,' and I've forgotten a bit about what they're really thinking. They see the shining star, but when there's no glow about you, they only see the clothes and the haircut again."

John Lennon on The Beatles staying together...
"They want to hold on to something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off to--it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, OK? I don't need it.... I absolutely don't need it. Let them chase Wings. Just forget about me. If that's what you want, go after Paul or Mick. I ain't here for that. If that's not apparent in my past, I'm saying it in black and green, next to all the tits and asses on page 196. Go play with the other boys. Don't bother me. Go play with the Rolling Wings.... No, wait a minute. Let's stay with this a second; sometimes I can't let go of it. [He is on his feet, climbing up the refrigerator] Nobody ever said anything about Paul's having a spell on me or my having one on Paul! They never thought that was abnormal in those days, two guys together, or four guys together! Why didn't they ever say, 'How come those guys don't split up? I mean, what's going on backstage? What is this Paul and John business? How can they be together so long?' We spent more time together in the early days than John and Yoko: the four of us sleeping in the same room, practically in the same bed, in the same truck, living together night and day, eating, shitting and pissing together! All right? Doing everything together! Nobody said a damn thing about being under a spell. Maybe they said we were under the spell of Brian Epstein or George Martin [the Beatles' first manager and producer, respectively]. There's always somebody who has to be doing something to you. You know, they're congratulating the Stones on being together 112 years. Whoooopee! At least Charlie and Bill still got their families. In the Eighties, they'll be asking, 'Why are those guys still together? Can't they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded by a gang? Is the little leader scared somebody's gonna knife him in the back?' That's gonna be the question. That's-a-gonna be the question! They're gonna look back at the Beatles and the Stones and all those guys are relics. The days when those bands were just all men will be on the newsreels, you know. They will be showing pictures of the guy with lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black make-up on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That's gonna be the joke in the future, not a couple singing together or living and working together. It's all right when you're 16, 17, 18 to have male companions and idols, OK? It's tribal and it's gang and it's fine. But when it continues and you're still doing it when you're 40, that means you're still 16 in the head."

John Lennon on the prospect of reuniting The Beatles on Saturday Night Live...
"Oh, yeah. Paul and I were together watching that show. He was visiting us at our place in the Dakota. We were watching it and almost went down to the studio, just as a gag. We nearly got into a cab, but we were actually too tired.... That was a period when Paul just kept turning up at our door with a guitar. I would let him in, but finally I said to him, 'Please call before you come over. It's not 1956 and turning up at the door isn't the same anymore. You know, just give me a ring.' He was upset by that, but I didn't mean it badly. I just meant that I was taking care of a baby all day and some guy turns up at the door. . . . But, anyway, back on that night, he and Linda walked in and he and I were just sitting there, watching the show, and we went, 'Ha-ha, wouldn't it be funny if we went down?' but we didn't."

John Lennon on benefit concerts...
"Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give $200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn't mean a damn thing. After they've eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I'm not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway."

John Lennon on the influence of radicalism on his songwriting...
"It almost ruined it, in a way. It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet. Even if it does go ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, da-deedle, deedle, it. I'm not a formalized poet, I have no education, so I have to write in the simplest forms usually. And I realized that over a period of time--and not just 'cause I met Jerry Rubin off the plane--but that was like a culmination. I realized that we were poets but we were really folk poets, and rock & roll was folk poetry--I've always felt that. Rock & roll was folk music. Then I began to take it seriously on another level, saying, 'Well, I am reflecting what is going on, right?' And then I was making an effort to reflect what was going on. Well, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work as pop music or what I want to do. It just doesn't make sense. You get into that bit where you can't talk about trees, 'cause, y'know, y'gotta talk about Corruption on Fifty-fourth Street! It's nothing to do with that. It's a bit larger than that. It's the usual lesson that I've learned in me little thirty-four years: As soon as you've clutched onto something, you think--you're always clutchin' at straws--this is what life is all about. I think artists are lucky because the straws are always blowin' out of their hands. But the unfortunate thing is that most people find the straw hat and hang on to it, like your best friend that got the job at the bank when he was fifteen and looked twenty-eight before he was twenty. 'Oh, this is it! Now I know what I'm doing! Right? Down this road for the next hundred years . . .' and it ain't never that. Whether it's a religious hat or a political hat or a no-political hat: whatever hat it was, always looking for these straw hats. I think I found out it's a waste of time. There is no hat to wear. Just keep moving around and changing clothes is the best. That's all that goes on: change."

John Lennon on death...
"I hate it. It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison--it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They're saying John Wayne conquered cancer--he whipped it like a man. You know, I'm sorry that he died and all that -- I'm sorry for his family -- but he didn't whip cancer. It whipped him. I don't want Sean [Lennon] worshiping John Wayne or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it's garbage, you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy."

On the Biography Channel, VH1 and the like, you only see the hippie John Lennon. These quotes show that despite some of those left-wing leanings, he at times made a lot of sense.

Only at the Flynn Files could you enjoy such consecutive yet disparate offerings! C.S. Lewis, followed by John Lennon! I loved Lewis and his writings, and though I loved most of the Beatles music, I honestly couldn't give a fig about anything John Lennon thought or had to say.

But that's why I love reading the Flynn Files! To borrow a phrase from Forrest Gump, "it's like a box o' chocolates!"

Keep 'em coming!

I think John Lennon was a hypocrite and an asshole, but probably the greatest songwriter of the 20th century. Just listen to some Wings and Paul McCartney solo recordings and you'll know who the important half of the Lennon/McCartney duo was. I think his melodies are far superior to his lyrics, and I think the vast majority of his lyrics are cheesy. That's of course subject to interpretation. Anyway, my favorite Beatle was George Harrison and I feel the Beach Boys are a superior musical act, so I probably shouldn't be posting this. :/

John could be caustic and mercurial. I tried to cull the positive stuff from his interviews, but here's his particularly brutal take, which no doubt changed the next day, on PMA's favorite Beatle, George Harrison:

"George's relationship with me was one of young follower and older guy. He's three or four years younger than me. It's a love-hate relationship and I think George still bears resentment toward me for being a daddy who left home. He would not agree with this, but that's my feeling about it. I was just hurt [by Harrison's book, "I, Me, Mine"]. I was just left out, as if I didn't exist. I don't want to be that egomaniacal, but he was like a disciple of mine when we started. I was already an art student when Paul and George were still in grammar school [equivalent to high school in the U.S.]. There is a vast difference between being in high school and being in college and I was already in college and already had sexual relationships, already drank and did a lot of things like that. When George was a kid, he used to follow me and my first girlfriend, Cynthia -- who became my wife -- around. We'd come out of art school and he'd be hovering around like those kids at the gate of the Dakota now. I remember the day he called to ask for help on "Taxman," one of his bigger songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that's what he asked for. He came to me because he couldn't go to Paul, because Paul wouldn't have helped him at that period. I didn't want to do it. I thought, Oh, no, don't tell me I have to work on George's stuff. It's enough doing my own and Paul's. But because I loved him and I didn't want to hurt him when he called me that afternoon and said, "Will you help me with this song?" I just sort of bit my tongue and said OK. It had been John and Paul so long, he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until then. As a singer, we allowed him only one track on each album. If you listen to the Beatles' first albums, the English versions, he gets a single track. The songs he and Ringo sang at first were the songs that used to be part of my repertoire in the dance halls. I used to pick songs for them from my repertoire--the easier ones to sing. So I am slightly resentful of George's book. But don't get me wrong. I still love those guys."

Woke up, got outta' bed, ran a comb across my head...

Found my way downstairs and had a cup, then looking up, I noticed I was late (chh chh chh chh!)

Thanks for letting me benefit from your scholarship. As an aside, another great rocker who was an art school student was Clapton. I'm sure there were plenty of others (Talking Heads comes to mind).

It's probably not fair for me to call Lennon an a-hole. It's tough enough living life, let alone being thrusted into the international spotlight in your mid-20's. Power like that would corrupt anyone, let alone a neurotic musical super-genius. I've said it before, but there's no doubt Lennon is the Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan of the rock world. Nobody can touch him.

Yeah, one thing that blows my mind is that the Beatles (when they existed as the Beatles) were all in their twenties. America never knew a thirty-year-old Beatle. They knew thirty- and forty-year-old ex-Beatles. But there has never existed a thirty-year-old Beatle. Creating the most influential and listened to music of the 20th century is a pretty amazing feat for four men under the age of 30.

Imagine, there's no loco Yoko!?

"Imagine" is the worst song in the history of mankind.

Lennon was a talented songwriter and musician but as far as all his preaching about peace, love and lending your neighbor a helping hand...when did he ever open his checkbook?? The guy was a multi-millionaire. The same goes for McCartney, Dylan, Bono and all those other rich rock stars who prattle on about charity: shut up and put your money where your mouth is.