Folks who know me well . . . especially those who grew up with me . . . know that I am a John Lennon fan . . . big time. I loved his music and I remember what it felt like when he the news of his death hit. Big time.

Unlike many of my generation, I also listened to Yoko Ono . . . yes, some of the songs seemed more like screeching than singing but a few pieces really spoke to me and I annoyed my family no end with repeated plays of a certain double album . . . I still love Have You Seen A Sunrise Lately and once in awhile, for fun, while on long drives and my daughter asks me to “sing a song, Daddy” I will belt out “All day long / I felt like / smashing my face through a clear glass window / but instead / I went out / and smashed up the phone booth ’round the corner” to which my bemused, befuddled, and otherwise confused daughter will ask, “Why?” Of course, I have no good solid answer other than, “I just like that song.” For some reason, she doesn’t really get why anyone would like something like “Why don’t we do it in the road? / No one will be watching us. / etc.” but then she isn’t quite sure what “it” is and why anyone would be wanting to shout about doing it in the middle of a road what with cars streaming by. Of course, another of my car-ride songs is the incredibly beautiful “Madrigal’s Song” from a very old and very funny Smothers Brothers album. I no longer have the album (couldn’t play it on any of our equipment even if I did) but I just loved that song. Wish I had it still. My daughter is eleven, to her the Beatles and John Lennon and the rest of that age are ancient history with no real substance or substantial reality beyond being names and references she doesn’t understand (compounded both by a generational gap that sometimes seems to go for miles and miles and by a cultural gap as she is growing up in Taiwan and misses a lot of the cultural references her American peers would take for granted).

Heck, such gaps extend further than my daughter’s generation. My baby brother is not a young man . . . not anymore . . . he’s been an adult longer than I’m sure he’d like to admit but when he was in high school, I introduced him to some of my old albums in my collection . . . his world opened up to something amazing on the day he discovered, much to his amazement, that Paul McCartney belonged to a band before Wings and that a lot of the music from that old old band was pretty good stuff. He had no consciousness of McCartney as a Beatle, only as the leader of Wings. Today’s kids may not even know what Wings was. Speaking of opening the world to our young . . . Kaye (my daughter, for those who just don’t pay attention to this blog) now has DVDs we have gotten for her of Paul McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, and Elton John (Kaye plays piano so the last DVD is really perfect for her). Of course, she also insisted on getting CDs of Carmen, Beethoven, and Mozart but eventually we’ll get her musical sensibilities widened. She has a friend who listens to all sorts of contemporary stuff (anorexic suicidal girl singers) that just don’t hold an appeal for Kaye . . . yet (adolescence is on the way).

I’m not really a child of the sixties . . . far from it . . . I was just born early on in that decade but don’t really have substantial memories of the age . . . my students at the university may believe I’m an old fart, and I guess to them I am, but I’m not quite that old . . .yet . . . no, my adolescence and early adulthood, the formation years, came later . . . I just love the music of the period (well, not all of it . . . a lot of it is just bubblegum swill just like today . . . but I loved the Beatles and I loved McCartney and I loved Lennon and I loved Harrison and I loved Starr . . . I was a real fanboy and had all their collective and solo efforts and scoured the bins looking for more).

I believe Lennon was a poet. A mixed up dreamer. McCartney was and is a song writer. Honestly, I think McCartney is often dismissed by a lot of folks in part because he hasn’t been romanticized in quite the way Lennon has. Just as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe have been romanticized and given more stature than their work would imply, Lennon has been romanticized as well . . . don’t get me wrong, I’m right in there with all the other Lennon fans and Lennon admirers . . . but I also love the work McCartney has done . . . a truly impressive body of work.

In any case, rounding about to the point of this post . . . this little essay about nothing that doesn’t seem to touch on the subject at hand . . . as I loved a couple of John and Yoko’s pieces (and loathed many others, really, screeching and all) . . . this little tidbit has interest to me . . . particularly since I am a hypnotist . . . with all that “power to sway men’s mind” crap included.

If you’re familiar with Lennon, you obviously know who Yoko Ono is . . . but a lot of folks have forgotten May Pang, John’s assistant who he saw when on hiatus with Yoko . . . the girlfriend who John left Yoko for and then left for Yoko . . . a handpicked affair, so to speak . . . well, according to May, Yoko used hypnosis as a means to remove her from John’s life and to cut him off from a lot of folks.

Hmmmm.

Joseph Cannon has written a bit on John Lennon and Hypnosis on his blog:

The same Friday night that Yoko setup the stop smoking hypnosis session with John at the Dakota without May, May said that John had planned on traveling down to New Orleans that weekend to join up with Paul McCartney and possibly start writing some songs with him for his upcoming album, ‘Venus and Mars’ that Paul was making in New Orleans. But alas, John’s so-called one hour “stop smoking hypnosis session” turned into a long drawn out all weekend marathon session from which he never returned back to May or to his old life. May guesses that Yoko may have had John drugged, hypnotized and/or put into a trance. During the so-called hypnosis session, May believes that John was told to break off with May and everything in his past so he could be with Yoko and was told that Yoko was his “mother” who knows what is best for John. Several days later May finally ran into John at the dentist’s office and John looked like he hadn’t slept in days and appeared “zombie like” and had difficulty talking. Then a few months later, May found out that John has made a complete break with his past by no longer seeing anyone from his past except for Yoko.

During an open forum interview session, Katie Hickox asked Lennon biographer Larry Kane about the hypnosis stuff and caused a controversy:

Later, during the Q&A session follow up to Larry Kane’s talk, mentioning May Pang’s book “Loving John” and a recent radio interview of May as references, I asked a question about Yoko’s use of hypnosis to get John back from May Pang during a so-called “stop-smoking session”, and at this point, MC Ken Dashow lost his cool. Ken Dashow is the DJ at local New York FM radio station Q104. When it came my turn to ask Mr. Kane my question, Ken stopped me by physically taking the microphone out of my hand before I could finish the question. I managed to regain the mike to finish my question, but Ken was clearly upset about the question being asked. He then ran up to the stage to completely dismiss the idea of hypnosis/mind control as a wife/husband control issue, completely skipping over any details of the Friday afternoon stop smoking session that resulted in John’s reunion back with Yoko and John never again living with May. But Larry Kane interrupted Ken Dashow’s monologue and he addressed my question, answering, “Yes, Yoko did use hypnosis as part of a stop smoking session, and she did use some techniques during that stop smoking session.” But Larry wouldn’t elaborate further about how Yoko’s use of hypnosis resulted in John’s reunion with Yoko, or whether perhaps in fact John was held hostage by Yoko as part of the original 1 to 2 hour long “stop smoking” session but that instead turned into a 72-hour marathon weekend “treatment” session, during which May, who had been expecting John back for dinner, was not permitted to talk to or see John.

Actually, while I was initially very skeptical about the whole thing . . . descriptions from folks close to Pang, Lennon, and Ono of what was what give me to believe that the hypnosis sessions probably did include some “relationship restructuring and reinforcement” suggestions that border on what folks are insinuating . . . albeit, folks need to be aware that you can’t hypnotize someone to fall in love with you unless they’re already predisposed towards that . . . of course, that’s where the laws and arts of seduction come in . . . and Lennon was certainly a man looking for a mommy and Ono certainly fit the bill.

Given recent nonsense, Yoko’s revision of Beatles and Lennon history goes along with the hypnosis bit. Yoko removed May from video footage and inserted herself where she most definitely was not present. Still has a chip on her shoulder when it comes to May as . . . Yoko Edits Herself into John’s History:

Yoko Ono is not making fans of John Lennon very happy right now. She’s been busy editing Lennon’s videos and changing songwriting credits. Call it her revenge on old enemies like Paul McCartney and May Pang. Ono’s weirdest piece of video trickery comes on the recently released DVD “Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon.” On one film, for the classic song “#9 Dream,” Ono has edited herself into the original video. There you will find her mouthing the backup vocals that were sung on the original hit recording by Lennon’s girlfriend at that time, May Pang. Pang, of course, was not thrilled to hear this had happened. “She is trying to erase everyone who had anything to do with John with her alone,” says Pang, who is a popular figure in the New York music scene. “I am definitely upset at her misleading everyone into thinking she is on ‘#9 Dream.’ She had nothing to do with this particular album and it was John’s only No.1 album and No. 1 single during his lifetime. Boy, do I understand how Paul feels.”

Of course, some folks just come out and say Lennon was a bit on the insane side of things from the get-go anyway . . . The Evil Legacy of John Lennon:

There were many evidences of insanity during Lennon’s final years. In the early 1970s, Lennon and Yoko underwent psychological therapy at the Primal Institute in California. Dr. Janov testified: “John was simply not functioning. He really needed help” (Giuliano, p. 18). The therapy consisted of giving oneself over to hysterical outbursts in an attempt to purge the psyche. Lennon would scream and wail, weep, and roll on the floor. “John eventually confessed to several dark sexual impulses: he wanted to be spanked or whipped and he was drawn to the notion of having a spiked boot heel driven into him. . . . Later in his life, John gathered together a collection of S&M-inspired manikins, which he kept tucked away in the bowels of the Dakota. These dummies, adorned with whips and chains, also had their hands and feet manacled. John’s violent sexual impulses troubled Yoko” (Giuliano, Lennon in America, p. 19). Lennon was plagued by nightmares from which he awoke in terror (Giuliano, pp. 83, 137, 142). Though never really overweight, Lennon was obsessed with his weight and when he found himself overeating, he would hide in the master bedroom and force himself to vomit (Giuliano, p. 92). After the couple moved into the Dakota apartments in New York in 1973, Lennon spent most of the time locked indoors. He referred to himself as Greta Hughes, referring to Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes, famous recluses. “More and more, the increasingly reclusive Lennon began to shun his friends. . . . Lennon’s anxieties were rapidly getting the better of him. . . . Everybody’s working-class hero was sliding steadily into a morass of hopelessness and solemnity” (Giuliano, pp. 84, 97, 105). He “quietly slipped into a dark hibernation,” spending entire days in bed (Giuliano, p. 129). To help him conquer his $700 per day heroin habit, Yoko introduced him to a form of therapy involving self-hypnosis and “past-life regression.” He thought he was actually traveling back into his past lives. In one session he discovered that he had been a Neanderthal man. In another, he was involved in the Crusades during the Dark Ages. Lennon was so paranoid that when he visited Hong Kong in 1976, he did not leave his suite for three days. He thought he had multiple personalities, and he would lie down and imagine that his various personalities were in other parts of the room talking to him. “In doing so, Lennon was in such a state of mind that the slightest noise or shadow would terrify him” (Giuliano, p. 122). When he went out into the crowds he would hear “a cacophony of terrible voices in his head” which filled him with terror. When he returned to New York, he became a virtual hermit, “retreating to his room, sleeping his days away, mindlessly standing at the window watching the rain. Once Yoko found him staring off into space groaning that there was no place he could go where he didn’t feel abandoned and isolated…” (Giuliano, p. 142). In 1978, Lennon “locked himself into his pristine, white-bricked, white-carpeted Dakota bedroom. Lying on the bed, he chain-smoked Gitane cigarettes and stared blankly at his giant television, while the muted phone at his side was lit by calls he never took. . . . he stayed in a dark room with the curtains drawn…” (Giuliano, pp. 173, 174). By 1979, at age 39, “John Lennon was already an old man haunted by his past and frightened by the future” (Giuliano, p. 177). He swung radically “from snappy impatience to bouts of uncontrolled weeping” and could only sleep with the aid of narcotics. Yoko talked Lennon into visiting their Virginia farm in 1979, but he became so paranoid and shaken from the brief excursion into the public (they rode a train) that when they arrived back at their home in New York he “erupted violently, reducing the apartment to a shambles.” The man who is acclaimed as the towering genius behind the Beatles had “all but lost his creative drive and confessed he’d sunk so low he had even become terrified of composing” (Giuliano, p. 130).

Weirdness and strangeness with a heaping helping of bullshit.

Doesn’t really matter to me . . . I still love the music.

See more:

• John Lennon Dream
• A Yoko Ono Box
• May Pang
• Lennon the Musical
• Lennon and Nudity
• Unfinished Music No. 1 – Two Virgins
• John Lennon and May Pang . . . UFO Sighting

Imagine . . . is still one of the most beautiful songs every written . . . especially when you listen to it with your eyes closed . . . and . . . just . . . breathe in . . . breathe out . . . relax . . . and . . . really FEEL the words as real as you can. Just . . . imagine . . .

Peace,
Brian