Download or read book Understanding John Lennon written by Francis Kenny and published by Shepheard Walwyn (Publishers) Limited. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This year marks the anniversary not only of what would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday but also the 40th anniversary of his death in New York. Understanding John Lennon takes us back to where it all began. While other writers have only touched on the 'cause' of John's genius, Francis Kenny reveals its roots in the post-war nature of Liverpool, John's family with its complex history, and the pain and hurt John felt during his childhood, revealing how his early life experiences shaped his brilliance as a songwriter and musician. Of all the books on The Beatles, this is the only one by an author who was himself born and raised under the same influences as the band's, in the heart of Liverpool and still lives there. From the maritime nature of the city to its blue-collar background and the Irish heritage of its people, this book provides an insight into post-war Liverpool and John's family life, which gave rise to his brilliant but conflicted nature and traces how this ultimately contributed to the fall of The Beatles. Covering Lennon's life from Liverpool to New York, Kenny writes with sympathetic understanding of the confusion, pain and corrosiveness that can, at times, accompany the demands and expectations of the creative process at its highest level. With new material revealing the real source of inspiration of 'Strawberry Fields', we are provided with a thought-provoking insight into a complex mind and a genius in the making. Whilst most books regurgitate the same stories about John's childhood and his time with The Beatles, this book presents an original insight into the founder of a band that was at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution. It is the only work to reveal the true sources of John's genius which continues to leave an enduring imprint on our everyday life and imagination. Francis Kenny, after spending 20 years in the construction industry in the UK and abroad, was awarded a degree by Liverpool University and went on to obtain MAs in Social Policy, Urban Regeneration and Screenwriting while teaching in special education and the social sciences. With extensive research into The Beatles spanning a lifetime, he published his first novel, Waiting for The Beatles in 2006, including an associated screenplay and television work, followed by The Making of John Lennon in 2014. In Understanding John Lennon, he takes a deeper look into the formative influences in John Lennon's life.
Download or read book In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works written by John Lennon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An omnibus edition of two works of John Lennon’s “fascinating…whimsy” (The Sunday Times, London) poetry, prose, and drawings that will “jolt [you] into gusts of laughter” (The Guardian). A humorous compilation of poetry, prose, and artwork from two of John Lennon’s classic works, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Known as the Beatles’s Renaissance man, Lennon is widely regarded as one of the most impactful musicians in history. Originally published in 1964, this “quirky, funny collection of stories, poems, and drawings” (The New York Times) is a must-have for John Lennon and Beatles fans everywhere.
Download or read book The Search for John Lennon written by Lesley-Ann Jones and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulling back the many hidden layers of John Lennon’s life, Lesley-AnnJones closely tracks the events and personality traits that led to the rock star living in self-imposed exile in New York—where he was shot dead outside his apartment on that fateful autumn day forty years ago. Late on December 8th, 1980, the world abruptly stopped turning for millions, as news broke that the world's most beloved bard had been gunned down in cold blood in New York city. The most iconic Beatle left behind an unrivaled body of music and legions of faithful disciples—yet his profound legacy has brought with it as many questions and contradictions as his music has provided truths and certainties. In this compelling exploration, acclaimed music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones unravels the enigma that was John Lennon to present a complete portrait of the man, his life, his loves, his music, his untimely death and, ultimately, his legacy. Using fresh first-hand research, unseen material and exclusive interviews with the people who knew Lennon best, Jones' search for answers offers a spellbinding, 360-degree view of one of the world's most iconic music legends. The Search for John Lennon delves deep into psyche of the world's most storied musician—the good, the bad and the genius—forty years on from his tragic death.
Download or read book Being John Lennon written by Ray Connolly and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Lennon was a rock star, a school clown, a writer, a wit, an iconoclast, a sometime peace activist and finally an eccentric millionaire. He was also a Beatle - his plain-speaking and impudent rejection of authority catching, and eloquently articulating, the group's moment in history. Chronicling a famously troubled life, Being John Lennon analyses the contradictions in the singer-songwriter's creative and destructive personality. Drawing on many interviews and conversations with Lennon, his first wife Cynthia and second Yoko Ono, as well as his girlfriend May Pang and song-writing partner Paul McCartney, Ray Connolly unsparingly reassesses the chameleon nature of the perpetually dissatisfied star who just couldn't stop reinventing himself.
Download or read book John Lennon 1980 written by Kenneth Womack and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Lennon, 1980 had begun as a ceaseless shopping spree in which he and wife Yoko Ono fell into the doldrums of purchasing blue-chip real estate and indulging their every whim. But for John, that pivotal year would climax in several moments of creative triumph as he rediscovered his artistic self in dramatic fashion, only to be cut down by an assassin's bullets on Monday, December 8th, 1980, in the prime of a new life that was only just beginning to blossom.
Download or read book Imagine John Yoko written by John Lennon and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personally compiled and curated by Yoko Ono, Imagine John Yoko is the definitive inside story-told in revelatory detail-of the making of the legendary album and all that surrounded it: the locations, the creative team, the artworks and the films, in the words of John & Yoko and the people who were there. Features 80% exclusive, hitherto-unpublished archive photos and footage sequences of all the key players in situ, together with lyric sheets, Yoko's art installations, and exclusive new insights and personal testimonies from Yoko and over forty of the musicians, engineers, staff, celebrities, artists and photographers who were there-including Julian Lennon, Klaus Voormann, Alan White, Jim Keltner, David Bailey, Dick Cavett and Sir Michael Parkinson. "A lot has been written about the creation of the song, the album and the film of Imagine, mainly by people who weren't there, so I'm very pleased and grateful that now, for the first time, so many of the participants have kindly given their time to 'gimme some truth' in their own words and pictures" -Yoko Ono Lennon, 2018 In 1971, John Lennon & Yoko Ono conceived and recorded the critically acclaimed album Imagine at their Georgian country home, Tittenhurst Park, in Berkshire, England, in the state-of-the-art studio they built in the grounds, and at the Record Plant in New York. The lyrics of the title track were inspired by Yoko Ono's "event scores" in her 1964 book Grapefruit, and she was officially co-credited as writer in June 2017. Imagine John Yoko tells the story of John & Yoko's life, work and relationship during this intensely creative period. It transports readers to home and working environments showcasing Yoko's closely guarded archive of photos and artifacts, using artfully compiled narrative film stills, and featuring digitally rendered maps, floorplans and panoramas that recreate the interiors in evocative detail. John & Yoko introduce each chapter and song; Yoko also provides invaluable additional commentary and a preface. All the minutiae is examined: the locations, the key players, the music and lyrics, the production techniques and the artworks-including the creative process behind the double exposure polaroids used on the album cover. With a message as universal and pertinent today as it was when the album was created, this landmark publication is a fitting tribute to John & Yoko and their place in cultural history.
Download or read book Dreaming the Beatles written by Rob Sheffield and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them. Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up? As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.
Download or read book Come Together written by Jon Wiener and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint. Originally published: New York: Random House, c1984.
Download or read book The John Lennon Letters written by John Lennon and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lifetime of letters, collected for the first time, from the legendary musician and songwriter. John Lennon was one of the greatest songwriters the world has ever known, creator of "Help!", "Come Together", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Imagine", and dozens more. But it was in his correspondences that he let his personality and poetry flow unguarded. Now, gathered for the first time in book form, are his letters to family, friends, strangers, and lovers from every point in his life. Funny, informative, wise, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking, his letters illuminate a never-before-seen intimate side of the private genius. This groundbreaking collection of almost 300 letters and postcards has been edited and annotated by Hunter Davies, whose authorized biography The Beatles (1968) was published to great acclaim. With unparalleled knowledge of Lennon and his contemporaries, Davies reads between the lines of the artist's words, contextualizing them in Lennon's life and using them to reveal the man himself.
Download or read book Memories of John Lennon written by Yoko Ono and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wonderful book for fans of Lennon. . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal John Lennon . . . as much a part of our world today as he ever was He touched many lives in his brief forty years, and continues to move and inspire millions more to this day. Now, invited by Yoko Ono, friends, family, and fans from all walks of life—including some of the great artists of our day—reminisce about Lennon as a visionary and friend, musician and performer, husband and father, activist and jokester. In their own words and drawings, poems and photos, Lennon's life from his childhood through the Beatles years to the happiness and tragedy of his final days become stunningly vivid. Intimate glimpses gathered from musicians who knew John, such as Pete Townshend, Sir Elton John, Billy Preston, and Joan Baez; friends and relatives such as producer David Geffen, publicist Elliot Mintz, and cousin Mike Cadwallader; and artists who followed him such as Bono, Alicia Keys, Steve Earle, Jello Biafra, and Carlos Santana. And, for the first time, renowned photographer Annie Liebovitz presents every frame of the historic last session with John and Yoko. Memories of John Lennon is a rich and deeply felt appreciation of a truly great man. “Heartfelt . . . poignant reminders of why Lennon was so widely mourned and is missed to this day.” —Booklist
Download or read book John Lennon written by Elizabeth Partridge and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of John Lennon from his turbulent childhood to rebellious rock'n'roll teen to writing and recording with the Beatles to life with Yoko Ono.
Download or read book Lennon written by Tim Riley and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame. Riley portrays Lennon's rise from Hamburg's red light district to Britain's Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naivetéf "Love Me Do" to the soaring ambivalence of "Don't Let Me Down"; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon's friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock 'n' roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone. In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.
Download or read book John Lennon The Life written by Philip Norman and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller Drawing on previously unknown sources, unpublished letters, and unprecedented access to all the key figures, author and journalist Philip Norman gives us the most complete and revealing portrait of John Lennon that is ever likely to be published. For this masterpiece of biography, Philip Norman set himself the challenge of looking afresh at every aspect of Lennon’s much-chronicled life. He has not just dug deep into the archives, including his own vast collection of tapes and notebooks dating back to the 60s, but spoken to hundreds of witnesses, from every walk of life and every stage of Lennon’s. The interviewees include Sean Lennon, whose moving reminiscences reveal his father as never before, and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candour about her marriage to John. In his brilliant Shout!, we were shown a band; in John Lennon, Philip Norman gives us a portrait of a man. It reconciles as never before the contradictions of this endlessly fascinating character–the volatile and violent hippie, the phenomenally wealthy advocate of no possessions, the family man and junkie–and his journey from Liverpool suburbia to becoming one of the presiding geniuses of pop culture.
Download or read book John Lennon written by Paul Du Noyer and published by Stories Behind the Songs. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jonn Lennon's life in the years between 1970 and his tragically young death in 1980 were eventful and fascinating. He moved from stardom in the world's biggest pop group, to global peace campaigner and figurehead for radical causes. He left England for a new life in the USA with Yoko Ono. There was a bizarre interlude of 18 months - his famous 'lost weekend' - when John ran off with Yoko's secretary May Pang and descended into alcoholism. Reunited with Yoko, he abandoned publi life and retired to his New York apartment to raise their son and live the life of a recluse. In 1980 he re-emerged with a new album, but the plan to resume his career was cruelly curtailed on that fateful night outside the Dakota Building. This book recounts John's life after The Beatles in a fascinating and revealing track-by-track analysis of the stories behind each song that he wrote."--Back cover.
Download or read book Lennon On Lennon Conversations With John Lennon written by Jeff Burger and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The electric spearhead of The Beatles meteoric rise; one half of the most creative and powerful songwriting partnerships ever; figurehead of peace and an icon of generations: John Lennon’s adventure through life is an immortalised legend. Lennon on Lennon is Jeff Burger’s dazzling digest of John Lennon’s views on the world around him. Sharp, insightful, contrary, witty, opinionated or downright aggressive, these illuminating interviews and quotations open a window into the musician and the man, and the volatile culture in which he lived, and died. Most of this material has never been available in print; some has remained entirely hidden until now. Jeff Burger’s meticulously researched book offers a truly unique and captivating glimpse into the mind and philosophy of one of the world’s most complex and inspiring talents.
Download or read book The Last Days of John Lennon written by James Patterson and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover one of the greatest true crime stories in music history, as only James Patterson can tell it. With the Beatles, John Lennon surpasses his youthful dreams, achieving a level of superstardom that defies classification. “We were the best bloody band there was,” he says. “There was nobody to touch us.” Nobody except the original nowhere man, Mark David Chapman. Chapman once worshipped his idols from afar—but now harbors grudges against those, like Lennon, whom he feels betrayed him. He’s convinced Lennon has misled fans with his message of hope and peace. And Chapman’s not staying away any longer. By the summer of 1980, Lennon is recording new music for the first time in years, energized and ready for it to be “(Just Like) Starting Over.” He can’t wait to show the world what he will do. Neither can Chapman, who quits his security job and boards a flight to New York, a handgun and bullets stowed in his luggage. The greatest true-crime story in music history, as only James Patterson can tell it. Enriched by exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends and associates, including Paul McCartney, The Last Days of John Lennon is the thrilling true story of two men who changed history: One whose indelible songs enliven our world to this day—and the other who ended the beautiful music with five pulls of a trigger.
Download or read book Lennon Legend written by James Henke and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented in a handsome slipcase, Lennon Legend is both an illustrated and an interactive biography of the creative genius - songwriter, artist, social activist - who changed his times. Created with the cooperation of Yoko Ono Lennon, who has opened her archives for this project, the book offers insightful details about every era of John's life, from his early days at art school to the height of Beatlemania to "Imagine." A live recording of that song is included, along with several interviews of John talking about his life and art, on the audio CD contained in this package. Throughout, the book features archival photographs and reproductions of John's handwritten song lyrics, drawings, memorabilia, and personal papers. In all, 40 removable facsimiles can be enjoyed by the reader, several previously unpublished, including an intimate self-portrait in pen and ink and a plea for world peace. It's been said that John Lennon's was the voice of a generation. Lennon Legend celebrates that voice's power to resonate across the generations.
