40 Years and 40 Days Later: a remembrance of John Lennon’s passing

Hick Planet magazine

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an unperiodical:

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Sunday, 2021 January 17th

issue 9

His contributions to the arts, to culture across the globe, and to a spirit of dedication to and mindfulness of the worth of all beings around the planet are extensive enough to fill volumes (and they certainly have). So we here pick just the snippet of a lyric from one tiny sample of his works to offer as an invitation to a brief moment’s remembrance of and reflection on his passing through this world.

The Beatles released this little song as a single; it was the B-side to “All You Need Is Love”. Like nearly 200 of their works, this is attributed to Lennon-McCartney—in line with an agreement that he and Paul had made, when they first got together, to take joint credit for songs written by either one of them for as long as they remained partners. Early on, as John pointed out to an interviewer in the last year of his life, “We wrote a lot of stuff together, one-on-one, eyeball to eyeball.” [

*2]

“In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s nose. We spent hours and hours and hours”, he continued. “We wrote in the back of vans together.” Later it was common for one or the other to be the actual composer of songs credited to both.

Yet this was one of the few later works that was a real collaboration. “That’s a combination of two separate pieces, Paul’s and mine, put together and forced into one song. One half was all mine,” as he went on to sing,

“which was a lick he had around.” [

*3] Similarly—it seems—to how it’d gone with another of their songs, “Paul’s contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song”, John reminisced, “that he’d had floating around in his head and couldn’t use.”

“Baby, You’re a Rich Man” came out in July 1967. Just a month later, their bandmate George Harrison performed it in San Francisco on his pilgrimage during the apex of the Summer of Love there. And 20 years later, George said of the song’s message that “the idea was to show that we, being rich and famous and having all these experiences, had realized that there was a greater thing to be got out of life—and what’s the point of having that on your own? You want all your friends and everyone else to do it, too.” [

*1]

John, although his life was cut short, had long found the time to call on everyone to open their eyes to see their own beauty and own potential and to imagine what this world could be if we were all to see everyone else’s too.