#john did choose yoko twice and i do have to remind myself of that

[get-back-homeward]

Saving these excellent tags from @inspiteallthedanger

“I think John in 1975-80 was stuck: he knew his current situation wasn’t making him happy, but he had given over much of his agency to Yoko, who was only happy to take it. Bereft of the ability to decide (and sometimes even think) for himself, he shriveled, as just about anyone would under such circumstances. I think he had the potential to change course somewhere in there — this was the guy who imagined what the Beatles could be — but I don’t know if, by the late Seventies, he had the strength. It would have taken as much strength as it took to make the Beatles happen in the first place, but he wasn’t twenty any more and had had his freedom and self-assurance nuked to bits by his arrangement with Yoko in a way that Julia/Freddy/Mimi/Alf/Stu’s absences/issues/deaths hadn’t done.

I also sadly agree that much of John’s life was tragic, too. Most people disagree with it because (a) it’s not the story that’s told over and over by official or quasi-official biographies or the Estate and (b) it’s really uncomfortable and sad, if you like the guy and his music, to realize that the arc of his life is fundamentally tragic after 1966 or so.

But to me, a summary is something like: "gifted, disturbed boy with tremendous amount of drive to outrun a bad childhood discovers love for music and creative soulmate(s) and gives everything he has to become the most famous musician in the world, hoping it will make him happy. He does, but it doesn’t, and people who don’t have his best interests separate him from his friends, his creation and creative spark, and ultimately himself. He’s too screwed up by addiction, mental illness, and unaddressed traumas to change things, so he retreats further into addiction and mental illness, wishing he could somehow regain his lost spark. He makes a few halfway steps toward doing so, but they’re not enough, and ultimately he is killed in front of his apartment building where, 24 hours later, his wife installs the man she had been sleeping with behind his back."”

— Michael Bleicher, Hey Dullblog: The Artist as a Dissipated Man: Fred Seaman’s “The Last Days of John Lennon.”