I was doing a major service on a Mazda Cappella (for yea verily, I was a mechanic at the start of my working life). Milling about on a creeper with the car up on jack stands, ripping out its gearbox. A senior apprentice and the foreman came over and stood there in silence with me gazing out at their steel-capped boots. I thought I was in trouble yet again. But they just stood motionless, not even shuffling their feet. Not calling me out from under the car. Just making strange and muted sounds. Altogether ominous.
Finally I relinquished my fears and doubts and slowly slid out from under the car. I looked up at these two very tough men and was struck by the fresh tear tracks. Wocko - the senior apprentice - was still crying, in fact. These were men who did not cry. Not in public, not in private.
I thought my mother had died.
"What's up?"
The foreman could barely get it out. "John Lennon's been shot. He's dead."
"Oh", was a far as I got before I too started crying, lying prostrate on that metal rolling board.
I'd only taken up guitar in earnest a couple of years before that day and learning the music of The Beatles and Lennon and McCartney and Harrison was de riguer. But more than that, it was joy unbound. The solo on Aisumasen (by Dave Spinotta?) was one thing I was going to conquer. And those words...
Before too long, so many unsavoury truths emerged. Lennon's heroin problems, his predilection for physical and emotional abuse foisted upon everyone he ever loved or who loved him, his excesses and hedonistic and cavalier disregard for many things I've long since come to accept as sacred cows.
But I contend, in spite of these terrible failings, that the one thing he taught me - even though I never knew the man - is that he TRIED. He made efforts in public and private not necessarily to overcome his schisms, but to make the most and the best from his worst faults. He himself would probably have denied that he even had any. After all he was a deity from the age of twenty until his death at forty. Deities don't take kindly to the display of their numerous and very public Achilles heels.
But that's what I took from his life and works. He was fucked but he often made good headway into not being fucked. As a man, as a human being, as a critical and often contradictory thinker of some small renown, as a living entity.
And like him, I don't care if I'm wrong or right in cherry picking in this regard. In much the same way as I took the energy of punk and it's progeny and tried to use it to half-decent effect rather than proselytising the pointless violence.
And I will always look for the people less perfect and less blessed in my life and try to steal wholesale the good accords and actions that they themselves perform and finally come to terms with - often against there own seemingly innate violent natures.
It's not about perfection. It's about the unfucking of all that's the more diminished in ourselves.
Blind exaltation aside, I can think of few I respect in this regard, as much as I respect the violent and often misogynist and arrogant John Lennon.
And I still haven't conquered that damned solo.
I'm Sorry.
