John Winston Lennon was famously shot to death at age 40, midway through his tumultuous life and storied career, robbing the world of a towering talent and profoundly ambiguous personality.
During the four-plus decades following his unimaginably tragic and senseless demise, much of Lennon’s legacy has become reduced and calcified. For many of the insufferable, apparently unkillable Baby Boomers, Lennon’s death became a convenient excuse for a modified beatification — forever casting him as a kind of petrified Summer Of Love saint, a bespectacled avatar of pacifism and righteous liberal causes. It wouldn’t feel so egregious if the actual John Lennon were not a man so completely oppositional in terms of temperament.