...your dad broke all your Beatle records?

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that, I'm right and will be proved right. We're (the Beatles) more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don't know which will go first, rock 'n roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
---John Lennon

 

He was also quoted as saying:

"I always remember to thank Jesus for the end of my touring days. If I hadn't said that The Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus' and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus."

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But jesus is not the point.

When I was little kid in the '60's, the statement I quoted had a major impact on the older kids- enough to trickle down into the life of a 9 year-old. That's when I realized the times, they REALLY WERE a-changing.

But if you're into Lennon quotes, here's some more:

Love means having to say you're sorry every fifteen minutes.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

I don't believe in Beatles; I just believe in me.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

We're all Christ and we're all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, TV, records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication, so let's use it.

My name's not John Beatle, it's John Lennon.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

If everybody wished for peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace.

 

He had a way with words.

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When something becomes famous, groups start kicking it around like a political football to promote their agenda. The groups in the south did this with the Beatles. Billy Graham made some remarks about the Beatles as did the KKK and others and used it to their own advantage.

Many years ago when the lovable Care Bears toys were popular, a religious group in the southern U.S. collected all the Care Bears of the little kids and burned them in a big fire. In that particular case, the group saw something non-religious that had virtue and felt the need to destroy it out of jealousy. The Taliban did a similar thing around 2001 when it destroyed the famous Tibetan statues. The Elian Gonzales case in southern Florida is yet another example. Everyone kicked that kid around like a football to promote an anti-Castro agenda.

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he didn't, he wouldn't, and i don't think i ever had one.

he did go on binges of throwing everything out, whether it was my mom's, mine, or his own. he'd get frustrated with the idea of materialism, without really thinking it through.

but mostly it wasn't stuff he didn't like or because he didn't like it, but just what he felt was excessive and worthless accumulation.

of course he didn't understand EVERYTHING, any more then any of the rest of us ever can or do. but he did listen to kpfa in those days, and while it took him years to 'get' civil rights, once he did, he started considering himself a hippie too.

i guess you could say my dad, while occasionally an idiot, was mostly pretty cool. again not much unlike most of us on nearly all counts.

he never got over his homophobia though, and that did get him in big trouble during a time when i wasn't arround, and i suppose he could have needed my support to dicipline himself, but i couldn't live his life for him any more then he could mine.

=^^=
.../\...

 

my father never fucked with my stuff. my mother was the one who did that. in 1967 i got a copy of the mothers of invention lp "freak out." she went apeshit when she heard the first song! she smashed both the lp and the stereo, and went on some kind of crazy rant about l.b.j. being a communist plant of the russians, and how if jay egear hoover was president america would be great again. she scared the living shit out of me! my mother was even more loopy then a loon!

 

roles changed: when i was a baby curious as can be i liked louching, breaking, smelling, eating my mom's beatles records. she minds that all my life long

but thatnks having intense experience with beatles things since my diaper days i love them too

 

Wow, weird. I was born '68 and when I was 1 or 2 I woke up early one morning before my 20 year old parents and busted up my Dads Beatles 45s...I liked the apples on the labels. Im not sure he ever forgave me, I tried to send him some Revolver and Sgt Peppers MP3s recently...

Almost on topic: am I correct? that at one point there was a anti-Beatles hysteria after Johns comment about Beatles<Jesus where people were busting up a real lot of Beatles records?/?

Seems a recurrent themes...

 

Yes- you are correct. I hear it was fairly common in the south.

 

Check out one of the Flintstones cartoon episodes where the hillbillies in the South couldn't stand Beatles music. In the cartoon, they didn't explicitly mention Beatles. They referred to it as 'bug' music. The Beatle music spoofed in the episode was a repeated chanting of the words 'yeah yeah yeah'.

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This quote was because people decided they didn't need 20 Bibles and didn't buy as many one year. Lenon got cocky because he was into [whichever cult it was], and they ended up selling more [whichever record] than Bibles that year.
I didn't know he went Christian later on. Same deal as Darwin I wonder? Did he make any records after that?

 

When you're a high profile group like the Beatles, people use you as a punching bag to promote their agenda.

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It doesn't help when you hang yourself up as one. Don't say something like what he said and expect everyone to turn their eyes for the moment.
Yes, it happens, but not in this situation.

 

His intent wasn't to hang himself. A few sentences from the original interview in England were posted in a teen magazine in the U.S. about 5 months later. People in the bible belt in the U.S. read it out of context and decided to make someone a punching bag. Even the KKK tried to hijack the spotlight.

It's not unlike other examples, such as people standing behind those being interviewed on the courthouse steps in the O.J. Simpson trial with signs saying 'ask Jesus to save you' or people sitting behind home plate with signs showing verses of the Bible.

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My parents were big Beatle fans. We always had Beatle albums in our house, and I grew up listening to them. I was only three or four when Lennon made the "Jesus" remark, but the subject came up years later, and as I recall my father just sorta laughed about it. He didn't think that just because somebody made great music, that made them some kind of sociological authority. So he didn't take the remark too seriously. And as an aside, it's the same with the Dixie Chicks or any other performer who thinks their celebrity makes them an authority.

Anyway, the only time I recall that my parents got upset at my music was with "The End" by the Doors. They hated it. They didn't forbid me to listen, though. And they certainly didn't break anything of mine.

Of course, the shoe is on the other foot now. I confess that I don't like most of what my kids listen to. There were plenty of times I just had to say ... headphones, please! But so it goes.