The Elegy in Music, Part 4: Lennon, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen

Born in 1914, Julia Stanley married Freddy Lennon in 1938, giving birth to John in 1940. When their marriage broke up two years later, John was adopted by Julia’s sister Mimi and her husband George Smith, and he went to live with them at Mendips, their house in Menlove Avenue.

Following the second crisis in his life (Uncle George’s death in 1955), John and his mother grew closer. A free spirit, she was a laughing lover of life who positively encouraged the rebel in him. Siding with him and his friends against censorious adults, she followed the progress of The Quarry Men with genuine interest, teaching them tunes on her banjo. To John, Julia was a semi-dream-figure (‘a young aunt or a big sister’): the only human being he had ever loved without reservation. Her death in a road accident outside Mendips on 15th July 1958 shattered him, and for the next two years he was consumed by ‘a blind rage’, drinking wildly and incessantly getting into fights. That his new friend Paul McCartney had also lost his mother in his teens brought them close despite their temperamental differences, while The Beatles gave Lennon a sanity-saving purpose. However, his relationships with women, who found themselves endlessly measured against the incomparable Julia, remained angry and often violent.¹

1 – According to McCartney, Julia was ‘a very beautiful woman, very good-looking, with long red hair. John absolutely adored her, and not just because she was his mum’.

‘Julia’, with which Yoko Ono helped,¹ expiates Lennon’s tortured devotion to his mother. In the incantatory repeated notes of its intro, the song suggests an offering to an ancestral spirit: an attempt to break an obsession by commending the supplicant’s new earthly love in the hope of a blessing. The heart of this ritual—the transfer of Lennon’s love from Julia to Yoko—is its ten-bar middle where a quasi-oriental scale implies that the accompanying image (‘Her hair of floating sky is shimmering’) applies to both women: Julia in his boyhood memory, Yoko in his present and future thoughts. (Ono sent him many cryptic postcards while he was in India, one of which asserted that she was a cloud and that he should look for her in the sky.)²

1 – Her influence is detectable in the song’s haiku-like images. (She may have suggested ‘seashell eyes’, taken from the then-fashionable Lebanese mystical poet Kahlil Gibran.)

2 – The Oedipal aspect of Lennon’s love for Julia was replicated in his marriage to Ono (whom he called ‘Mother Superior’), she being frequently cast in a maternal role, an arrangement in which each colluded.

To a great extent, Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. Once he had rid his soul of grief for her, his creativity forfeited its pressure and, during his more reconciled final decade, his output lost most of the edge and forcefulness it displayed at its fundamentally unhappy zenith in the mid-Sixties.

MY MUMMY’S DEAD
John Lennon

My mummy’s dead
I can’t get it through my head
Though it’s been so many years
My mummy’s dead

I can’t explain
So much pain
I could never show it
My mummy’s dead

I just don’t know what to do tonight
My head is aching as I drink and breathe
Memory falls like cream in my bones, moving on my own

There must be something I can dream tonight
The air is filled with the moves of you
All the fire is frozen yet still I have the will

Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance
And my skin emits a ray, but I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad
That our friends can’t be with us today

Recorded on the sixth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, 18 September 1975, ‘Elegie,’ the last track on Horses, is, from a musicological point of view, the first true tune on the album. Circling around Am and B♭, Smith draws on her love of opera, inflecting the lyrics with a rich, harmonic diversity not encountered elsewhere on the album. The song belongs, however, as much to Richard Sohl and to Allen Lanier as it does to Smith. While the former contributes a beautiful, classically inspired piano arrangement, the latter performs a sonorous, elegiac guitar solo, reputedly devised and recorded in a single take. As a farewell offering to the record, as well as to Hendrix, Morrison, Rimbaud et al., the tone of the song could not be more appropriate.

In the end, ‘Elegie’ suggests the futility of our attempts to come to terms with loss. Here, so-called closure is as perilous and fragile as the experience, death, that it seeks to comprehend and contain. Like its precursors in the elegiac poetic tradition, such as Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1638) and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821), Smith’s ‘Elegie’ is thus open-ended and radically decentered; it speaks disturbingly of the richness of death, of how loss can be transformed into profit; of how a singer can feed on the legacy of the dead (Morrison, Hendrix, Rimbaud), and of how declarations of self-reliance and autonomy (‘Moving on my own … I have the will’) are haunted and undermined by attendant feelings of guilt and sorrow. Horses could not have a finer conclusion.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street

Those were the reasons and that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left

Ah but you got away, didn’t you baby,
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don’t need you
I need you, I don’t need you
And all of that jiving around

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception

And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, ‘Well never mind,
We are ugly but we have the music.’

And then you got away, didn’t you baby,
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don’t need you
I need you, I don’t need you
And all of that jiving around

I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best
I can’t keep track of each fallen robin
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often

Leonard checked back into the Chelsea. Not many days passed before he noticed a woman who seemed to share his timetable, wandering the hotel at three in the morning looking for a drink and company. Janis Joplin had moved into the Chelsea while recording her second album with Big Brother & the Holding Company, which John Simon was producing. One night, as Leonard was on the way back to the hotel from the Bronco Burger and Janis from Studio E, they found themselves sharing the elevator, and then an unmade bed. In later years, after Leonard immortalized Janis’ blowjob in song—first in ‘Chelsea Hotel #1’, which he sang live but never released, then in ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, recorded on 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony—he polished the encounter into a stage anecdote. ‘She wasn’t looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson, I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot, but we fell into each other’s arms through some process of elimination.’ His words had the dark humour of both loneliness and honesty. Leonard’s later refinements to the anecdote were less black, more stand-up comedy. He said he asked her who she was looking for and when she told him he quipped, ‘My dear lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.’ Either way, she made an exception.