A Mens Liberation Guide to Women | Page 6

come home...

In the final verse or arguably chorus, whic h is repeated over and over, begging for his
mother not to go and his father to come home, Lennon literally screams and wails the
words like a child.

We know he was experimenting with all kind s of ideas such as “rebirthing” or
“primal scream therapy” during his post B eatles period, but this most powerful of
emotional confessions which he made in th is song, seems very far from the “all you
need is love” panacea he advo cated in his earlier days.

Really, like all men with such a broken family background – deserted by his own
mother and father, and raised by an aunt - Lennon was hunting for love a\
ll his life, for
a short period for example as an ardent devotee at the feet of the Maharishi.

And one suggests that he never really found it, except in the form of the motherly and
non-judgmental Yoko Ono, which clearly did not satisfy him as a man, as he
subsequently went into a spell of drug and al cohol abuse, and had affairs with at least
one other woman after his relationship with her had long been.

By the time of his tragic murder in 1980 how ever, he seemed to have settled into an
image of himself as romantic father figure, devoted to his wife and son.

His songs Starting Over and Woman expressed that he no longer had a “spiritual
quest” as in his Maharishi phase, but had as explained ear lier descended into “woman
worship” as below quoting from Woman:

A Men’s Liberation Guide to Women 9
Woman - I can hardly express
My mixed emotion at my thoughtlessness
After all I'm forever in your debt

And woman I will try to express
My inner feelings and thankfulness
For showing me the meaning of success

Compare this kind of sentiment, to the cocky, witty, self-possessed, rebel who
appeared on stage in front of the Queen in the mid 1960s and said “you peasants in
the stalls can clap yer hands, and the rest of you up there in the royal box can just
rattle yer jewellery.”

Or he would call the then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, to his face by his
first name, “ ’Arold”, even dropping the ‘h” with out seeming to care, all this in a time
still of comparative deference, corporal punishment of children in the home and
school, and British gents with brollies in bowler hats, like the Avengers Mr Steed,
you will appreciate .

But then suddenly, a mere decade and a half la ter, instead of progressive to some kind
of mature enlightenment, he had it seemed become largely the sentimental, woman
worshipper of the above verses, and appare ntly obsessing somewhat on his son, to a
degree that seemed perhaps a little unhealt hy in the song Beautiful Boy.

Another song on the same album, whose cover is a rather exhibitionistic and arguably
embarrassing kiss on the lips between himself and Yoko Ono, is called Watching the
Wheels , perhaps the most creative song of the set, but again suggests Lennon has
surrendered his quest for meaning in life and was trying to fob us all off with “pseudo
truths” such as:

People asking questions
lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem
Only solutions

Well they shake their heads
and they look at me as if I've lost my mind
etc.

In the sense of the quest for the truth of life - the male hero’s search for the holy grail
- in that sense, it would appear that Lennon had lost his mind, as most men do, in the
sense that unable to find answers to life’s fundamental problems, we give up and
descend into a life of se x, sentimentality, materiality and woman worship.

The whole song and album released in 1980 at the time of his death has this sense of
resignation about it, and descent into roma ntic fantasy and sentimentality, and the
inclusion of Yoko Ono’s typically bizarre a nd inferior songs every second track which
from the public’s point of view just ruin ed the album, are another sign that Lennon
was perhaps losing his grip on reality.

A Men’s Liberation Guide