Today is Saturday, October, 9, 2010. If John Lennon were alive, he would be seventy years old today. In fact, they are having a celebration in New York and erecting a monument to honor him in Liverpool on this day in history.
There is no doubt he made a lasting impression on music in America. I can remember the first time I ever heard of the Beatles. It was February, 1964 and they were landing in New York for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was in the bathroom at Iuka High School standing at the sink washing my hands and a friend of mine said something about the Beatles coming to America. I immediately thought 'hey, man, we don't need any more insects. Didn't the bowl weevil do enough damage to these farmers around here'.
She then explained to me they were all the latest rage on the music scene.
It was the fashion in the sixties for all the girls to come to school in dresses or skirts and blouses, and the dress of choice for the girls was the moo moo, along with a bubble style hairdo, also known as the beehive. For the boys it was trousers or blue jeans with their shirt tails tucked neatly inside always accompanied by a belt and neatly cut hair with their ears properly showing. Little did we know what an impact John and the Beatles would have on all that. I remember when the first boy in our class let his hair grow out long enough to cover his ears completely and hang somewhat down to his eyebrows. I thought that was the most outrageous thing I had ever seen. Looking back on those old pictures in our 1967 school annual, his hair would be considered short by today's standards.
They came again in 1966 for an American tour and by this time everyone knew who they were. They even played in Memphis at the Mid South Coliseum and some of my school mates managed to get the much coveted tickets to the concert and headed off to the big city in what could be described as a state of total euphoria. I heard it later reported you couldn't hear anything for the screaming and crying, which made me extremely glad I wasn't in that crowd.
John Lennon had recently made a statement to the news media that in his opinion the Beatles were now bigger than Jesus Christ, or something to that effect. You can imagine how that statement was received in the Bible Belt. A member of the Klu Klutz Klan in Memphis threatened to kill him. There was much apprehension, to say the least. The afternoon performance went off without a hitch, but during the evening show some wise-cracker threw a fire cracker on the stage. It sounded like a gun shot. But everyone revived and the show went on.
Looking back on those days in the sixties little could we imagine where they would lead. A young man could even be expelled from school if he persisted in wearing his shirttail out of his pants. Today it's not a matter of a flapping shirttail in the wind, it's a matter of wondering whether he is going to completely lose his pants if they happen to slide down past his underwear.
And the subject of hair is another matter altogether. It can be worn any way imagined on both males and females. The females can shave their heads and the males can sport pony tails. Just what ever floats their boat.
Any sense of order and discipline has all but disappeared from the schoolroom. Teachers and students both sometimes have to attend class where their very lives may be threatened.
John Lennon sang about peace and all men living together in harmony and imagining a world without war. How far we are from that today. Just can't help but wonder how he would react to the world of today. Just can't help but wonder if he would realize he was part of that great change that took place in the sixties.
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